Tropical MBA

Dan Andrews and Ian Schoen started Tropical MBA in 2009 while running a small manufacturing business from Southeast Asia, and what began as a blog about location-independent entrepreneurship has grown into a podcast with over 10 million downloads and 840 episodes. The show drops every Thursday and targets a specific audience that most business podcasts ignore: founders running seven- and eight-figure businesses who've already figured out the basics and are now wrestling with harder questions about growth, operations, lifestyle design, and whether the business they built is actually making them happy. The hosts bring the credibility of having done it themselves. They built and scaled multiple businesses, including a podcast production company and a conference series that brings together location-independent entrepreneurs from around the world. That conference community feeds directly into the podcast, which often features candid conversations with founders in their network about problems they're actually facing -- not theoretical case studies from business school. Recent episodes have tackled questions like whether your business can outperform the S&P 500, how to structure equity splits with a co-founder, and what happens when you hit a growth ceiling and have to decide between staying lean or adding headcount. The tone is pragmatic and grounded, with none of the hustle-culture hype that dominates much of the entrepreneurship podcast space. Andrews and Schoen talk openly about their own mistakes and the tradeoffs they've made along the way. For founders who are past the idea stage and deep in the messy middle of actually running a company, Tropical MBA speaks their language.