Today’s guest is Karsten Temme, CEO and Founder of Pivot Bio. Pivot Bio is at the cutting edge of the AgTech world and is working hard to fight things like pollution and climate change. Chad and Karsten discuss: Pivot Bio's goal of replacing the current form of fertilizer with a synthetic microbe they’ve created in their labs. Pivot Bio’s first product, PROVEN. Tips for building company culture and establishing company values. KPI’s for Karsten and his team and how they are measured. The importa...
Mar 10, 2020•30 min•Ep. 387
The student loan crisis in America is a generation-defining problem, and joining us today is a man looking for a solution. Robb Granado is the President of CommonBond, a company helping redefine what it means to get, and pay for, a college education. In this episode, Chad and Robb talk about: The work that CommonBond does to fight the student loan crisis. What motivated Robb to join the Air Force. Robb's career before CommonBond and how/why he founded Raiseworks. How CommonBond is working with e...
Mar 09, 2020•39 min•Ep. 386
Chad sits down with Nick Elprin, the CEO of Domino Data Labs. You may think data science is all the rage, but it wasn't when Nick got started. In this episode, Chad and Nick discuss: Nick's career, some of his early times at Harvard and Bridgewater, and the lessons he learned through it all. How Nick got started doing what he's doing today. What it's like to build a company in a space that is emerging. Some persuasion techniques and tips for how to be persistent even when the going gets tough. H...
Mar 06, 2020•33 min•Ep. 385
In today's episode, we sit down with Mathilde Collin, the CEO of Front. If you'd like to imagine a bright future for email - better correspondence, being more effective - Front is working on it. Today, Mathilde and Chad talk about: How to become more happy at work Getting the balance right between your personal identity and your business identity What email would be like if it was designed today and how they would reimagine it Where Mathilde's competitive motivations come from and how she channe...
Mar 05, 2020•36 min•Ep. 384
Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, joins Chad. They cover principles of capital allocation from one of their favorite books, The Outsiders . The Outsiders looks at eight hugely successful CEOs who have extraordinarily high returns on capital. In today’s episode, Chad and Wade discuss the 5 central strategies these CEOs use and how they can be applied in business and life. Grab a notebook, grab a pen, and get ready for lots of actionable insights that will change how you think about business, capital, a...
Mar 04, 2020•41 min•Ep. 383
Chad interviews Evan Goldberg, Founder and EVP of Oracle NetSuite. Evan grew up in Massachusetts and moved out to Silicon Valley in the 1980s to work for Oracle, where he was able to pursue a life long dream of working in computer software. He joins us today to talk lessons learned, mistakes, opportunities, successes, and some of the best advice he has for entrepreneurs… as well as what he’s learned working with Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, and Mark Hurd. — This episode of Mission Daily is broug...
Mar 03, 2020•43 min•Ep. 382
On today's episode, Albert sits down with newly anointed Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar. Stack Overflow is the largest online community for developers to share their knowledge and build their careers. Tune in to learn how Prashanth and Stack Overflow are planning to serve the developer community for years to come. — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org . We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accel...
Feb 27, 2020•38 min•Ep. 380
On this episode of Mission Daily, Hilary is joined by Eugenio Pace, co-founder and CEO of Auth0, a company that provides authentication and authorization services for app developers. Eugenio discusses Auth0’s core values, what he learned in Argentina that kickstarted his entrepreneurial journey, and how Auth0 is changing the game for innovators. — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org . We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story stu...
Feb 12, 2020•48 min•Ep. 378
“If you're not willing to be curious, not willing to be a student of innovation and a student of disruption, this is probably not the right industry for you.” – Ed Scott Today we talked with Ed Scott, CEO of ElectrifAi, a company that is revolutionizing the artificial intelligence and machine learning space. On this episode of Mission Daily, Stephanie and Ed discuss how he turned ElectrifAi into the ML and AI company that the future needs, the importance of finding women leaders, and tips for de...
Feb 11, 2020•38 min•Ep. 377
"Imagine if eBay and FedEx had a baby. That's what we can do for consumers." Albert is joined by Ari Mir, Co-founder and CEO of Clutter, a tech-heavy, on-demand storage and moving company. Clutter allows consumers to affordably store their belongings without lifting a finger. Prior to Clutter, Ari founded Gumgum, the world's largest image ad network in the visual AI space, and PocketChange, a startup backed by Google. On this episode of Mission Daily, Ari discusses the future of self-storage, ho...
Feb 05, 2020•36 min•Ep. 376
“Every time somebody gets a job, there's a little shred of me that's like, ‘Wow, this really works. This is crazy.’” With a 93% employment rate across 11 campuses, Adam Enbar and Flatiron School are on a mission to get people great jobs. Today, Adam discusses how Flatiron School was created, why its curriculums outperform traditional education, and how Flatiron’s model is disrupting the education system as we know it. (Please note: In the episode, it is mentioned that there is a 97% employment r...
Feb 03, 2020•37 min•Ep. 375
“The one thing that I always made sure we did, is to never have a month or a quarter that was lower than the quarter before.” Today, we are joined by Joe Chura, CEO of Dealer Inspire, a leading automotive platform developing innovative, mobile-first technologies. Joe co-founded Dealer Inspire in 2013, and the company has since grown to a team of over 600 employees and has partnered with over 4,000 dealers. Joe's success didn't go unnoticed and Dealer Inspire was recently acquired by Cars.com. On...
Jan 29, 2020•40 min•Ep. 374
“To me it's about pragmatism. It's about iteration, it's about listening and it's about striking out a way forward." - Andy Hovancik Today, Albert speaks with Andy Hovancik, CEO of Sovos, a company that safeguards businesses from the burden and risk of modern tax. Andy has more than 25 years of experience growing technology companies, 15 years of which have been in regulatory and compliance software. Andy joined Sovos in 2013 and has since overseen the integration of businesses, creating the mos...
Jan 23, 2020•38 min•Ep. 373
Henry Schuck is the Co-Founder and CEO of ZoomInfo, formerly known as DiscoverOrg. Henry and his close friend Kirk Brown bootstrapped ZoomInfo into the massively successful tech company it is today. Funding the project with nothing but their own money, Henry and Kirk chose what many would consider the harder, but smarter, path to starting a business. Today, ZoomInfo has won hundreds of awards within the industry and has donated a considerable amount to charities in Washington State. On this epis...
Jan 16, 2020•46 min•Ep. 372
On this special, mid-week episode of the show, Chad Grills, CEO of Mission, sits down with Kamal Ravikant. Kamal has done it all; trekked through the Himalayas, walked across Spain, served our country in the US Army Infantry, written several bestsellers... and today, he is a partner at Evolve.VC, a seed and A round investment firm. On this episode, Chad and Kamal talk about Kamal's experience in the military and in Silicon Valley, and dive deep into why the most transformative thing you can do i...
Jan 16, 2020•40 min•Ep. 371
When Joel Peterson agreed to teach a real estate course at Stanford in the early 1990s, he thought he was just helping the school out for a couple of semesters. More than 25 years later, Joel is still a professor at Stanford and maintains relationships with many of the students he’s taught throughout the years. “For me, it's all about the students,” Joel says. “I love rubbing shoulders with these young people. I love potential. I love spotting potential. I love nurturing it. I love nudging it. T...
Jan 15, 2020•37 min•Ep. 370
“Technology should be viewed as your friend and as a support tool for you.”— Brent Lang Brent Lang , CEO of Vocera , has worked hard to achieve his long list of accomplishments. He started his career as a star athlete in college winning an Olympic gold medal in 1988, and it was only after he graduated from the University of Michigan that he began diving into the world of technology. Brent eventually became one of the first employees to join Vocera and is on a mission to help improve the lives of...
Jan 09, 2020•32 min•Ep. 369
“Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. People ask though, what does that mean? Our customers are Internet property. Anything connected online can use Cloudflare and we help make sure we protect our customers from cybersecurity attacks.” — Michelle Zatlyn Michelle Zatlyn , COO of Cloudflare , founded Cloudflare in 2009 and has since grown the company from start-up to multi-billion-dollar public company in just 10 years. “The Cloudflare story is almost like a fairy tale in many ...
Jan 07, 2020•49 min•Ep. 368
“At the core of what HashiCorp does, almost everything is open source for us. And so in terms of traditional marketing, we do very little of it. It's very much driven around creating great products in open source as to make it broadly available to developers and users.” — Armon Dadgar Chad is joined by Armon Dadgar , co-founder and CTO of Hashicorp . As CTO of Hashicorp, Armon has spent a large amount of his time building the culture of the company by refining the process of hiring and investing...
Dec 19, 2019•48 min•Ep. 367
“Don't obsess about the fact that you don't always understand what the next step is.” — Jay Fulcher Today, Chad sits down with Jay Fulcher , CEO and chairman of Zenefits which offers cloud based software as a service for companies to better manage their human resources. Having learned the ropes of leadership by being a serial entrepreneur and CEO, he was brought on to lead Zenefits in 2017 after the company had suffered from internal issues and infamously grew too quickly. Jay decided to flip th...
Dec 17, 2019•44 min•Ep. 366
“People think that when you start a company that it is this immensely risky thing but the upside is so disproportionately higher if you just looked at it from an expected value standpoint. Worst case scenario your company fails and you go to work for a McKinsey or something similar.” — John Arrow Today, Chad is joined by John Arrow , CEO of Mutual Mobile , an agency that designs and develops breakthrough digital applications for the Fortune 1000. As a freshman at the University of Texas, John jo...
Dec 10, 2019•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 365
Today, Ian is joined by Chris Hsu , a West Point graduate, an Army veteran, and now CEO of Zibo , a digital financial services platform that provides individual landlords banking, insurance and payment services. Prior to founding Zibo and post-military, Chris held roles as Executive Vice President for Hewlett Packard and a Senior Vice President at HP. He also served as a top executive in private equity for six years, during which he advised entrepreneurs and led turnaround efforts at companies i...
Dec 03, 2019•2 hr 32 min•Ep. 362
“Have a plan, but don't have it so rigorous that you miss opportunities. Don't let people talk you out of what your gut thinks is the right thing.” — Mark Testoni Today, Chad is joined by Mark Testoni CEO of SAP NS2 . At the age of 20, Mark worked as a high school janitor but decided to turn the page and join the Air Force. He served in the military for 20 years, and since retiring , Mark has become an active spokesperson on veteran’s issues, discussing the importance of believing in yourself an...
Nov 26, 2019•52 min•Ep. 361
Today, Chad is joined by Alex MacCaw , founder and CEO of Clearbit . Alex’s road to entrepreneurship was anything but conventional. Having taught himself programming at a young age, he dropped out of high school at the age of 17 to pursue a full-time career as a software engineer. Living in the London, Alex had intentions to get his visa and move to San Francisco to start his own company. But when he encountered a few roadblocks along the way, he took the opportunity to travel through south-east...
Nov 21, 2019•50 min•Ep. 360
Chad and Ian are joined by Bill Draper and Pitch Johnson , both of whom were instrumental in starting venture capital in the early 1960’s, shaping the industry even to this day. Bill and Pitch first met at Inland Steel in the late 1950s, instantly becoming friends and forming a lifelong personal and professional relationship. Both Bill and Pitch decided to leave the steel mill to form Draper and Johnson Investment Group which would later became Sutter Hill Ventures. Pitch went on to start Asset ...
Nov 19, 2019•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 359
“You are building features that your customers need right here, right now. You educate them on what can be done and the art of the possible. Then, you execute way better than your competitors. That's it.” — Amr Awadallah Today, Stephanie is joined by Amr Awadallah , co-founder and Global Chief Technology Officer of Cloudera . Amr is fondly called the “geek from Egypt” as he migrated from Egypt and has a passion for computer science. Living in Egypt, Amr never aspired to become an entrepreneur; i...
Nov 14, 2019•41 min•Ep. 358
“I think an entrepreneurial spirit is within somebody.” — Michele Bolos Today, Chad is joined by Michele Bolos , founder and CEO of NT Concepts , a leading national security solution provider applying AI and machine learning to help strengthen the operations of government agencies such as the Department of Defense. Michele built the business by staying lean and cultivating an employee culture of innovation. Her company has lived through two recessions, the tech bust of 2000 and the national rece...
Nov 12, 2019•30 min•Ep. 357
On today’s episode of Mission Daily, Chad shares what we’ve been working on at Mission.org and how we are building culture. Courage and forgiveness are two of our values at Mission, guiding our culture every day. Chad explains, “courage is in really short supply right now and it always has been. It is the most valuable currency.” In our upcoming episodes, Chad will be sharing more on Mission’s company culture from courage and forgiveness to voluntaryism. We will share military leadership stories...
Nov 01, 2019•9 min•Ep. 356
“I have always firmly believed that work should have a higher purpose.” — Lenny Stein Lenny Stein , SVP of Global Affairs at Splunk , heads up Splunk’s global corporate, government affairs and social impact initiatives including Splunk for Good , an “effort to identify means and work with groups that can use the power of data to improve the human condition.” Partners of Splunk for Good include The Global Emancipation Network, with whom Splunk is helping to try to put an end to human trafficking....
Oct 22, 2019•30 min•Ep. 355
“The more that people can get exposed to the data, the more people can tinker with it, the more people can exert their intuition and ideas onto that data, the better society is going to be.” — Monzy Merza Monzy Merza, Vice President and Head of Security Research at Splunk, works at the cutting edge of cybersecurity. With over 15 years of experience in the field, he has seen how the evolution of technology directly influences the necessity and intricacies of cybersecurity. Today, Monzy is respons...
Oct 15, 2019•44 min•Ep. 354
