David Siteman Garland is an entrepreneur,  speaker, and host of “The Rise to the Top,” a show that is entertaining, empowering, and energizing entrepreneurs.

1. Tell me about how you started “The Rise to the Top.”

It all started in a coffee shop. I felt like there was a market need on television for a show designed for forward-thinking young and young-at-heart entrepreneurs, and also room for events and resources to really help people grow their business and get involved with the community. I saw what was out there and honestly thought we could do it better by bringing in extremely interesting guests and delivering helpful content. I went all in, invested everything I had in getting it started and was fortunate to land some early sponsors who believed in me and the concept. The most crucial aspect though was surrounding myself with great people simply by asking for help. I talked to everyone I knew and said “I‘m doing a TV show and this is what I want to do but I’m not exactly sure how to do it. If you think it sucks, punch me;  however, if you like the concept I would appreciate a nudge in the right direction.” A bunch of nudges later I had a solid network of people who had years of experience helping me.

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Netvibes allows anyone to assemble the best of the web in one place. By providing private and public digital dashboards for individuals, personalized pages for brands, and personalized intranet pages for enterprises, it may just be the best personalized start page out there.

CEO Freddy Mini told us about his role in expanding Netvibes, the importance of personalization, and his view on the current stage of the social web.

After you’re done reading, make sure to send Freddy a tweet and add the Social Nerdia Netvibes widget.

 1. Netvibes pioneered the personalized start page, but there are several options these days. What makes Netvibes the best?

Netvibes is the only personalization platform. With Netvibes you don’t customize someone else’s page you’re invited to, you really own the page. entirely. An example: Netvibes doesn’t have a big logo on the upper left corner to remind you you’re at some eelse’s place; at Netvibes you can get rid of the search engine if you’re rather use it separately from your personal page. In addition, Netvibes offers the largest widget gallery with 180,000+ widgets to really find what you are looking for to build your very own page. And finally, Netvibes offers you 2 pages: one private and one public. On the public page, your own URL will welcome all the widgets you’d like to share, like a super profile page. Who can match all this? :) 

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Andy Milonakis from MTV’s The Andy Milonakis Show is a great example of someone who has used the internet in very creative ways. His comedic talent has taken him from user-generated videos to his own TV show and several appearances on Loveline and Jimmy Kimmel Live. 

Andy was very cool to take some time to answer some questions for Social Nerdia. Make sure to check out Andy’s  show and send him a tweet after you’re done reading.

1. Did you really get started with web cam recordings and how did that happen?

I used to do a photo-based comic strip on Brian Lynch’s site Angry Naked Pat. After writing a bunch, one of them was a rap and I thought it would be better to do a video, but since it was a long time ago it was a pain in the a**. People still had dial-up modems, so I had to get different programs to compress the video small enough for streaming, and learn different ways of embedding the vids on the pages and stuff. It was a lot of extra work but it paid off to get into the game so early. YouTube is great, it makes my life a lot easier.

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