It’s been awhile but today we have two special guests: Rob Walling and Mike Taber of the Micropreneur Academy join us to discuss their program for helping people quit their jobs and pursue a life of “Micropreneurship.” We’ll hear about the common obstacles encountered when starting down this path and how to best overcome them. If you’ve been toying with the idea of quitting your day job and starting a solo business of your own be sure to listen to their interview. You can read more from Rob and Mike on their personal blogs and check out some of the successful graduates of the Academy here.

The founders of Buildproof, Alan Farber and Greyson Geiler join us to share what they’ve learned over the past two years in creating their company. Buildproof is a system that bundles project management, escrow and payment features to safeguard both homeowners and contractors during home remodels. Catch Alan and Greyson this evening at Refresh Phoenix where they will be presenting more on the Buildproof system.

Ken Losch and his sister Andrea Saab join us today to share their experience in building some amazing projects. Ken and Andrea are the people behind the Centerpoint Development in downtown Tempe, the Purvine Winery, the Tracares Foundation and the Trillium Residential Developments in Tempe.

This is part one of a two-part set of interviews in which they share the core concepts that they’ve applied in each endeavor to create positive outcomes. I asked them if they could distill their success down to one factor and they cited a simple yet powerful cornerstone that underlies everything they do. Here’s the link Ken mentions for determining your Kolbe Score. Enjoy!

Michael Gruen and Andrew Hyde of Startup Weekend give us the scoop on what it takes to hyper-accelerate the development of a startup company with a room full of strangers in order to launch a product from scratch in a weekend. I had the privilege of attending all three days of the event and seeing the process first-hand. Check out pictures and read the story that just hit the homepage of Tech Crunch. The company we started is launching as we speak.

In a special episode today we have audio captures of all the sessions from the Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference that took place on November 8th, 2007 at the Airport Marriot in Phoenix, AZ. You can stream or download individual sessions as well as download the entire audio bundle as a single zip file.

Special thanks to Deru Internet for hosting the audio.

Jessica Livingston joins us today to share the scoop on Y Combinator and what hopeful candidates can do to improve their odds of getting accepted. Y Combinator is a technology start-up seed fund with offices in Cambridge, MA and Mountain View, CA. YC focuses on mentoring first-time founders and helping them develop their early-stage business ideas. Aside from being co-founder of Y Combinator Jessica is also author of the Founders At Work book (find the digest here) and has interviewed more successful start-up founders than anyone. This is a conversation with nuggets of wisdom that will be of interest for any fledgling entrepreneur.

Allan Cameron joins us today to share an incredible story that made Wired magazine. Allan led a small team of underprivileged high school students with no technical backgrounds of any kind (and minimal English-speaking abilities for that matter) to beat the MIT college team in a national robotics championship. In this real-life Stand and Deliver story (the movie rights for which were recently purchased by Warner Brothers) Allan’s students prove that it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog. Towards the end we dig into the problems with the notoriously lagging Arizona public education system and hear Allan’s take on what we can and should be doing to turn things around.

Luis Sala shares the secrets of how the Alfresco Enterprise Content Management System has achieved over 700,000 downloads. Luis runs his own podcast and in a unique “dual-interview” that’s being promoted via his site as well, we discuss the story behind the Alfresco CMS as well as the JumpBox platform. This rich conversation delves into the business models, licensing issues, promotional tactics and startup lessons coming from both companies. We’ll likely see an Alfresco JumpBox unveiled shortly and this dialogue explains why. And be sure to subscribe to Luis’ Alfresco Freshtalk podcast for more interviews like these.

Paul Pluschkell, CEO of Spigit tells us about his newly-launched “fantasy league for startups” that functions as a pseudo stock market for new ventures. People can enter their idea, rate the ideas others and advance their own through the various stages of the game earning reputation, visibility and potentially a funding or development resource for their startup. Spigit incorporates advanced mathematical models to extract the “wisdom of crowds” to identify winning startups and entrepreneurs.

Wayne Crosby and Robby Walker join us today to share the tale of how they created Zenter, the latest Google acquisition. Wayne and Robby left Arizona to do the Y Combinator startup program in Mountain View, CA and six months later they find themselves sitting in the Google headquarters in Mountain View as the latest addition to the family of Google applications. Zenter (which has since been taken offline following the acquisition but a screenshot can be found here) is the product of rethinking what a presentation tool can be beyond Powerpoint by incorporating collaborative capabilities afforded by having it online. Robby and Wayne (respectively in the photo) take us from day one of packing a Honda Civic full of their worldly possessions and making the road trip to Mountain View, through 12-hr coding sessions broken only by a tennis match all the way to the acquisition. The “innoview” referenced in the podcast can be found here.