The following interview with Bill Nguyen (pronounced “WIN”) was sent to me several years ago from a friend. I can’t recall who the publisher was or who did the interviewing otherwise I would have given due credit to them.

It’s CHOCK FULL of excellent marketing and business wisdom. It is truly a ‘gold nugget’ and worth your time reading and studying.

————————

Entrepreneur Bill Nguyen discovered the bottom line in business fairly early in life. As a job-hunting 16-year-old, he bet a supervisor at a Houston used-car lot that he could sell more autos in a weekend than any of the veteran salesmen.

The boss agreed to the bet, and Nguyen promptly sold twice as many cars. As a result, he got the job, which enabled him to take on a financial responsibility that ultimately shaped the rest of his professional and personal life: He paid his own way through private high school.

Nguyen has an independent financial philosophy, and a reluctance to take things for granted, particularly in regard to the companies he creates. “There are no free handouts,” he says. “When people decide to give us money, I don’t think that’s a win, I think that’s a commitment.”

The Redwood City, Calif., company he founded less than nine months ago - Seven, which will build software for wireless carriers that can handle millions of mobile business users so they can access databases, e-mail and intranets -just secured a strategic partnership with Microsoft and $34 million in venture capital. The achievement would have many entrepreneurs celebrating, but not Nguyen. “I don’t hoop and hurrah every time we get a customer,” he says, speaking by phone from the GSM World Congress in Cannes, France, where his company made its formal debut last week. “That’s what we get paid to do.”

Because of a reluctance to rest on his laurels, the 30-year-old Nguyen may not be the life of the party, but few would argue with his record of accomplishments.

After the stint at the used-car lot, he took a job as a data entry clerk at American Express (AXP) , where he modernized the company’s mainframe by migrating it to a PC-based system, after learning how from reading computer manuals. That experience led to a promotion and, eventually, to a number of opportunities at startup companies. In 1998, he became vice president of products for Tioga Systems, the customer-service software provider now called Support.com (SPRT) .

The following year he co-created Onebox.com, the popular all-in-one messaging service acquired by Phone.com, now Openwave Systems (OPWV) , for about $800 million last April. In all, Nguyen has helped six startups come to life, and three of them have been acquired.

Nguyen, who now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, has developed several maxims for entrepreneurial success.

First: maintain focus. “A cardinal sin of all technology companies is that we have huge appetites,” he says. “You raise a lot of money and all of a sudden you think you’re Superman. But you’re not.”

Second: fire the entrepreneur. “As a founder, you have to own everything until you find someone who does the job better than you. Any person that I hire, I have to fundamentally believe that that person is better than me.”

Third: listen to your customers. “I think I can build products better than anyone else. Not because I understand technology better than anyone else; I’m just religious about getting pounded by my customers.”

Last: sleep no more than three hours each night. “Any other time, you send me an e-mail, and I’m probably going to respond pretty fast.”

Nguyen’s practical attitude may stand out among some of his counterparts nowadays, but he believes in taking nothing for granted. “I think a lot of entrepreneurs look at big rounds of financing as almost an entitlement,” he says, “I think that’s bull. All you were given was a ticket. You’ve still got to get to the starting line, and even that’s pretty damn easy. The hard part is winning.”

With these thoughts in mind, after hitting it big with the Onebox acquisition last year, Nguyen endowed a foundation that pays for 15 underprivileged boys to attend his high school alma mater, Houston’s Strake Jesuit College Preparatory, each year.

->

Cocktails and Conversation With Bill Nguyen

QUES: You are introduced to someone at a cocktail party. Describe what you do in two or three sentences.

ANS: Hello, I’m Bill Nguyen, and I work at Seven. Seven is an amazing company, which I should be at home working on. But since I’m here, tell me about what you do.

QUES: What do you wish you had invented?

ANS: Corrugated cardboard. Without it, the Far East would have never reached the West with its products. Before cardboard, items were shipped in heavy wooden or metal boxes. Cardboard enabled the shipment of heavy goods in a light and strong material that is inexpensive to produce. Import/export is made possible by cardboard.

QUES: What do you consider your greatest professional achievement?

ANS: I’ve had the courage, patience and persistence to build products I believe in at six different companies. Along the way, I’ve seen technology change people’s lives.

QUES: Tell us the URL of one site (other than your own) that you think is essential for doing business on the Net, and why.

ANS: (I’d choose) www.ebay.com - Forget about PEZ dispensers and Beanie Babies. They create a market for everything from tractor trailers to industrial machinery. They changed the way commerce is transacted.

QUES: If you weren’t doing what you’re doing now, what would you be doing?

ANS: I would teaching a third-grade class of kids on entrepreneurship. Example: If you buy candy from Wal-Mart for 25 cents each, and you resold it to your friends at 50 cents, your profit would be 25 cents multiplied by the maximum amount of candy you could store or take to school. Let’s say you can take 10 pieces each day. Your profit potential would be $2.50. This is called a “direct” sales model.

What would happen if you got friends to sell candy for you? You have 10 friends and each of them can carry the same 10 pieces of candy. You now have the potential of selling $50 worth of candy each day and a $25 profit. Give your friends $1 each for their help, and you still make $15. Fifteen dollars is a lot better than $2.50. This is called “distribution,” and it’s an example of “leverage.”

——————————–