Jeff Binder: continuing the legacy of colorado's cable industry, layer3 tv announced in 2013 the 'next generation cable company' would locate its headquarters across the street from denver union station. a year and a half, more than $80 million investment dollars and about 100 employees later, the business remains cloaked in mystery, having yet to launch its product or service.

• Author: Sukin, Gigi
• Position: GOOD COMPANY - Interview

At the helm of the yet-to-be unveiled cable-TV service is 50-year-old Jeff Binder, whose previous business successes include mass-produced customized audio cassette tapes, golf travel management alongside Jack Nicklaus, and the founding and milestone sale of Broadbus Technologies --a video-on-demand infrastructure--to Motorola in 2006 for about $200 million. Since, Binder has set his sights on the cable industry, with Layer3 TV.

CB: You come from an entrepreneurial family. Describe your upbringing and how it impacted you as a businessperson.

JB: I don't think I knew it was an entrepreneurial family. My grandfather was an entrepreneur from the time he was in his 30s until the time he died. He invented paint-by-numbers and the cork white board. He was also one of the early franchisees of McDonald's and he had a fastener-manufacturing business. Not in crazy terms, but he was an American industrialist. So it was all a big influence on me. My dad was a lawyer and went into business with my grandfather. But the thing is, the word "entrepreneur" didn't have the same meaning then as it does today. Entrepreneur today tends to apply in venture contexts, but the vast majority of businesses don't come out of VCs. For me, they were just business people... but I think I always knew they were in control of their own destinies.

You've been described as a "perpetual motion type." You've had a series of successes in business. Can you take us through a highlight reel?

I started my career on the Chicago Board of Trade, traded for a few years, and then my dad, who's very much an entrepreneur, had an idea for a business. He had the concept of building a system that would mass-produce customized cassettes, and I had a background as a musician through my teens, so I decided to help. The mass duplication system we sold to major record companies, but it was a pretty small business relatively speaking.

Then I started a series of companies in the software space, in the sports and leisure and marketing and travel spaces. Then we took a lot of the technology that we built in the cassette business for the TV business in the late '90s. We foresaw in the TV world a desire for on-demand systems, and so we founded a company called Broadbus. We raised capital in one of the toughest tech markets, literally right after the tech bust. We grew that company and then sold to Motorola, and then I stayed on at Motorola for about a year and a half and worked there in the mobile space...