The Times of Northwest Indiana the source for crime, business, government, education and sports news and information in the Region. The Hollywood Reporter is your source for breaking news about Hollywood and entertainment, including movies, TV, reviews and industry blogs. Archives and past articles from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and Philly. Kilauea Mount Etna Mount Yasur Mount Nyiragongo and Nyamuragira Piton de la Fournaise Erta Ale. Learn more about Neil Patel. Neil Patel is the co founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics. He helps companies like Amazon, NBC, GM, HP and Viacom grow their revenue. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 1. Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 1. He was recognized as a top 1. President Obama and one of the top 1. United Nations. Neil has also been awarded Congressional Recognition from the United States House of Representatives. My life story. I was born on April 2. London, England. From the beginning, I had entrepreneurship in my blood, but Ill get into that a bit later. When I was two years old, my parents decided to move to sunny Orange County, California. At first, we struggled a bit just like most first generation Indians. Russell-Peters-Malibu.jpg' alt='Watch Russell Peters: Outsourced Online Forbes' title='Watch Russell Peters: Outsourced Online Forbes' />My moms first job was a non paid teaching gig, to which she had to walk a few miles every day with my sister and me. My dad, on the other hand, worked for one of my uncles. His job didnt pay much, but we were grateful for the opportunity my uncle gave him. Because of my moms tenacious nature and my dads work ethic, my sister and I were able to live a middle class lifestyle. Throughout my childhood, I was surrounded by entrepreneurs. All of my uncles on my moms side had multiple businesses, which led them all to be successful. My uncles entrepreneurship rubbed off on my mom, and she started her own home daycare business. Although she was successful at it, moms business never revenued more than 1. This meant my sister and I would not live a rich lifestyle. Entrepreneurship. Growing up, I was always thinking about what I could do to change my lifestyle. For years, I couldnt come up with anything, but during my first year at John F. Kennedy High School, things started to get better. My cousin, who is a year older than me, was selling burned music CDs to students. I saw that he was making a few bucks, so I started doing the same thing within my freshmen class, but I tried to be a bit more careful by not selling pirated media. I quickly realized that I could only make a few dollars a CD, so as a more profitable venture, I started selling black boxes. Soon after, I was known as the kid in high school who was selling black boxes. I then decided to capitalize on this by purchasing cable black boxes in quantity on e. Bay and then selling them to my classmates as well as their parents. Business was booming, and I made a few grand in profit. Realizing that there wasnt a long term career in selling things that could be potentially classified as illegal, I decided to get into a legitimate business. I noticed that many of the kids in my school were fixing up their cars with after market parts, so I decided to get into reselling automotive parts. I picked up a resellers permit from the State Board of Equalization, which allowed me to buy car parts at a discount and sell them to other students. The Corporate Life. Because my income from my businesses was not stable, I decided to get a real job. I was only fifteen, and the only local place I could find a job at was Knotts Berry Farm, in the park services department. The department I worked in sounded cool, but I was in charge of picking up trash, emptying trash cans, cleaning restrooms and sweeping up vomit. Although the job was less than glorious, I loved it because I got paid a few cents more per hour for cleaning the restrooms compared to most of the other jobs at Knotts Berry Farm. After three months of working at Knotts, I quit and found a job at Quality Systems. This job didnt give me any steady income, but the job paid a few hundred dollars in commission per sale. I was selling 1,6. Kirby vacuums. I went door to door, trying to convince home owners to let me clean their carpets for free. If they did, I would then sell them on the vacuum after shampooing their carpet. After doing this for a month or so, shockingly I sold a vacuum to an Indian couple I was surprised because generally Indians are cheap. But after a week, reality kicked in, and they returned the vacuum. Realizing that an average American could not afford to buy a 1,6. I decided to look for other career opportunities. My sister was working for an Oracle consultant locally, and she introduced me to him. I found out that as an Oracle consultant, my sisters boss was billing companies 1. I was shocked to hear how much he was making, which led the entrepreneur within me to come out once again. I tried to figure out how I could also make that much as a high school student, so I turned to Monster. Oracle consulting jobs. The problem was I had no clue what Oracle was. COM boom. Instead of finding a job on Monster. I learned about Monster. As a kid, I thought that if I could even make 1 of what they did, I would be rich. This led me to start my own job board called Advice Monkey. After spending 5,0. I launched it and learned that I have to market a site for it to be successful. Knowing that I needed some help with marketing, I hired an Internet marketing firm. Within a few months, I realized that they were taking my money and doing nothing valuable in exchange, so I fired them. I then hired two more firms, who also provided little to no results. Because Internet marketers I had hired had taken all my money, I decided to learn Internet marketing myself. Within a few months, I became pretty good at it. Advice Monkey started to become popular, but it never succeeded because the site was not set up to take credit card transactions. A New Life. My sister was still working for the Oracle consultant and kept telling me how much money she was making. I then decided that I was going to take that career path and open my own Oracle consulting company. Unfortunately, I had two major roadblocks in my way I was nowhere near 1. I didnt have a college degree. With my sisters help, I started taking general education college courses at Cypress Community College while in high school. My goal was to finish college in 2. Watch Tim And Eric`S Billion Dollar Movie Online IMDB. My first college class was Speech 1. I had to give three speeches on any topic of my choice. One of the speeches I gave was on how search engines work. After hearing my speech, one of the individuals in the class asked me if I wanted to consult Elpac Electronics on their Internet marketing strategy. Using my sales skills that I learned from selling vacuums door to door, I was able to lock them into a 3,5. Realizing that I could make a lot of money and change my lifestyle by doing Internet marketing for companies, I decided to start up an Internet marketing company with my sisters boyfriend now her husband. The Good Life. My business partner and I got a bit lucky as the owner of Elpac had a son who owned an ad agency. The son heard about the results we provided for his fathers company, and soon enough more marketing contracts started coming our way. The Internet marketing company began to take off. Still being a kid, I thought I was rolling in dough. With the money I made, I started investing in a few other companies. I invested around a million dollars into a hosting company called Vision Web Hosting that never worked out. Sadly, I lost all of the money I invested into it. After realizing investing wasnt for us, my business partner and I took the rest of the money we made and created another company called Crazy Egg. Crazy Egg created a lot of buzz when it came out, and I surely thought I would end up selling it for ten million dollars because we were getting so much interest from Fortune 1,0. When we werent able to get an asking price of ten million dollars for Crazy Egg, my business partner and I decided that we were going to raise venture capital because Crazy Egg wasnt a profitable company. After pitching Crazy Egg to venture capitalists for six months, I realized no one was going to invest in it. Because of this, we had no choice but to figure out how to make Crazy Egg profitable. The Mad Man Life.