On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Michelle Zatlyn, Co-Founder & COO at Cloudflare, Shawn Abbott, Partner at Inovia Capital, and Mahendra Ramsinghani, Founder at Secure Octane & Author at Startup Boards. Together, they give us a masterclass on building high-performing boards and productive relationships. Topics covered include: 12:22 - What do investors expect from founders when it comes to their board? 23:52 - Why momentum is the source of all authori...
Feb 28, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep 24•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Rishi Mandal, Co-Founder and CEO of Future. You hear the term ‘saturated market' and, naturally, you are struck with the fear of limited growth. But a competitive market also shows that there’s a real demand, and with that comes customers. You just need to out-innovate and outgrow the competition. Future, backed by Kate Hudson, Kleiner Perkins, SC.Holdings, Trustbridge Partners, Founders Fund, and Khosla Ventures, is ...
Feb 21, 2022•53 min•Ep 23•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Anu Bharadwaj, Chief Operating Officer at Atlassian. Anu shares how to start a movement in your organization to encourage, inspire, and motivate your employees to drive transformational change and exponential growth. The most successful companies of the last decade, from Amazon to Netflix and Microsoft, have been through transformational changes. Great companies must develop the muscle to transform if they want to las...
Feb 14, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Jason Lemkin, Trusted Advisor at SaaStr. Jason, who is often regarded as the godfather of SaaS, shares 10 things you can do to grow 10x faster in 2022. Jason runs SaaStr, the world's largest SaaS community and $100M+ SaaS venture fund. Previously, Jason founded the web's most popular electronic signature service, EchoSign, which he grew to over $100M in revenue and sold to Adobe. Prior to EchoSign and SaaStr, he co-fo...
Feb 09, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Nick Mehta, Chief Executive Officer at Gainsight. The goal of every startup is to exit via IPO, and if not, then by way of acquisition. But what should founders know about the process of getting there? Everything — from turning an idea into a scalable business to seeking potential buyers to what the reality of being owned by a larger company entails. Nick's first CEO role, at LiveOffice, led to the sale of the company...
Feb 07, 2022•56 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Rahul Vohra, Founder and CEO at Superhuman. How do you build products that are 10X better than the competition? It almost always starts with a counterintuitive approach to the conventional. Rahul is one of the rare founders and product builders with this conviction, building the fastest email experience in the world. Rahul was previously the founder of Rapportive, acquired by LinkedIn in 2014. Rahul shares his framewo...
Feb 02, 2022•55 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Eren Bali, Co-Founder and CEO at Carbon Health. Eren previously founded Udemy and helped pioneer the online learning industry. Now, he's disrupting healthcare with Carbon Health and has grown the company 7x since January 2020, increasing its clinic footprint from 7 to 27 clinics, introducing virtual care to 16 states, and facilitating over 500K Covid-19 tests. Specifically, Eren covers: 4:05 - The decision to start Ca...
Jan 31, 2022•59 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Meagen Eisenberg, Chief Marketing Officer at TripActions. Meagen is one of the most sought-after marketing leaders and has won a number of accolades, including Most Influential Marketing Tech Leaders and Top 25 B2B Marketing Influencers. She spent more than 20 years growing and scaling tech companies through many acquisitions and IPOs, including prior roles as CMO of MongoDB (NASDAQ: MDB) and VP of Demand Generation a...
Jan 26, 2022•55 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Kerel Cooper, Chief Marketing Officer at LiveIntent, Inc. Hiring has turned into gatekeeping, but building a great company is not about selecting people who fit your existing culture and keeping out those who don’t. Culture should expand like your business. Just like we want people to contribute new skills and ideas, people should be able to contribute to a new culture. Ultimately, openness is the biggest and most ind...
Jan 25, 2022•45 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Noah Kagan, Chief Sumo and CEO at AppSumo. Noah started his career as employee #30 at Facebook, before getting fired and losing $185M in company shares. He was then #4 at Mint.com and built their first 100K customers as director of marketing. Today Noah runs two multimillion-dollar businesses: AppSumo and Sumo.com . But along the way, he's launched 24 businesses. In this discussion, Noah will go through EVERY business...
Jan 19, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Tomasz Tunguz, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures and co-author of Winning with Data . To build a massive long-term sustainable business, you need strong defensive moats around your company. However, the dramatic shifts in technology are rendering traditional moats useless and leaving companies feeling like it’s almost impossible to build a defensible business. Tomasz shares a unique look at SaaS and data ecosyste...
Jan 17, 2022•49 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Brian Rothenberg , Partner at defy.vc. Finding exponential growth is the holy grail of every startup, but many fail in pursuit of it. Brian’s career has spanned every stage of startup growth, from scrappy zero to triumphant IPO. He founded SkillSlate which was acquired by TaskRabbit (acq. Ikea), then went on to scale Eventbrite’s $5B+ growth engine as VP of Growth and helped them to IPO. Today, Brian is investing in a...
Jan 12, 2022•59 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Martin Basiri, co-founder and CEO at ApplyBoard. ApplyBoard is the world’s largest online platform for international student recruitment, with over 750 employees in 20 countries. It has recently closed its latest round of financing and the company is now valued at $1.4 billion. In this session, Martin shares the secrets and lessons learned from their exponential growth journey. Specifically, they discuss: 7:23 - What ...
Jan 10, 2022•54 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Startup Helper, Elad Gil. The Information recently had a cover article with the headline, “The Rise of Elad Gil, Silicon Valley’s Biggest Solo Venture Capitalist.” Investing in one or two unicorns is already magic, but Elad has invested in over 40, including helping companies like Airbnb, Gitlab, Gusto, Instacart, Notion, Stripe, Square, Google, and Twitter navigate the hyper-growth phase by sharing his playbook. Spec...
Jan 05, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Shiven Ramji, chief product officer at Auth0. Building a developer product is probably one of the hardest things for startups to build, because you're selling to people who don't really hold the budget. What are the fundamentals (or secrets) to building successful developer products and companies? Shiven has built two successful products and brands at Auth0 and DigitalOcean. Both companies recently had exits of $5B+ b...
Jan 04, 2022•54 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Laurie Schultz who was most recently CEO at Galvanize which was acquired for $1 billion.. Early-stage startups often act like pirates, fighting to scale in pursuit of treasure while being rough around the edges and breaking things along the way. But eventually, it comes time to evolve into something more like the navy—still heroic, but disciplined and polished in its approach, with a long-term view. Laurie Schultz rec...
Jan 03, 2022•56 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, I welcome Andy Johns, venture partner at Unusual Ventures. Some of the fastest-growing products have artfully constructed a series of content flywheels, resulting in nearly unstoppable organic growth for years or decades. To put the power of a content flywheel in perspective, Reddit recently claimed 430M monthly active users—it’s 15 years old and still spreading its wings. But how do you create such a platform? In this episode, Andy describes what the ing...
Dec 20, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Sridhar Vembu, founder and CEO of Zoho Corporation (moderated by Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch) . Sridhar built Zoho, a software product firm valued at over a billion dollars, without a rupee of external funding—almost completely bootstrapped. Months before the pandemic, he moved from Silicon Valley to a village in Tamil Nadu, where he is now based. Years before Atmanirbhar Bharat became a slogan, Sridhar champione...
Dec 15, 2021•33 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Ali Tamaseb, partner at Data Collective Venture Capital (DCVC). What are the key traits of billion dollar startups? Ali embarked on a journey to answer that question with real data. In the process, he has collected the largest data set on startups (30,000+ data points) to analyze every piece of them and understand what makes super founders and unicorns. What makes this even more incredible is the fact that he did this...
Dec 13, 2021•58 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Farhan Thawar, VP of engineering at Shopify, a global commerce company that provides tools to start, grow, market, and manage retail businesses of all sizes. Farhan studied computer science despite his parents’ disapproval, which was because at the time there were computers but no computer industry to speak of and very few job opportunities. He ended up with a job at the food giant Kraft. It turns out his choice to wo...
Dec 08, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Harness. There’s a .00006% chance of becoming a billion-dollar company. Now imagine building two in your lifetime. Is it luck, or is there strategy involved? Jyoti is an engineer turned serial entrepreneur with 2x unicorns. Harness recently attained unicorn status with a $1.7B valuation alongside his previous unicorn AppDynamics, which he sold to Cisco in 2017 for $3.7 billion. With...
Dec 06, 2021•59 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Mandy Sebel, operating partner, people and talent at Radian Capital and former chief people officer at UiPath. Mandy has spent many years in the people and culture space, so we talked about everything from recruiting to onboarding to building a culture that fosters high retention. Mandy believes that early-stage companies should bring in a leader of people and culture as soon as they can afford it. It is a critical ro...
Nov 30, 2021•59 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Vidya Peters, chief marketing officer and interim chief product officer at Marqeta, a card issuing and payment processing company that broke many records with an IPO valuation of $16 billion. Following her love of math and science, Vidya studied engineering as an undergraduate student. She says her career path was like skiing down moguls, you know where you are starting but you don’t know exactly where you’re going. I...
Nov 29, 2021•1 hr•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Jeff Lawson, CEO and Co-Founder of Twilio, for a lively discussion about how to build high performing software teams. Jeff goes over his career journey, which included stops at Stub Hub and Amazon before starting Twilio. Along the way, he discovered that it is difficult to put in the time and energy needed to build a product or service if you aren’t passionate about it. The way to get developers passionate about what ...
Oct 27, 2021•55 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast 
