There is a misconception that all “family businesses” are “lifestyle” businesses. That was so not the case with W3i/Freeze.com since inception. Although we had three brothers involved with founding the business, we never ran ourselves like a “lifestyle” business. In the podcast, we talk about how very early on we tapped into other thought leaders like our Chairman Young Sohn. Young and other outside voices, like Brian Schoenborn (manager in charge of the St. Cloud branch of the law firm Leonard, Street and Deinard) were always provided fresh new perspectives. We also have had the benefit of having many employees and managers in our company with a very diverse set of experience to draw upon. This provided fueled for our relentless commitment to growth, and not accepting the status quo. Being a growth company is more about attitude than anything.

We certainly had a great deal of influence from our parents, including our biological mom and dad as well as our stepfather Rich Childers. Our mom worked very hard getting her MBA in Marketing later in her adult life while working day jobs at local consumer companies including Tonka Toys and Crystal Farms (the cheese company). From her, we learned what it meant to have a strong work ethic, and also were exposure to consumer marketing. Our dad is a safety engineer by vocation, but has a deep passion for photography. Through his deep passion for photography, he taught us the value of quality content. Our dad was also a huge cheerleader, our believing us even when others doubted us. Our stepdad Rich was the only parental figure who had any kind of entrepreneurial history. Earlier in his life, he started an auto-body shop. Due to some road construction, he was forced out of business. He provided the most practical guidance to us, such as “make sure you pay your taxes” (we didn’t know we had to when we were 16, as funny as that sounds). The other thing our stepdad Rich also exposed us to high tech at a very young age. Rich was on the Internet well before it was mainstream. Rich is a software programmer by trade, and while we were growing up he programmed at MECC (the local game company which created the popular Apple green screen games Oregon Trail and Number Munchers if you remember those days) as well as Damark (catalog/e-commerce company).

I’ll see if I can get a couple of other people involved with the founding of W3i to give their perspective.

Thanks for hosting me this morning and for giving me a chance to share our story!

By the way, doesn’t that green picture of our office just make you wish winter was over? We didn’t start out calling ourselves “Freeze.com” for nothing! We are proud to be a member of the Minnesota tech community, and appreciate all of the exposure you guys are bringing to the local scene.

On the topic of CoolIris, if you are interested in hearing more check out their feature on Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner podcast at http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html. For all you Minnesota tech enthusiasts, Stanford’s podcast series is a great way to keep up on Silicon Valley trends.

I’ll spread the word about the upcoming MobileMarchTC event.

Keep up the good work,

Rob