This episode kicks off our Israeli Entrepreneur Series, four episodes dedicated to getting to know Israeli founders and their companies. Known as Startup Nation, Israel creates more companies per capita than any other country, with one startup for every 1,400 people. Read more about GGV’s commitment to funding and supporting the next generation of Israeli entrepreneurs. This series is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger. Roy Mann is the CEO and Co-Founder of monday.com – one of the fa...
Feb 27, 2020•38 min
Sarah Nahm is the Founder and CEO of Lever , a recruiting software company that is tackling the most strategic challenge that companies face: how to grow their teams. Prior to Lever, Sarah worked at Google as speechwriter for Marissa Mayer and later joined the product team that launched Google Chrome, helping it become the world’s top web browser. A self-taught programmer, Sarah received her BS in engineering and product design from Stanford University, where she occasionally returns to coach de...
Feb 06, 2020•43 min
Dheeraj Pandey is the Founder, CEO & Chairman of Nutanix . He brings a wealth of experience of working at high growth enterprise software companies. Prior to founding Nutanix, Dheeraj was the VP of Engineering at Aster Data (now Teradata), where he helped build the product and its engineering team from the ground up. At Oracle, he managed the storage engine group for Oracle Database/Exadata, and co-authored numerous patents in the area of distributed databases. Dheeraj is a Ph.D. dropout fro...
Jan 09, 2020•41 min
Michelle Zatlyn is Co-founder and COO of Cloudflare , a leading Internet security, performance, and reliability company that was named to CNBC’s Disruptor 50 List, selected by the Wall Street Journal as the Most Innovative Internet Technology Company for two successive years, and named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. Before co-founding Cloudflare, Michelle held positions at Google and Toshiba and launched two successful startups. She holds a BS degree, with distinction, from Mc...
Dec 02, 2019•40 min
As President and CEO of Smartsheet (NYSE: SMAR), Mark Mader leads a company committed to transforming the way organizations plan, track, manage, automate, and report on work at scale. With over 20 years executive leadership experience driving innovation for high-growth Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies, Mark is a recognized leader in the technology community. He has been named Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year in Technology for the Pacific Northwest, and GeekWire’s CEO of the Yea...
Nov 14, 2019•37 min
Aghi Marietti is an inventor, technology entrepreneur and angel investor. As the CEO and Co-founder of Kong — the API company on a mission to intelligently broker information across all services — he drives the company’s vision, strategy and long-term growth. Prior to Kong, he was the CEO and Co-founder of Mashape, the largest API marketplace, which was acquired by RapidAPI in 2017. Before that, he founded MemboxX, the first European cloud service for storing documents and sensitive personal dat...
Oct 24, 2019•55 min
Assaf Wand is the Co-founder and CEO of insurtech startup Hippo . Based in Palo Alto, CA, the company is modernizing home insurance through the lens of homeowners – building policies with more comprehensive coverage for today's consumers at up to 25% less than competitors. Prior to Hippo, Wand was founder and CEO of Sabi, which designed and produced elegant everyday products (Sabi was acquired in 2015), a consultant with McKinsey & Company and an investor with Intel Capital. He has an MBA fr...
Sep 13, 2019•37 min
Erica Brescia is GitHub’s Chief Operating Officer, where she leads the business development, support, and workplace teams. Prior to joining GitHub, she was the COO and co-founder of Bitnami, where she was instrumental in leading the team's business development efforts with all of the leading cloud platform providers. Erica’s leadership in the technology space extends to serving on the board of directors of the Linux Foundation, as well as being an Investment Partner in X Factor Ventures, which e...
Aug 22, 2019•40 min
Kunal Agarwal co-founded Unravel Data Systems, Inc. in 2013. Prior to that Kunal led sales and implementation at several Fortune 100 companies. Earlier, he also co-founded Yuuze.com, a pioneer in personalized shopping and what-to-wear recommendations. Before that he helped Sun Microsystems evaluate Big Data infrastructure like Sun’s Grid Computing Engine. Kunal holds a Bachelor’s in computer engineering from Valparaiso University and a M.B.A from The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. In...
Aug 08, 2019•38 min
Anne Raimondi is an industry veteran with over 20 years of experience driving growth for B2B and B2C companies - taking them from startups to nationally recognized brands. Currently, she is the Chief Customer Officer for Guru , a leading AI knowledge management platform. Prior to Guru, Raimondi served as the SVP of Operations for Zendesk. Prior to Zendesk, Raimondi served as a product leader and executive for technology innovators - including Survey Monkey, TaskRabbit, Blue Nile and eBay. Anne h...
Jul 18, 2019•27 min
Max Levchin is the Founder & CEO of Affirm a financial services technology company that offers microloans to consumers at the point of sale. Affirm allows shoppers to pay for purchases across multiple months with transparent, fairly priced fees built into every payment. Max is also the Co-Founder and Chairman of Glow, a data-driven fertility company, and was one of the original co-founders of PayPal where he served as CTO until its acquisition by Ebay in 2002. He has served on several boards...
Jun 27, 2019•57 min
Rich Waldron is the Co-Founder and CEO of Tray.io, a next gen workflow and integration technology company that allows automation of business processes without IT. Tray puts the power in the hands of non-technical users or “citizen automators” to quickly integrate the myriad cloud solutions that every company runs today to easily build and streamline bespoke workflows. In this episode, we learn how Rich and his two co-founders and lifelong friends, Ali and Dom, built a competitive product and hig...
Jun 06, 2019•44 min
Dave McJannet joined HashiCorp as CEO about three years ago when the company was approximately 30 people. Today the company employs more than 400 people, the company’s value has grown more than 20x and customer adoption for both the company’s open source platform and enterprise products have exploded. Prior to joining HashiCorp, Dave ran marketing at GitHub and HortonWorks, and earlier in his career spent time at VMware, Microsoft and webMethods. In this episode, we dig into HashiCorp’s growth a...
Apr 25, 2019•29 min
Kevin Hartz is one of the few leaders in Silicon Valley who has had an incredible career as a repeat founder, business builder and investor. He co-founded Eventbrite, the born digital ticketing leader, in October 2005 with his wife Julia Hartz and Renaud Visage. Kevin served as Chairman and CEO through late 2016 before turning the CEO reins over to Julia while remaining Chairman. Eventbrite had a very successful IPO in September 2018 valuing the company at well north of $2 billion. Prior to buil...
Apr 04, 2019•33 min
Tom has worn many hats in his time at BitSight, including EVP of Sales and Marketing, COO and CEO. In this episode, he walks us through how to navigate relationships with founders as an incoming CEO, how to use content marketing in an enterprise market, and how to think about go-to-market strategy for a global business. Tom Turner is CEO and President of BitSight. Tom has extensive security industry experience, and has helped build category-defining companies. Prior to joining BitSight, Tom was ...
Mar 21, 2019•35 min
This week we are joined by Caryn Marooney for a salon episode that focuses on PR and communications. Caryn shares tips on how to build a brand, when to take PR in house, and how to handle a publicity crisis. Caryn leads global communications for Facebook and its family of apps including Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Oculus. Prior to joining Facebook in 2011, Caryn co-founded OutCast Communications , one of Silicon Valley's premier technology communications firms. As co-founder, partner and ...
Feb 22, 2019•35 min
Pandora Founder and former-CEO, Tim Westergren, joins Founder Real Talk to reminisce on how his experiences playing in a band prepared him for running a company. From the first moment of product-market fit, to the right partnership that doubled growth rates, Tim shares the ups and downs of his 18-year journey with the company. Tim started the popular personalized radio service in 2000 with the Music Genome Project. In addition to Pandora, he is an award-winning composer and accomplished musician...
Jan 28, 2019•33 min
Serial entrepreneur and Color founder Elad Gil joins Founder Real Talk to share insights and his experiences in starting and building high growth start-ups. We talk about how a founder’s role changes over time, how to build a team that scales, and what conditions need to be in place for “high growth” to happen. His recent book “High Growth Handbook” is a must-read for any startup founder starting to scale up or hoping to get to that point one day. The book is also highly relevant for executives ...
Dec 12, 2018•37 min
Will gives an inside look at Stripe, one of the most valuable venture-backed startups in the U.S. In this episode, he talks about Stripe’s developer-first ethos, how the company is expanding into international markets, and how to run a great board meeting. Will is the CFO at Stripe, where he leads Stripe’s financial operations, including economic strategy, business forecasting, financial planning and analysis, and treasury duties. Prior to Stripe, Will was a general partner at Thrive Capital, wh...
Nov 27, 2018•38 min
Michelle created a movement to empower women from the first piece of clothing they put on in the morning. She shares the secrets of how she built a culture-driven business that has inspired more than 40,000 brand ambassadors, the role of customer feedback in her product strategy, and how she took a direct-to-consumer brand to multiple offline retail locations. Michelle Cordeiro Grant, Founder & CEO of LIVELY, has spent her career creating brands and product for some of the world's largest re...
Nov 13, 2018•34 min
Mitchell turned his hobby into a business that now serves 100 of the Fortune 500 companies. In this episode, he talks about how he grew the HashiCorp open source community, monetized an open-source product, and decided to bring on a CEO. Mitchell Hashimoto is best known as the creator of Vagrant, Packer, Terraform and Consul. Mitchell is the co-founder of HashiCorp, a company that builds powerful and elegant DevOps tools. He is also an O’Reilly author. He is one of the top GitHub users by follow...
Oct 30, 2018•35 min
Jen shares her experience working with start-ups as a talent and search specialist and answers all your most pressing questions. This episode is the first of many salon episodes where we feature an expert from the field who has worked extensively with founders, from early to growth stage. Jen Holmstrom joined GGV Capital in 2016 and leads the firm’s talent and recruiting efforts. To support founders as their companies scale, she created Founders+Leaders, a leadership development platform that pr...
Oct 24, 2018•35 min
Jay started his career at the NSA and brought his love of uncovering cyber vulnerabilities to the private sector through Synack. In this interview, Jay gives his perspective on how to find product-market fit in cyber security, how early customers shape the product, and how to balance the sales and leadership responsibilities of being a CEO. Jay Kaplan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Synack, the hacker-powered security platform for the enterprise. Prior to founding Synack, Jay served in a number of ...
Oct 02, 2018•34 min
Repeat CEO Nick Mehta joined Gainsight in its Series A and has since grown the company into the customer success management category leader. In this episode Nick shares what it takes to build an industry leading company in a previously non-existent category, how to use customer conferences as a way to build community, and how to attract a roster of all-star VCs. Prior to Gainsight, Nick was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners where he focused on developing opportunities in the enterpr...
Sep 19, 2018•41 min
Kelly Wright tells the story of how selling books door-to-door shaped her approach to start-up sales and how she went from the first sales person at Tableau to becoming the EVP and scaled the company to nearly $1B in revenue. Kelly brings 20 years of experience in leadership and sales roles, including ten years at Tableau selling the company’s award-winning applications. She has previously held positions at a number of high profile companies, including VP positions at At Hoc, a major venture-bac...
Sep 06, 2018•38 min
In this episode, Eric talks about building a capital intensive business across multiple geographies and how he balances speed vs. scale. He also discusses his controversial take on hiring, how poker influences his outlook on business, and how to transition from an IC to a manager. Eric Wu is co-founder and CEO of Opendoor, a consumer technology company that is reinventing how people buy and sell real estate. Prior to Opendoor, Eric was the founder and CEO of Movity.com, a geo-data analytics comp...
Aug 22, 2018•35 min
In this episode, Edith shares her story of founding LaunchDarkly. She walks through the valuable lessons learned from disastrous product launches to first pitch meetings. Nowadays she has a podcast called “To Be Continuous” about continuous delivery and software development, teaches a class on how to fundraise, and has her own philosophy on how to manage procurement cycles for young enterprise software companies. Edith Harbaugh is CEO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly. Edith has more than 10 years ...
Aug 10, 2018•34 min
In this episode, Barmak discusses product-market fit, go-to-market strategies, and how to beat incumbents in the enterprise space. AlienVault was recently acquired by AT&T. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed but as shareholders, GGV Capital is very excited about this outcome. Barmak is a veteran of the technology industry with a passion for building and leading great teams. Over his 20 years of experience in enterprise software, he has assembled an incredible track record for deliveri...
Jul 25, 2018•43 min
In this episode, Jackie shares how she brought the rigor of private equity to People Operations at Square. Along the way she talks about how she found an entrepreneurial opportunity within the company through Square Capital, how she built a team for a field that didn’t exist, and how her team uses data to foster diversity for Square Capital customers. Jackie Reses serves as the Lead of Square Capital and People Lead for Square. As Lead of Square Capital, Jackie oversees the team working to expan...
Jul 12, 2018•36 min
In this episode, Mikkel talks about how three guys from Copenhagen found themselves in Silicon Valley before people invested in foreign companies, and how they were able to turn that around by creating a new category in the SaaS space and take Zendesk public. Mikkel Svane is the CEO, chairman and founder of Zendesk, a global company that builds software for the best customer experiences. He has driven the vision, culture, and growth of the company for the last 10 years. Under his leadership, the...
Jul 12, 2018•37 min
