Today, many aspiring MBAs and MBA graduates want to join start-ups or launch such companies themselves. Is entrepreneurship as exciting as it seems? Is it really for you? mbaMission Founder Jeremy Shinewald has teamed up with Venture for America and CBS Interactive to launch Smart People Should Build Things: The Venture for America Podcast. Each week, Shinewald interviews another entrepreneur so you can hear the gritty stories of their ups and downs on the road to success.

In this fifth installment of the podcast series, Jeremy Shinewald sits down with Charlie Kroll, the co-founder of Ellevest Financial who also founded the customer acquisition solutions company Andera 15 years ago while still attending Brown University. Kroll looks back on his path to the present day, sharing such stories as:

• Borrowing $40,000 from a girlfriend, who had earmarked it to buy a BMW, to complete a funding round
• Selling Andera to Bottomline Technologies for $45 million and witnessing the acquirer starting to repaint the building’s walls its own colors the second the deal closed

Subscribe to the podcast to hear Kroll’s story and many more!