Ep 16: Creating A Billion-Dollar Business From Scratch With Liz Elting

How She Does It

This fall, millions of college students are stepping onto campus for the first time. The first months of college are also the first moments when many of us dream about how we want to make our marks on the world. While some of us changed majors many times before we decided what path we wanted to take, others were laser-focused on their futures from day one. We’ve all heard stories of successful entrepreneurs who got their start in their college dorm rooms — Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Liz Elting.

Liz Elting is the founder of TransPerfect — now the world’s largest language translation company — which she launched in an NYU dorm room in 1992 without any outside funding. Her new book: “Dream Big and Win: Translating Power Into Purpose and Creating a Billion-Dollar Business” chronicles the ups and downs of starting a company from nothing. Listen to the episode to hear the qualities Liz was looking for when hiring her core team of employees, why she decided not to take venture capital money, and what lessons she learned from eventually selling the business to her ex-fiancé.

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