On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Mar Hershenson, Managing Partner at Pear VC. There is a lot of confusion among founders as to the right approach to raising a series A because each industry, whether it’s e-commerce, consumer, SaaS, or marketplace, has a different set of rules and tactics. In this session, Mar Hershenson, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Pear VC gives us a masterclass on clinching your Series A. Today, Mar covers the following topic...
Jun 21, 2022•51 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI features a talk on Product Positioning by April Dunford, Founder of Ambient Strategy and Author of Obviously Awesome from Traction Conference 2019. Positioning has an impact across all key product decisions, from roadmap to pricing. Buyers need context to understand new innovative offerings. Businesses that figure out how to set that context have a distinct advantage over those that don't. April provides a methodology for pick...
Jun 15, 2022•29 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI features a fireside between Ryan Smith, Founder and Executive Chairman at Qualtrics, and Jason Lemkin, Founder at SaaStr from the in-person Traction Conf in San Francisco. Ryan shares his journey from a bootstrapped startup to a multi-billion dollar company and the challenges and learnings along the way. In this session, Ryan and Jason discuss: 1:01 - The Qualtrics founding story 7:14 - Stress of managing cashflow in the early...
Jun 13, 2022•34 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Mark Achler, Managing Director of MATH Venture Partners, and Mert Iseri, Entrepreneur in Residence at MATH Venture Partners. A successful exit is a dream for many founders, but it often seems like a black box or a game of chance. So how do you bake an exit strategy into your business from day one, whether it’s an acquisition/selling your startup, a merger, an IPO, or something else? In this session, Mark and Mert shar...
Jun 10, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI and Brian Ascher, Partner at Venrock dive into the top themes driving startup funding and how founders should think about raising capital in this market. Brian has had a successful career investing across unicorns, exits, and IPOs and has been named to the Forbes Midas List multiple times. Specifically, Brian dives into: 5:04 - What Brian looks for in founders when he invests 14:40 - What's driving decision making in VC today,...
Jun 06, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Vishal Sunak, Co-Founder and CEO at LinkSquares. LinkSquares has grown 1,000% in two years, with 400+ brands including Fitbit and Twilio as customers. The company was recently placed No. 253 on the annual Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America. Fresh off their $100M Series C funding at an $800M valuation, Vishal joins us to share the founders’ perspective of scaling a company to $10M ARR in...
Jun 01, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Ep 49•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI features a fireside chat between Harj Taggar , Partner at Y Combinator , and Alda Leu Dennis, General Partner at Initialized Capital from the in-person Traction Conference. Previously, Harj was a Co-founder and CEO at Triplebyte and Co-founder and President at Auctomatic. Harj was also the first seed investor in a number of unicorns including Instacart, Coinbase, Rippling, and Opendoor. In this episode, Harj dives into: 1:26 -...
May 31, 2022•21 min•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Karen Peacock, CEO at Intercom which helps more than 25,000 companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and Shopify to engage and support their customers and prospects. Intercom has been named one of the top 100 private cloud companies globally by Forbes for five years in a row. Before joining Intercom, Karen served as the Senior Vice President of Small Business at Intuit, where she helped build one of the world’s largest ...
May 27, 2022•23 min•Ep 47•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Gokul Rajaram , CxO at DoorDash , Board member at Coinbase and Pinterest, and an angel investor in over 100 companies with more than 40 exits and unicorns. With massive shifts and uncertainty in the markets right now, the default for most companies is to work on a defensive plan to get through it all. Whilst defensive strategies might help a company survive, thriving is a different matter. To exit this current climate...
May 25, 2022•58 min•Ep 46•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Byron Deeter , Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners . With massive shifts and uncertainty in the markets right now, founders, CEOs, CFOs, and board members alike want to know what the new rules are to play by. In this episode join Byron for a deep dive on what's going on in Venture Capital and how you can build a cloud unicorn in the current climate. Byron started as a SaaS CEO and has invested in probably more SaaS I...
May 18, 2022•57 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Cristina Cordova, Partner at First Round Capital. Partnerships are one of the most effective forms of marketing, but one of the most difficult to predict and scale. In this session, Cristina pulls from across her decade-long career running partnerships at Stripe and Notion to share the inside scoop on deals that had an unexpected outsized impact — as well as the ones that went sideways. Specifically, Cristina discusse...
May 17, 2022•54 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI features a fireside chat between Michael Pryor, Cofounder at Trello and Frederic Lardinois from TechCrunch at Traction Conf. When Atlassian acquired Trello for $425 Million in 2017, the product had nearly 20 million users, all through word-of-mouth. In this session, Michael shares his journey building Trello from idea to exit and discusses how to build products that everyone loves. Specifically, Michael covers: 1:32 - Coming u...
May 11, 2022•29 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Alok Tyagi, CEO at Boast.AI. You raised a big round of funding and hired a pedigreed big company CTO but now, a few months in, you’re concerned that the team is not shipping as fast as they used to. Startups are built in stages, from idea to product-market fit and scale. The kind of product and engineering playbook you implement for your stage will make all the difference between hypergrowth and missing the boat. Alok...
May 09, 2022•53 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Patrick Malatack, Partner at Matrix Partners and Kyle Poyar, Partner at OpenView. Is the end of subscription pricing near? Research from OpenView states that companies with usage-based pricing grow 38% faster... Of the IPOs over the last three years, seven out of nine that had the best net dollar retention all have a usage-based model. Welcome to a new era of software buying, where customers pay for the value they rec...
May 05, 2022•51 min•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Matt Epstein , Chief Marketing Officer at Rippling . Not many CMOs have grown a company from $0 to billion dollar valuation in record time. Matt has done it twice. Matt was employee #1 at Zenefits, where he created a leading HR brand and helped grow the company from $0 to $65M ARR. Today he leads Marketing at HR unicorn Rippling, where he's taken big bets. In this session, Matt shares his tips for driving major impact...
May 02, 2022•46 min•Ep 40•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI features a panel he moderated at the recent SaaStr Annual Conference with the founders of Expensify, Coda, LaunchDarkly, and SaaStr. Panelists: Shishir Mehrotra, Co-Founder and CEO, Coda Edith Harbaugh, Co-Founder and CEO, LaunchDarkly David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify Jason Lemkin, Founder and CEO, SaaStr You'll hear about the highs and lows of fundraising, working with a VC board, and real talk about what it really i...
Apr 27, 2022•49 min•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI features a fireside chat between Matt Mickiewicz , Co-founder of 99designs, Hired, SitePoint, and Flippa, and Andy McLoughlin Partner at Uncork Capital from the IRL Traction Conference. Matt shares his secrets to building disruptive multibillion-dollar marketplaces. Specifically, he covers: 1:19 - Back story on how he got into doing some of the most popular marketplaces of the last decade 2:25 - Interacting with professionals ...
Apr 25, 2022•20 min•Ep 38•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Matt Hulett , CEO and President at PetMeds , and Author of Unlock: 5 Questions to Unleash Your Company's Hidden Power. Previously, Matt was the President of Expedia and Rosetta Stone. Whether you're starting a new business or bringing an existing one to the next level, it can be daunting. Instead of wasting months and large sums of money on an extensive strategic planning process, join Matt as he walks through his fiv...
Apr 21, 2022•51 min•Ep 37•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Gina Gotthilf, Co-Founder at Latitud. PR can be a game-changer but for many startups, PR begins and ends with receiving a nod from TechCrunch. While TechCrunch is a great publication (and a mention from it is no small feat), there’s a lot more that goes into a winning PR strategy. Gina shares how you can use PR tactics with no budget to grow your business. Previously, Gina led growth at Duolingo, where she helped grow...
Apr 21, 2022•51 min•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes John S. Kim, Co-Founder and CEO of Sendbird. Sendbird is the world's no.1 chat API, serving over 100M monthly chat users across leading companies such as Reddit, Delivery Hero, Yahoo!, Rakuten, Paytm, Accolade, Livongo, and DHL. John shares the four techniques that enabled his company to become a billion-dollar company at breakneck speed. Specifically, John covers: 2:37 - Career pivots from software engineer to gamer ...
Apr 15, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep 35•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Annie Pearl, Chief Product Officer at Calendly. As more and more enterprises put employees in the driver’s seat to pick the right tools for their organizations, product leaders have put more emphasis than ever on end-to-end users. With everything from pricing to packaging being looked over very deliberately, will the final product frustrate those users or delight them? Annie shares insights on how to build and drive p...
Apr 11, 2022•1 hr•Ep 34•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Mark Roberge, Managing Director at Stage 2 Capital. Previously, Mark was the CRO at HubSpot seeing it from the earliest stages through post-IPO. “When to scale?” and “How fast?” are two mission-critical questions for start-ups, yet most entrepreneurs lack a rigorous approach to answering them. After peeking inside the go-to-market machinery of hundreds of start-ups over the last decade, Mark Roberge shares a scientifi...
Apr 07, 2022•59 min•Ep 33•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI features a talk by Sarah Tavel, General Partner at Benchmark from the IRL Traction Conference in Vancouver. Sarah started her career at Bessemer Venture Partners, and invested in Pinterest when it was a small five person company with about 30,000 registered users. She loved the company so much that she joined Pinterest to become their first product manager. Sarah led product at Pinterest through a period of hyper-growth, and w...
Apr 04, 2022•19 min•Ep 32•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Oji Udezue, Product Lead at Twitter (and former CPO at Calendly) and Michael Litt, Co-Founder and CEO at Vidyard. The most successful IPOs and fastest-growing private companies of the past decade all started with a freemium, self-service product. Zoom, Atlassian, Slack, Dropbox are just a few. But building a freemium, self-service product when you already have a successful enterprise business can seem like a daunting ...
Mar 30, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep 31•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Jason Lemkin, Founder at SaaStr, and Justin Kan, Co-Founder at Fractal.is . Justin co-founded Kiko Software, a Web 2.0 calendar that pre-dated Google Calendar by four years; Justin.tv, a lifecasting platform; Twitch, a live streaming platform for esports, music, and other creatives that was acquired by Amazon for almost $1 billion. More recent roles include Partner and GM at Y Combinator and CEO of Atrium, a software-...
Mar 29, 2022•30 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Matt Harris, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures. Want the key to unlocking the next unicorn? Today, more and more companies are embedding finance (payments, lending, insurance, etc.) into their products — not only to drive growth and revenue but also to stay competitive. Starbucks has the second most used payments application in the United States and they’re not a bank. Analysts estimate Shopify’s payments revenue to gr...
Mar 23, 2022•57 min•Ep 29•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, I welcome Wade Foster, Co-Founder & CEO at Zapier. This episode is moderated by Arjun Chopra, Partner at Floodgate VC.. Before he was Zapier’s CEO, Wade played saxophone in a blues and jazz quartet. Started as a side project in 2011, today Zapier boasts more than $100 million in revenue & more than 3 million users. All this with ONLY a $1.2 million seed round in 2012. In this session, Wade shares his top secrets in taking Zapier from a side project to a u...
Mar 21, 2022•22 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Patrick Lor, Managing Partner at Panache Ventures. Patrick joins us to share the top themes driving startup funding and how founders should think about fundraising in this market. Specifically, Patrick discusses: 1:17- A walk through Patrick's journey 4:12 - How should founders think about fundraising and valuations? 13:08 - How should founders approach their funding round and relationships? 19:39 - How do startup fou...
Mar 16, 2022•53 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Kipp Bodnar, CMO at HubSpot. Today’s most innovative companies will have a media company embedded in them - that’s what Kipp believes. HubSpot, Salesforce, Amex, and Adobe are a few companies that have leveraged this strategy to drive multibillion-dollar outcomes. Kipp oversees all demand generation activity worldwide, building out the EMEA and APAC marketing teams, and managing HubSpot’s field marketing, localization...
Mar 14, 2022•47 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Greg Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of Thinkific. With over 400+ employees and 10M+ students, tech unicorn Thinkific brings the incredible power of education and business to entrepreneurs across the globe. Greg shares his lessons learned from building Thinkific from 0 to IPO through navigating many hard fought battles. Specifically, Greg shares: 5:12 - Finding early customers and product-market fit 13:31 - How customer acq...
Mar 09, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast 
