Cameron Herold, Founder of the COO Alliance and former COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, talks to Michael about building a successful company culture, effective process implementation, and what a strong relationship between a COO and CEO should look like. They also touch on how to attract “A” players to your team, how to approach each initiative with a Plan, Brief, Execute, and Debrief mentality, reverse engineering processes, and of course, penguins. Cameron is a growth expert and an acclaimed “CEO Whispe...
Oct 27, 2022•43 min•Ep. 23
Cathy Hawley, former Chief People Officer of Return Path and Co-Founder of Bolster, sits down with Michael to discuss the importance of intentionality and an agile mindset in building a remote company culture, how people operations grew out of traditional human resources, and why employers should focus on a co-creating mentality when approaching its workforce. Cathy is a strategic people leader, with an exceptional track record of laying the foundation for strong company cultures. After several ...
Oct 18, 2022•48 min•Ep. 22
Dale Pfeifer, CEO of Goodworld, chats on scaling social impact through tech, the evolution of CSR (corporate social responsibility) from consumer targeted to greater corporate involvement, Mastercard, Citi, and BlackRock's leadership in CSR, the impact of the pandemic on accelerating CSR, the challenges of raising VC capital as a woman and as a social impact co., and what it's like to pitch President Obama & being on the front page of the NYTimes. Goodworld helps companies grow by making it ...
Aug 02, 2022•38 min•Ep. 21
Jenny Lawton is the EVP at Bolster, an on-demand executive talent marketplace that helps accelerate companies’ growth by connecting them with experienced, highly vetted executives for interim, fractional, advisory, project-based, or board roles. Prior to Bolster, Jenny served in a variety of C-Suite roles which include her time as the Chief Strategy Officer and then CEO of MakerBot, the leader in desktop 3D printing technology that was acquired by Stratasys for over $400M. Jenny also served as t...
Jun 14, 2022•45 min•Ep. 20
Handshake COO, Jonathan Stull, joins to talk about the journey of building a three-sided marketplace to $100M ARR at a $3.5B valuation with over 500 employees. We touch on the role of COO at Handshake; Jonathan's path from waiting tables to Capital Hill to PE to tech; compromising on tactics but not on vision or mission; adding independent board members; deploying $100MMs in funding; the move from hiring generalists to specialists; global expansion; timing and more. Handshake’s mission is to dem...
Jun 01, 2022•54 min•Ep. 19
GoGuardian COO, Cyrus Mistry, spent 14 years at Google as the Director of Product Management for Chromebooks bringing computers to schools, before joining GoGuardian as COO right when they raised $200M in new funding from Tiger Global Management. Cyrus has a wealth of knowledge not only stemming from his four advanced degrees but also from his operating experience at Disney prior to Google. Have a listen to hear about his story and what it's like to move from Google to a startup. Cyrus Mistry on...
May 02, 2022•30 min•Ep. 18
Art Harding is the COO at People.ai, and joins to share how People.ai has supported their Ukrainian team members, how coaching is inspiring for the right to inspect performance and provide timely and meaningful feedback, the operational mandate of E2T: driving efficiency, effectiveness, and transformation, how COO is the most interesting job in the world, launching new products, what healthy friction looks like, how great operations leaders think like project managers, and product and sales lead...
Apr 11, 2022•46 min•Ep. 17
Angela Tucci, COO at Uplight, joins to talk about running a $1.5B company created from the M&A of 6 companies, advocating for voice & equity for women in the workforce, finding an inspiring CEO, working with utility companies to reduce their carbon footprint, taking private equity vs. VC funding, integrating acquisitions remotely during covid, the impact of politics, and systems thinking. Prior to Uplight, Angela was Chief Strategy Officer at Symantec, Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Mar...
Mar 17, 2022•49 min•Ep. 16
Ken Weary is the COO of Hotjar and joins to chat on running a fully remote 220 person company, being a digital nomad traveling for over 7 years as a COO with a family, going through M&A and diligence on the buyer, always having a just cause as the "why" behind what you do, the impact of remote on the great resignation, and bringing the Houses from Harry Potter to the workplace. Hotjar, is a European headquartered start-up with over 200 fully remote team members distributed across the globe. ...
Mar 09, 2022•42 min•Ep. 15
Steve Taylor is an operating executive with experience building high-performing teams and scaling high-growth, category-defining companies. After spending the early part of his career flying E-2C Hawkeyes in the US Navy, he received a Masters of Policy Management from Georgetown University and spent five years as a management consultant. Steve joined Lyft in 2015 with just 220 employees, led two of the company's largest territories, launched multiple product lines, and managed a P&L with >...
Mar 03, 2022•36 min•Ep. 14
Joe is Founder & CEO of ExecThread, a VC-backed crowdsourcing platform and premium job-sharing network that enables professionals to access the “hidden job market”. ExecThread is the largest global aggregator of unpublished executive-level job opportunities. Joe has been a successful start-up CEO and operating executive at high-growth tech companies including HopStop (acquired by Apple), Quigo (acquired by AOL) and eBay (EBAY) with a strong track record of recruiting teams, launching new pro...
Feb 23, 2022•34 min•Ep. 13
Kettle COO, Nathaniel Manning, talks about balancing risk in a changing climate, structure without bureaucracy, evolution by design, good decision making, the social contract of insurance, and sitting on a monastery cushion for 3 months. He also talks about old guard vs new guard, building the plane while it's flying, making the implicit explicit, and evolution by design. Nathaniel has a long career of founding and leading companies including Fellow Robots, BRCK, the largest provider of public w...
Feb 15, 2022•47 min•Ep. 12
Dave Weiss, co-founder, and COO of Hatch, joins us to discuss what it takes to confound a hardware company with his wife, sell 2 million IoT devices, the heightened consumer expectations of hardware, visit customers' homes, going from Shark Tank to VC fundraising, moving from CTO at BabyCenter to COO, and believing in wet paint. Prior to co-founding Hatch, Dave was the CTO of BabyCenter, where he was responsible for software engineering and product. Dave Weiss on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.c...
Feb 08, 2022•33 min•Ep. 11
Dia&Co. COO and former LVMH Chief Digital Officer, Valerie Hoecke, joins to chat on how a $50B co. like LVMH preps you for anything, how Dia&Co. solves the shopping challenges faced by plus size women, the impact of size discrimination in the workforce, the challenges that "try before you buy" creates, and going from growth to survival mode and back again. Valerie kicked off her career in the early days of the internet with one software exit followed by one agency exit, in the Web 1.0 da...
Feb 01, 2022•52 min•Ep. 10
Catherine Stewart is the former Chief Operating Officer at Shippo and Chief Business Officer at Automattic ( WordPress ), joins us in part one of a special two-parter, to talk about the craft of scaling operations at hyper-growth tech companies. Topics include shifting strategic priorities at Automattic to also focus on revenue generation and e-commerce through the acquisition of WooCommerce , the shift from Facebook to Automattic, balancing the entrepreneurial mindset with the need for processe...
Jan 19, 2022•43 min•Ep. 9
Doug Hanna, COO at Grafana Labs, joins us to discuss scaling a company to $3B in valuation after raising $330M in funding. As a former Zendesk VP of Ops, Doug has had front seats at both companies, during hyper-growth. This episode, Part 2, focuses on scaling the go-to-market machine of a multi-billion dollar company. Grafana Labs is the company behind the lead open source observability platform, Grafana, used by the likes of Salesforce, Paypal, Verizon, Ebay, and 750K other instances. Part 1 of...
Jan 11, 2022•43 min•Ep. 8
Doug Hanna, COO at Grafana Labs, joins us to discuss scaling a company to $3B in valuation after raising $330M in funding. As a former Zendesk VP of Ops, Doug has had front seats at both companies, during hyper-growth. This episode, Part 1, focuses on people and culture: what goes into scaling from 70 to 400 net new employees in a mere 18 months. Grafana Labs is the company behind the lead open source observability platform, Grafana, used by the likes of Salesforce, Paypal, Verizon, Ebay, and 75...
Jan 04, 2022•22 min•Ep. 7
Before Micah Rosenbloom was a venture capitalist, he was the co-founder and COO of Brontes Technologies, which he sold to 3M. Micah and his business partner Eric then went on to found the VC firm, Founder Collective, which has made investments in companies like Uber, ThreadUp, Hotels Tonight, Venmo, PillPack, and more. Micah joins us to discuss deciding who's CEO and COO, not shying away from tough conversations, hiring the right people, founding a VC firm and introducing ops to it, going throug...
Dec 20, 2021•45 min•Ep. 6
After doing $26B of M&A at Diageo, Marie Prokopets joined the startup world, and together with Hiten Shah, founded Nira.com a way to secure your company documents and access controls. As COO at Nira, Marie joins us to talk about pivoting from search to security, context switching, and what happens when vendors mess up access controls. Nira.com Marie Prokopets on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarieProkopets Marie Prokopets on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marieprokopets Hiten Shah on T...
Dec 14, 2021•26 min•Ep. 5
Tucows Chief Product Officer, Justin Reilly , joins as our first non-COO, and shares on your customer's best last experience, how product design influences operations and where AI fits, Ting's amazing customer care, and how photos almost pushed a launch. Justin focuses on building the next generation of consumer products, particularly where AI meets customer experience. Prior to Tucows, Justin was Head of Product & CX Innovation at Verizon . He founded Focus Health, Grey Seven Labs, and Qsti...
Dec 06, 2021•36 min•Ep. 4
True Ventures Chief Operating Officer, Jim Stewart, on what it's like to take four companies public, what goes into the operations to run a venture capital firm, how to take calculated risks, and what to do when you realize that you've just violated US government export controls when you're doing an IPO roadshow (don't panic). True Ventures is a venture capital firm with an astonishing track record of investing in the best companies like Peleton, Fitbit, Ring, Duo Security, Automattic, and Sweet...
Nov 29, 2021•26 min•Ep. 3
Allie Fleder is the cofounder and COO of SimplyWise, an NYC-based fintech app helping Americans take control of their data. She previously founded and ran Sherpa, a British luggage delivery platform for busy travelers that was acquired in 2019. Before starting her own business, she consulted for VC-backed fintech and travel tech startups in London and NYC. She Chairs EUROUT, Europe’s largest LGBT+ business conference, and serves on the Digital Corps leadership committee of Out in Tech. Allie is ...
Nov 21, 2021•28 min•Ep. 2
Rich Wallach , COO, and CFO of Deepak Chopra's Chopra Global , joins us to discuss: How a philosophy degree prepared him for everything and nothing at the same time Credit Suisse's attempt to crush the humanity out of him Creating security, safety, and certainty for employees Over-communicating without stressing people out How processes can improve people Getting rid of the office and going fully remote And lemurs. Yes, lemurs, the animals. Chopra Global: https://chopra.com Chopra Global's Brand...
Nov 21, 2021•45 min•Ep. 1
Between Two COO's: www.betweentwocoos.com Michael Koenig: https://linkedin.com/in/mkoenig514
Nov 18, 2021•2 min
