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Within the first year of launching my company, Spanx, I decided to go over to England and cold-call Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and Selfridges the same way I had cold-called Neiman Marcus, Saks, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdale's here in the United States.

Neiman-Marcus is one thing, and the Dallas Cowboys are another.

My name became a brand, and I'd love to say that was the plan from the start. But the only plan was to keep writing books. And I've stuck to that ever since.

I loved Internet businesses, having built and sold one. And I loved the financial business, despite the fact that it was almost all a scam.

I didn't like the name 'personal shopper.' That makes it sound like too much of a commodity and not personal enough.

It was 1999, and we were building a way for college kids to create online profiles for the purpose of sharing... with employers. Oops. I vividly remember the moment I realized my company was going to fail. My co-founder and I were at our wits' end. By 2001, the dot-com bubble had burst, and we had spent all our money.

Before Mint.com, I was a long-time user of 'Microsoft Money' and Intuit's 'Quicken.' Both were powerful tools, loaded with features and functionality around taxes, investment, budgeting - too feature-laden, in fact. They took hours to set up, forever to learn, and an hour a week to maintain.

Until 1998, I worked in marketing at ASB bank. I loved it.

What was really tough for me was that Lars Magnus Ericsson founded Ericsson in 1876; we've always had a consumer product. And I'm the 16th CEO of Ericsson, and I decided that we don't have any consumer products anymore.

In high school, I started my first company, called M Cubed Software. We named it that because it was me and two other guys named Mike.