Editorial Team

It’s funny how we always take things for granted. I once saw at my mother’s home a can of
“stevia sugar” that she mentioned it’s an all-natural sweetener for diabetics and calorie-free and
found out it’s easy to get at the supermarket. I remember telling myself that I should get and buy
some to see how this works. I never knew there is a great entrepreneurial story behind finding stevia
sweeteners on the shelves – that’s why I’m very happy to have Mr. James May – the man that
introduced stevia to the US market for an interview. Mr. May, first, what are the stevia sweeteners?

Mr. May: First, may I say that Gilbert, Arizona-based Wisdom Natural Brands® is the parent company of two
highly respected and award-winning consumer brands: SweetLeaf Stevia® Sweetener and Wisdom
of the Ancients® herbal teas, which contain natural leaves from the stevia plant.

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Hi Nasir Shakouri, welcome to entrepreneurship-interviews. Tell us a bit about yourself.

Nasir: Thank you for having me today. My family is originally from Iran, but my parents immigrated to the United States to start a better life for themselves. They felt that the United States would be a place for more opportunities and better access to top-quality education. My mother and father worked very hard when they came to America, and it influenced me as a person to try my best in everything that I do. My father would say that if you’re a janitor, be the best janitor that you can be. I grew up and went to high school in Westlake Village, Ca, a small suburb near Los Angeles. I played high school basketball and even made it in the newspaper, which was super exciting for me at the time. I graduated from Westlake High and attended Cal State Poly in San Luis Obispo with a finance and business major. I really liked what I was studying and couldn’t wait to get out of school and into the real world.

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I must say that while I always had foreign customers, I never tried special international phone numbers and did try to get 0800 numbers from the big providers. When Robin from Planet Numbers contacted me for an interview, I thought to myself: that’s going to be an interesting interview and discovery. Is it still possible to make a good margin from a telecommunication business? Hi Robin, to put things into perspective, what do Planet Numbers do?

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Funny how Facebook sometimes works, I run across one of my older connections in the software industry, the BitsDuJour guys. I contacted them a few years ago while I was a hotshot marketing manager at Avangate. So I invited Nico to an interview to find out how things are going. BitsDuJour is one of the “original” one discount per day sites, tailored to the software industry, right?
Nico: That’s right, we’ve been in business for over five years, well before Groupon exploded onto the scene, and you can now get daily deals from everything from pizza to kitchen sinks, and yes, I actually found a kitchen sink daily deal on a site last year. We showcase Mac and PC software and WebApps too, everything for people who love the software. We continue to work with Avangate and your replacement over there, but it’s great to catch up!

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