Founder Real Talk

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 CEO, Caryn was responsible for planning and executing communications strategies for companies of every size, including Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce and VMware. Caryn was named to the board of directors of Zendesk in 2014. She is originally from New York City and holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University. Highlights from the episode: 2:29 What was the biggest challenge that you saw startups facing with respect to communications? What types of pain points did you see them encounter most frequently? 3:22 What should

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 with 20 years of experience in the music industry – spanning production, audio engineering, film scoring and live performance. Presently, he works extensively with technology partners, distribution partners, advertisers and investors to help shape the future of Pandora and personalized radio. Highlights from the episode: 1:57 How did being in a band prepare you for starting and running a company? 3:02 How did you motivate the team in a challenging fundraising environment? 5:40 How did you find conviction in the pro

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 at high growth startups. Elad Gil is an entrepreneur, operating executive, and investor or advisor to private companies such as Airbnb, Coinbase, Checkr, Gusto, Instacart, OpenDoor, Pinterest, Square, Stripe, Wish, and others. He co-founded and is the Chairman of Color Genomics, and was its CEO until December 2016. Before that, he was the VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter, where he also ran various product (Geo, Search) and other operational teams (M&A and corporate development). Elad joined Twitter via the acqu

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, where he worked closely with internet businesses across all stages and geographies, particularly within software and e-commerce. He's also worked as a software developer and company founder.  Will holds degrees in mathematics from Harvard University and law from Yale. 1:10 Tell us about your background and what led you to join Stripe as CFO 4:35 What made Stripe an interesting company to join and where do you think the company is headed? 7:33 What was it like to join a team with two well-known founders? 9:45 How

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 retailers including Federated, VF Corporation, Limited Brands/ Victoria's Secret and Thrillist Media Group. Grant realized that her passion was in supporting, creating and developing amazing brands and products and instantly fell in love with the entire process from concept to customer. While working with Victoria's Secret, she learned that the $13B lingerie category, in the US alone, was dominated by a single brand, with a single point of view, so Grant was inspired to create a completely new experience for the categor

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 followers, activity, and contributions. “Automation obsessed,” Mitchell solves problems with as much computer automation as possible. Highlights from the episode: 3:31 How did you get to where you are now? 5:30 How did you know when your hobby should be a company? 6:55 How did you find your co-founder? Why did you think a co-founder made sense? What are the positives and negatives of being best friends with your co-founder? 9:07 When you left your job, what was your vision for the company and how has it changed to your vi

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 provides training, mentorship, network and more. Prior to joining GGV, Jen was a Talent Partner at Highland Capital Partners and a leader on the executive search team at Facebook. Jen’s career has been focused on team building in fast growing companies. Before Facebook, Jen was a Director at San Francisco-based Riviera Partners, an executive search firm focused on recruiting engineering and product leadership for fast growing venture-backed technology companies, and also worked with SPMB, a technology focused talent sea

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 cyber-related positions at the Department of Defense and NSA, as a member of the DoD’s Incident Response and Red Team and as a Senior Computer Network Exploitation and Vulnerability Analyst at the National Security Agency. He received multiple accolades for classified work conducted while at the NSA, where his focus was supporting counterterrorism-related intelligence operations. Jay was a former member of the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th President. He received a BS in Computer Science with a focus on Inf

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 enterprise application and infrastructure markets. Prior to Accel, Nick served as Chief Executive Officer of LiveOffice, where he led the company’s profitable growth to $25 MM in revenue and successful sale to Symantec. During college in the mid 1990s, Nick co-founded his first business, a venture-funded online golf retailer called Chipshot.com that became one of the top 20 online retailers of its time. Nick holds a Bachelor's degree in Biochemistry and a Master's degree in Computer Science from Harvard University. Highligh

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-backed software company in Silicon Valley, and sales and management positions at Southwestern, Inc., Dale Carnegie and Bank of America. With an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an undergraduate degree from Stanford University, Kelly has also spent time at strategic consulting firms Bain & Company and McKinsey & Company, helping executives solve strategic questions about organizational structures, channel conflict, operations, pricing and international expansion. Highlights: 3:47

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 company acquired by Trulia.com in 2011. At Trulia, Eric led location, social, and consumer product development. Eric also co-founded RentAdvisor.com, which was later acquired by Apartment List, and runs a real estate fund that has invested in over 100 multi-family units. Eric has been an investor and advisor to a number of startups and social enterprises including Watsi, CareMessage, and Color Genomics.

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 of experience in product, engineering and marketing with both consumer and enterprise startups. She was Product Director at TripIt, where she launched TripIt for Business and ExpenseIt. She was Product Manager at Vignette, a global content management company. She holds two patents in deployment. She moderated the lean startup list. Edith earned a BS, Engineering from Harvey Mudd College and a degree in Economics from Pomona College. She enjoys trail running distances up to 100 miles, and co-hosts “To Be Continuous,” a p

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 delivering award-winning products. Under his leadership since 2011, AlienVault has become one of the fastest growing security vendors in the industry with thousands of customers and partners around the world. Prior to AlienVault, he served as VP of the Enterprise Security Products division at HP. At HP he led the Fortify and SPI Dynamics business units after the successful acquisition of Fortify by HP in September 2010. Barmak was the 10th employee at Fortify and as Chief Products Officer, lead the build-out and expansion of th

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 expand access to funding for small businesses, enabling them to grow and achieve their goals. As People Lead of Square, she also oversees all leadership, recruiting and people programs to drive the growth and culture of Square. Prior to Square, Jackie was the Chief Development Officer for Yahoo and she served on the Board of Directors of Alibaba Group. She spent a decade prior to Yahoo leading the US Media Group at Apax Partners, a global private equity firm with $40Bn in assets, and before that she spent seven years at Gold

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 company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014 and currently helps more than 125,000 organizations around the world better help, engage with and understand their customers. Originally from Copenhagen, Denmark, he is a published author of the book Startupland, a father of three, and a lover of handcrafted cocktails.

In this episode, Stewart tells Slack’s origin story and the hard decisions it took to get there, elaborating on when to follow your dreams and when to "stop banging your head into the ground until you bleed out."Stewart Butterfield is the co-founder and CEO of Slack. Over the last 20 years, Stewart has built a distinguished career as a designer, entrepreneur, and technologist. He co-founded Flickr in 2003, and was its CEO through its acquisition by Yahoo!. Among many other honors, he was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine, one of BusinessWeek's Top 50 Leaders, featured on Vanity Fair’s New Establishment List, and was recognized as the 2015 Technology Innovator of the Year by the Wall Street Journal.

In this episode, Laura talks about her experience being a young CEO from a different country, how she built Shippo's culture from the top-down, and how her executive coach made her more like Steve Jobs. Laura Behrens Wu is the founder and CEO of Shippo. Shippo simplifies shipping for eCommerce companies by offering discounted shipping rates and a streamlined solution across all different shipping providers. It’s Amazon-level shipping for all e-commerce stores. Laura, featured in Forbes 30 under 30 in 2017, runs a 65 person team based in San Francisco.

In this episode, Russ tells the stories of life as a serial entrepreneur, including knowing when to pivot…or not, how to build delightful company culture, and how to be unapologetic about work-life balance. Russ Fradin is the founder and CEO Dynamic Signal, the leading employee communications & engagement platform worldwide. Russ is a digital media industry veteran with more than 15 years of experience in the online marketing world. He co-founded and was CEO of Adify, which was acquired by Cox in 2008, and he also co-founded SocialShield. Russ was also SVP of Business Development at Wine.com, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development at comScore, and was among the first employees at Flycast, which was acquired by CMGi in 2000. He is an active angel investor in the digital world and currently sits on a number of boards.

In this episode, Nate chats about how to get out of the “trough of sorrows” through finding product-market fit, growing a global marketplace, and thinking outside (or inside) the box on building a business.Nathan (Nate) Blecharczyk is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Airbnb. Nate also serves as Chairman of Airbnb China. Nate plays a leading role in driving key strategic initiatives across Airbnb’s global business. Previously he oversaw the creation of Airbnb’s engineering, data science, and performance marketing teams. Nate became an entrepreneur in his youth, running a business while he was in high school that sold to clients in more than 20 countries. He earned a degree in Computer Science from Harvard University and held several engineering positions before co-founding Airbnb. As a guest, Nate has stayed in hundreds of homes using Airbnb and he is also a host in San Francisco, where he lives with his family.

In this episode, Sarah chats about how to not ruin someone's day, or livelihood, the importance of staying ahead, and how leadership inspires change across an organization.Sarah Friar is CFO and Operations Lead at Square. Sarah joined Square in July 2012 from salesforce.com, where she served as SVP of Finance & Strategy. Prior to salesforce.com, she worked at Goldman Sachs for over 10 years, with experience in corporate finance, M&A, and equity research, and ultimately as lead software analyst and Business Unit Leader for Goldman Sachs' Technology Research Group. She previously worked for McKinsey in both London and South Africa. She holds a Masters of Engineering degree from Oxford University and an MBA from Stanford University. In addition to New Relic, Sarah sits on the Boards of ModelN, Walmart, and Spark, a nonprofit focused on changing the lives of at-risk middle schoolers through mentorship.