Founder Real Talk

Armon Dadgar is the Co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, a commercial open source company that provides the fundamental building blocks around infrastructure and automation that developers need to create scalable, secure, high-performance applications hosted in the cloud. Valued at over $5 billion and now with over 1,000 employees worldwide, HashiCorp started out life in 2010 as an open source project and since grown into the defacto standard for modern cloud-computing development. In this episode, which was recorded live at GGV’s annual Evolving Enterprise conference, we learn how Armon and his Co-founder, Mitchell Hashimoto, initially met, what it took to sell to the enterprise and how to hire the right people as a distributed company.

Mitchell Hashimoto is the Co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, the leader in multi-cloud infrastructure automation software. In this episode, which was recorded during a GGV live webinar, we learn how Mitchell and his cofounder, Armon Dadgar, built HashiCorp into a 1000-person company valued at over $5B—all with a very distributed team since day one. For companies suddenly managing remote workforces, or for startups just beginning the journey toward growth, how can you scale and succeed far into the future with a fully distributed team? HashiCorp’s experiences scaling into a global enterprise software powerhouse without opening the usual array of offices are especially valuable today, now that so many companies have gone remote almost overnight.

This is the fourth episode in the Founder Real Talk Israeli Entrepreneur Series, a group of 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. Netanel (Nati) Davidi and Uri Alter are two of the Co-founders of VDOO, the only automated device security solution that is integrated across the entire product lifecycle, and a GGV portfolio company. Nati and Uri have had quite the journey together. They first met in the Israeli military service in 1999 and went on to co-found Cyvera, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2014. Their mission didn’t stop there. In 2017, with co-founder Asaf Karas, they started VDOO, a company born out of one of the biggest shortfalls of IOT. In this episode, we

This is the third episode in the Founder Real Talk Israeli Entrepreneur Series, a group of 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. Shlomi Ben Haim is Co-Founder and CEO of JFrog, provider of the world’s first universal artifact management platform that ushered in a completely new era in DevOps. Founded in 2008, JFrog has become the “database of DevOps” used by over 6000 customers worldwide including Amazon, Cisco, and Netflix. In this episode, we learn how Shlomi’s 12 years in the Israeli Air Force influenced his startup mentality, how the JFrog team has scaled an open source company, and what it takes to expand globally.

This is the second episode in the Founder Real Talk Israeli Entrepreneur Series, a group of 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. Slavik Markovich is the Co-founder and CEO of Demisto, a leading Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platform that helps security teams accelerate incident response, standardize and scale processes, and learn from each incident while working together. Slavik sold Demisto to Palo Alto Networks in Feb 2019, less than four years after its founding, for over $560 million. Starting from his early days in the Israeli military, Slavik shares his thought process while walking us through his impressive journey. From founding his first compa

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 fastest-growing SaaS companies in the world, connecting people to processes while creating an environment of transparency in business. Before monday.com, he was part of Wix’s senior management team. Prior to that, he founded the online social game Save an Alien. Roy obtained a Bachelor of Science focused in Computer Science from the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC). In this episode, we learn how Roy and his Co-founder, Eran Zinman are scaling the fastest growing company in Israel. With over 100K customers, users

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 design students at Stanford’s d.school. In this episode, we learn how Sarah’s inclination to pick the uncertain path over the logical path eventually lead her to Lever. Having grown up in Birmingham Alabama where she was one of two nonwhite people in a high school of 800, Sarah’s commitment to diversity and inclusion runs deep. The Lever team has been a 50/50 gender ratio since 2016 and inclusion is ingrained in the company culture Sarah has built. Her message to operators who are hiring: “If you're not building a databas

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 from University of Texas (Austin), where he was a Graduate Fellow of CS. That didn’t stop him from founding the fastest growing startup in history in 2009. In 2014 (the companies 5th full year), Nutanix eclipsed 100 Million in revenue. In this episode, we learn that behind the rosy story, there were a few near death experiences for the company. Inspired by Apple’s playbook, Dheeraj applied simplicity and elegance to a “very nerdy, geeky thing called web scale architecture for data centers” (his words). Dheeraj engineered s

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 McGill University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was awarded the Dubliner Prize for Entrepreneurship.    In this episode, we learn why Michelle turned down a job at LinkedIn in June 2009 to pursue an idea that started as a school project with Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway at Harvard Business School and ultimately turned into Cloudflare. Among Michelle’s recommendations to founders is to think about cofounders as Venn diagrams in an effort to cover as much surface area as possible. She also encourage

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 Year. Under his leadership, Smartsheet was named Washington’s Best Workplace by the Puget Sound Business Journal, and Seattle’s Next Tech Titan by GeekWire.   In this episode, learn how Mark grew Smartsheet from a six-employee startup to a publicly traded company with over 1000 employees serving 82,000 customers. When Smartsheet started in 2006, productivity apps were not ubiquitous like they are today. How did Mark and his team convince investors and customers that Smartsheet was solving for what spreadsheets don’t do we

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 data. Augusto holds a B.S. in Economics from the Catholic University of Milan. He is the lead inventor on five U.S. patents and an angel investor in more than 10 startups. In this episode, we learn from Aghi how he and his Co-founder & CTO Marco Palladino decided to move to an open core model. Kong Inc. was born from the first API marketplace, previously known as Mashape. Today, Kong has 75k downloads for its open source API gateway and more than 40k community members. Aghi and Glenn discussed the changing face of the

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 from the University of Chicago and a BA in finance and LLB in Law from the IDC Herzliya in Israel. In this episode, we learn how Assaf and the team at Hippo are modernizing the $100 billion home insurance industry. Now at unicorn status, Hippo is using data to deliver better and cheaper insurance policies to homeowners. Assaf talks about the importance of having a co-founder that counters you on a psychological level and notes why he and his co-founder, Eyal Navon, align in values. More often than not, companies fail due

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 empowers female-led businesses to succeed. In this episode, we learn how Erica Brescia went from balancing a Y Combinator interview while caring for her then 2-week-old baby to growing Bitnami’s team with her Co-Founder, Daniel Lopez to about 100 people with little outside capital. Erica explains why taking her current role at Github felt like “coming home,” despite not being a developer. When she’s not helping scale Github’s product roadmap and global expansion, Erica is supporting the next wave of female founders at X

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 this episode, we learn how Kunal and his Co-Founder, Shivnath Babu, convinced top notch talent with cushy jobs to make sacrifices for a common vision at Unravel. He shares how Unravel has kept its cultural values in check while growing from 11 to 100+ employees across multiple continents. We learn why the “shout-out” Slack channel is the 4th most used Slack channel at Unravel and why the Unravel team spent 3 years defining product-market fit. Spoiler Alert: Kunal’s recommended reading is The Power of Habit: Why We Do

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 holds an M.B.A. from Stanford University and currently lives in the Bay Area. In this episode, we learn from Anne why face-to-face engagement with customers and prospects is critical and why we should stay in cross-functional pods for as long as possible. Anne encourages founders to hire inherently curious “evangelists” who are already passionate about your product. Pro tip from Anne: The quickest way to end internal debates about what should or shouldn’t be built is to listen to customers talk about their pain points.

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 such as Yahoo!, Yelp, and Evernote. Max is an engineer by training, serial entrepreneur, computer scientist, investor and philanthropist. In this Founder Real Talk / 996 crossover episode, we learn how Max used the guiding principle of HVF (Hard, Valuable, Fun) to found Affirm. Max talks about writing a pivotal note to self to crystalize what he wanted to accomplish and how the financial industry is ripe for disruption. This episode is co-hosted by Glenn Solomon and Hans Tung. [03:14] Why is and how is affirm hard, va

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 high growth company with customers the likes of Lyft Forbes and New Relic. Rich explains how Tray has leveraged London and SF offices to define and maintain a strong company culture and shares tips for founders who are fundraising. Episode Highlights: 01:43 How did you decide to come together with your co-founders and what problem were you guys trying to solve initially? 03:43 How and why did the vision for the company expand beyond just email? 07:01 In the beginning, did you raise very little capital by design or was a r

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 and how it balances open source communities and enterprise revenue models, Dave’s journey to becoming the CEO and his relationship with HashiCorp co-founders Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar, and the secret to selling software to large enterprises. Episode Highlights: 02:36: What’s it like to join a startup as a CEO when you’re not the founder? What are some of the challenges? 05:23: What made you think you were the right CEO for the CEO role at Hashicorp? 06:40: How to do split things up – between yourself and the t

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 building Eventbrite, Kevin co-founded Xoom, the money remittance business, in 2001, and he served as CEO until 2005. Zoom also had a successful IPO before being acquired in 2015 by PayPal for about a billion dollars. Kevin's been a very successful investor as well. Some of his most successful early stage investments include Airbnb, Pinterest, Trulia, Skybox Imaging and NewFront Insurance which we talk a bit about in this episode. Kevin was also a partner at Founders Fund. In this episode, we mainly talk about Kevin’s journ

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 a founding member of the executive management team of IBM Security Systems, a new division within IBM Software group that was created on the heels of the Q1 Labs acquisition. Formerly, he was Senior Vice President of Marketing and Channels at Q1 Labs. Before joining Q1 Labs, he served as Director of Marketing for endpoint security at Cisco Systems. Tom also served as VP of Marketing at Okena, Inc., where he helped pioneer the intrusion prevention market and led the company to its successful acquisition by Cisco.   1:36