Jon Levin has been teaching at Stanford for more than 20 years, and has been the dean of the famous Graduate School of Business since 2016. Although teaching at Stanford puts him in contact with some of the most promising future entrepreneurs in tech, he says he hasn’t yet been tempted to leave academia for a startup because “I actually love being part of an institution that’s gonna be around for hundreds of years.” As public trust in institutions has eroded in recent years, Jon and his colleagu...
Dec 26, 2022•54 min•Ep. 118
“Think about the pandemic without the internet,” says Cloudflare co-founder and COO Michelle Zatlyn. The world’s sudden shift to doing almost everything online only worked because network engineers, IT administrators, and internet infrastructure companies like Cloudflare had done the work. Michelle says that, both personally and professionally, she’s fine being under the radar because she doesn’t need to be publicly reminded of the importance of her job: “It's like all the roads, the tunnels, th...
Dec 19, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 117
Grit has never been just about business, and success is not a vaccine against stress, anxiety, or depression. On today’s special episode, Joubin looks back at nine past interviews and the advice shared by guests who have been through difficult personal challenges. You can find links to the full interviews these clips came from below. In this episode: CCO Forter, Ozge Ozcan on burning out like a phoenix and the “dark side” of grit (01:05) CMO Samsara, Sarah Patterson on the value of being vulnera...
Dec 12, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 116
SAP Executive Board Member Scott Russell used to avoid talking about his personal life with coworkers. But “we want to understand and relate to each other,” he says, and being more open has made people more willing to trust and follow him. “Authenticity, you cannot manufacture that,” Scott says. “When you’re only showing a part of who you are to your team, you’re not showing your true, authentic self.” In this episode, Scott and Joubin discuss European business structures, three-year contracts, ...
Dec 05, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 115
In Silicon Valley when business is good, it's normal for top talent to hop from company to company to company. But GE's Linda Boff, described by at least one of her peers as the "Beyoncé of CMOs," has stayed at the 130-year-old conglomerate for nearly 20 years, through radical changes to the business structure, and with plans to split into three public companies on the horizon. She attributes her longevity to the fact that four out of five days of any week, she's excited to come in: "I believe i...
Nov 28, 2022•47 min•Ep. 114
PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada has mixed feelings about how she is often portrayed in the press, as a “badass woman CEO.” The scarcity of female executives in enterprise means that it’s often the first thing anyone wants to talk about — not her performance leading a $2 billion company, or her team. She has specifically designed that team to include more under-represented people like her, so that she is not “the only one in the room” — but one executive team isn’t enough. “In my peer group, there’...
Nov 21, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 113
When DVx Ventures co-founder Jon McNeill joined Tesla in 2015, he told his new boss Elon Musk: “You won’t see me at least a day a week.” That’s because Jon believes the job of any leader is to make time to talk to front-line workers who know things executives don’t. While he was at Tesla he spent 20% of his time in service centers, support centers, or in retail stores, asking the people who worked there the same question: “If you had had my job for a day, what are the two things you would do to ...
Nov 14, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 112
Health monitoring company Whoop, founded and led by CEO Will Ahmed, hid a secret message on the circuitboard of its latest wearable device. “It says, ‘Don’t bother copying us, we will win,’” Will says. “And it also has every engineer who worked on Whoop 4.0’s initials.” For more than 10 years, Whoop has attracted fans from world-famous athletes to everyday consumers, and its deep-pocketed rivals have noticed. After financing talks with Amazon fell apart, “they just directly ripped us off” and ma...
Nov 07, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 111
As a veteran of several high-powered organizations — including McKinsey, Google, Dropbox — Notion advisor Olivia Nottebohm has learned the importance of respecting her teams’ personal journeys. She believes none of the 10 most important milestones in any person’s life will be career-related, and it’s important for leaders like her to strike a balance between accountability and empathy. “Before I need to have a tough conversation,” she says, “I try to put myself in their situation and think, ‘OK,...
Oct 31, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 110
“I literally thought to myself, I probably made the biggest mistake of my life taking this job.” That’s what Ali Ghodsi recalls about his decision step up the CEO role at Databricks, which would mean leaving a desirable post at UC Berkeley. He wasn’t sure if the company would make it, and some of Databricks’ board agreed that as an academic, he wasn’t right for the job. But they all wound up being wrong: Ali has led the company from $3 million ARR to $800 million, and the data-analytics company ...
Oct 24, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 109
Before Zscaler’s Dali Rajic arrived at his current company, he helped grow AppDynamics from $7 million in annual recurring revenue to nearly $1 billion — and for his next move, he knew he had to do something even bigger. That’s why he was excited to transition to Zscaler’s COO in February after more than two years as its CRO: “It was a job worth taking because it stretched me and it made me uncomfortable.” In this episode, Dali and Joubin discuss the state of tech M&A, the meaning of wealth ...
Oct 17, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 108
“Everyone excellent at their craft starts from a place of deep insecurity,” says Flexport’s founding CRO Ben Braverman. People are “slow-burning fireworks,” he explains, and we need time to learn how to do anything well. If you lie to yourself, you won’t ever improve; but if you admit the truth and approach people who know more with genuine curiosity and enthusiasm, Ben says, you’ll be able to level up faster and do things you never could before. In this episode, Ben and Joubin discuss giving sp...
Oct 10, 2022•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 107
When Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman and his co-founders opened their second-ever store, it was a “complete mess.” Located in Washington D.C.’s Dupont Circle and opening in the middle of the Great Recession, it was clearing less than $1000 per day at first. But Neman & co turned that crisis into opportunity the only way three 23-year-olds knew how: They bought a big speaker, started blasting music in the park, and turned their sleepy storefront into a party. That desperate play underscored one...
Oct 03, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 106
For more than 10 years, AOL co-founder and Revolution Chairman Steve Case has been investing in startups in all corners of the US — and urging others to do the same. His new book about this movement, The Rise of the Rest , explains why: The next wave of the tech industry, he argues, is not going to be anchored to physical offices in Silicon Valley alone. “The pandemic has created more attention on that,” he says. “That dispersion that started a decade ago accelerated over the last couple years ....
Sep 26, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 105
Intuit co-founder Scott Cook still remembers the first line of an email he received in 1994 from [email protected]: “This really is Bill Gates.” Intuit’s personal finance product Quicken had survived being crushed by Microsoft Money, and its new accounting software Quickbooks was thriving as well; instead of competing, Gates wanted to buy Intuit for $1.5 billion and take it worldwide. A deal was struck, hands were shook, but there was just one problem: The U.S. Department of Justice. In this e...
Sep 19, 2022•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 104
Productboard founder and CEO Hubert Palan has made a point of studying the communication style of other leaders, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Elon Musk. But as the boss of a hot and growing tech startup, he’s realizing just how exceptional those people are. “You’re interviewing some of the top execs from companies are the Silicon Valley darling brands,” he says. “You leave the interview like, ‘This person has no idea what they’re doing. They just happen to be in the right spot at the right tim...
Sep 12, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 103
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon believes his company is perfectly positioned for the world economy of the future, connecting everything from phones to exercise bikes to cars. And he predicts we’re about to see AI-assisted cars deployed at a “mass scale.” Fully autonomous vehicles, he concedes, will take longer — perhaps 5 or 10 years — but he says it’s in everyone’s interest to make an intermediate level of assisted driving available in every vehicle on the highway, not just premium cars like Teslas...
Sep 05, 2022•47 min•Ep. 102
“When I grew up in Bangalore, I’d never seen a computer,” says Thomas Kurian. The former president of Oracle, now the CEO of Google Cloud, remembers learning how to write while sitting outside his childhood home, and doing homework by candlelight during power blackouts. He credits his “trailblazer” mother, who instilled curiosity and discipline in all her children, with helping them understand the value of education beyond doing well on the next test. Something must have stuck, because Thomas is...
Aug 29, 2022•52 min•Ep. 101
After Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr first invested in Google — $12.8 million for 13 percent of the company — he told co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin that they needed to hire a CEO to help them build the business. After they took meetings with a variety of successful tech execs, they came back to Doerr and told him “We’ve got some good news and some bad news.” The good news was that they agreed on the need for a CEO; the bad news, Doerr recalls, is that they believed there was only o...
Aug 22, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 100
Touch The Top CEO Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind person to summit Mount Everest, climbs hundreds of mountains every year. And he’s learned over the years that sometimes, the smartest thing to do in the face of adversity is stop, turn around, and go home; but in other situations, like an unexpectedly icy day climbing Mount Kenya, one only has to change their approach. “The mountain doesn’t care, the mountain’s not gonna change,” he says. “We could still maybe get to the summit, even though the...
Aug 15, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 99
After rescuing his first startup BigMachines from the brink of bankruptcy and building it to positive cash flow, Godard Abel thought the express lane of life was opening up to him. But after the board replaced him as CEO, Godard — now the CEO of B2B tech buying firm G2 — found himself on a rocky road for 10 years. He had all the money he could want, but also overwhelming fear, anxiety, and depression. To break out of this funk, Godard says he had to embrace presence and reckon with why entrepren...
Aug 08, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 98
Mark Roberge’s first anxiety attack hit him six months after 9/11, and his second hit him in the middle of a big speech while he was an executive at HubSpot. And Roberge, who now lectures at Harvard Business School and co-founded the venture firm Stage 2 Capital, says it’s important to include that anxiety in his entrepreneurial story. “I talk about it because there is a stigma associated with it,” he says. “Society values some of the things I’ve accomplished, but when I admit to everyone that I...
Aug 01, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 97
Canva CMO Zach Kitschke was the company’s fifth employee, joining right before the product launched to the public — or, that was the plan anyway. Emerging technologies like HTML5 and negative feedback from early testers delayed the debut of the design startup, but in the 10 years since its launch Canva has become one of the most successful companies to ever come out of Australia. “One of our values is to set crazy big goals and make them happen,” Zach says. In this episode, Zach and Joubin discu...
Jul 25, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 96
Girish Mathrubootham is the founder and CEO of Freshworks, the first Indian SaaS company to be listed in NASDAQ — and when he’s in his home country, he gets the celebrity treatment. Freshworks’ 2021 IPO was a milestone for the country’s tech sector, and Mathrubootham has also attracted a “take a selfie with me!” level of fame for trying to change the conversation about entrepreneurship there. “You can be successful in business without doing bad things,” he says. “Being a good person and winning ...
Jul 18, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 95
Riot Games CMO Jason Bunge knows you might roll your eyes when he says this, but he doesn’t care, because it’s the truth: Marketing doesn’t get enough respect. Although many companies have convinced themselves that they don’t need a traditional marketing division, they’re very wrong. “If you care about your brand [and] you care about your customer,” he says, “you need great marketing. And you need actually great marketers to tell you what that is.” In this episode, Jason and Joubin discuss learn...
Jul 11, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 94
Before Peter Reinhardt started his current company, Charm Industrial, he was the CEO and co-founder of the customer data platform Segment, which almost died in its first year. Why? He was afraid to ask customers to pay more than $10 per month for it. A savvy sales advisor pressured him to raise the price by 1000x, which worked wonders. By early 2022, Segment — now owned by Twilio — was commanding seven-figure contracts. In this episode, Peter and Joubin discuss the hierarchy of majors at MIT, bu...
Jul 04, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 93
Clari CEO Andy Byrne says he never wants to look back and see that he put more into his work than his family. But that doesn’t mean he can’t learn a thing or two from running a 600-person multi-billion dollar business: Inspired by business books, he and his wife Julie set goals, methods and OKRs for their family, and even asked their kids to grade them on how well they were hitting their targets. “I feel like our job is to help our families realize their fullest potential first, and then work is...
Jun 27, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 92
In the early days of Okta, co-founder Frederic Kerrest was courting a 3,000-person company in Louisiana, which was considering Okta and one other vendor. When he learned who he was up against, he said, “We love competing with them ‘cause we beat them every time.” That arrogant boast lost him the deal, and taught him a humbling lesson: Your confidence is not superior to your customer’s needs. In this episode, Frederic and Joubin discuss literally walking down memory lane in San Francisco, who his...
Jun 20, 2022•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 91
In April, a young girl was kidnapped and sexually assaulted in Yakima, Wash., and later told police she was picked up by a stranger in a car. The case might have gone cold there, if Yakima hadn’t just installed Flock Safety cameras : The cameras were able to pinpoint a car matching the girl’s description, and picked up the alleged abductor outside an elementary school campus, says Flock CEO Garrett Langley, who says stories like this have validated his company’s mission of stopping crime in our ...
Jun 13, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 90
Leyla Seka has a clear idea of “what makes me great” as the COO of Ironclad: She’s incredibly direct with her team. Although many people are not comfortable with getting direct feedback, she says, “I can’t do my job if I can’t tell you what I’m seeing.” And in the end, she sees her job as one of seeking out the truth, to make her business better. In this episode, Leyla and Joubin discuss developing peccadilloes as you get older, why a former boss told her “if you’re in a bad mood, don’t come to ...
Jun 06, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 89
