Startup Grind

Daniel Klausssen, Senior Director within the Innovation Strategy Department at Marriott International. Prior to joining Marriott, Daniel led the complete re-development of the Public Broadcasting Systems digital strategy including all of their mobile apps, streaming tools, and architecture. Prior to that he was a stay at home dad while consulting for startups after a career at legendary silicon va...

Jon Steinberg who at the time was the President and COO of Buzzfeed. Following Buzzfeed he became CEO of the US version of the Daily Mail Online and a Board Member of Bustle. He is an Ex-Googler previously as a Strategic Partner Development Manager on Google’s SMB Partnerships team. Prior to Google, Jon was the Director of Business Development at Majestic Research and the founder of  iBuilding , a...

Nigel Morris, co-founder of the Capital One Financial Corporation. Nigel started Capital One with the simple idea of dropping annual fee’s for credit cards and instead target different credit cards to specific segments of the population. Now it's a publicly traded company with over $20 Billion in revenues headquartered in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. Nigel is now the managing partner of  QED Investor...

Jim Bankoff.  Jim is CEO and Chairman of Vox Media, a global internet media company that currently has three major editorial brands,  SB Nation ,  The Verge , and  Polygon , a video-gaming site. SB Nation, its sports brand, boasts over 30mm users per month across 300 individually branded, fan-centric sports communities, each covering a specific professional or college team, league or sport. In Nov...

Jennifer Dulski President & COO of the social advocacy platform Change.org. An early Yahoo! employee, Jennifer led one of the company's 6 Business units, serving as group VP and general manager of local and commerce. In 2007, Jennifer left Yahoo! to become co-founder and CEO of The Dealmap, a location-based deals site that Google acquired in 2011. She served as a senior executive at Google for two...

Tony Wheeler. When Tony and his wife arrived in Sydney in 1972 after a six month trip through Asia from Europe toward Australia, they decided to start Lonely Planet Publications to publish the story of their journey - Across Asia on the Cheap. From those humble beginnings, Lonely Planet Publications has grown to become the world’s largest independent guidebook publisher with more than 500 titles i...

United States Congresswoman Suzan DelBene. Prior to her election as the representative for Washington’s 1st congressional district in 2012, Suzan held various tech exec roles including as the Co-Founder and VP of Drugstore.com which sold to Walgreens for $409M. Suzan has also served as the CEO of Nimble Technology and as Microsofts VP of Mobile Communications. Earlier in her career at Microsoft, S...

Daehee Park & JT Marino. The two founded Tuft & Needle with the idea that it is possible to create high quality products and charge a fair price to customers.  Launched in 2012 by two software engineers, Tuft & Needle was the first vertically integrated ecommerce mattress company to focus on selling one perfect product: an unbeatable mattress at an unbeatable price. With a background in ecommerce...

Matt Barrie is an Australian technology entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Freelancer.com: the world's leading freelancing and crowd-sourcing marketplace and Eight-time Webby-award winner. Matt was named Entrepreneur of the Year in 2011 by BRW and in 2014 he was named the most influential person in technology in Australia by Smart Company.  After graduating at Stanford University Matt worked as a ve...

Today we have a great episode with the co-founder of Genius, formerly rap genius Mahbod Moghadam whose current project is helping to run everipedia, the encyclopedia for people and more. in 2014 Genius had raised a total of 56.9 million from investors such as Andressen Horowitz. Moghadam and his co-founder came up with the idea for Rap Genius in the summer of 2009 when Lehman asked Moghadam about...

Juan Diego Calle the Founder of the .CO domain business. Prior to founding .CO which was  by Neustar, Inc. in April of 2014, while at the university of Miami, Juan Diego launched and ran  TeRespondo.com , a performance-based advertising network, which he sold to Yahoo in 2005.    Juan Diego also currently serves as the chairman of STRAAT, a company builder software based in Miami, Florida. Juan Di...

Jason joined Maveron in 2007 and is now a partner focused on investing in education, e-commerce and web-enabled consumer businesses. He is involved with the firm's investments in General Assembly, Common, TrueFacet, Julep, Everlane, CourseHero, Dolls Kill and Lively.  Prior to joining Maveron, Jason served as senior director of strategic operations for Career Education Corp., where he co-founded a...

Adam Nash, CEO of Wealth Front. As president and CEO of Wealthfront, Adam has built the company around a centralized mission to always put the client first and change the bad practices that plague the financial services industry. Adam joined Wealthfront from Greylock Partners, where he was an Executive-in-Residence. Prior to Greylock, he was VP of Product Management at LinkedIn, where he built the...

Tony Xu founded Door Dash as a local delivery service for Stanford students and participated in the Y Combinator incubator with his co founders while polishing the business model. Prior to co-founding Door Dash, tony worked in product at Square, led special projects for the CEO and CFO at eBay, and began his career at McKinsey and Company. He holds a B.S. with High Honors in Industrial Engineering...

William Pence who is the CTO of AOL. As the CTO of AOL William leads all aspects of AOL’s global technology strategy, platform development, and external technology partnerships. He also plays a key leadership role in the overall strategy and direction of AOL.  Before joining AOL, William served as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of WebMD from 2007 to 2014 as well as Chief Ope...

Barry Nalebuff is the Milton Steinbach Professor of Economics and Management at the Yale School of Management. A graduate of MIT, a Rhodes Scholar and Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, Nalebuff earned his doctorate at Oxford University. In addition to founding Honest Tea, Professor Nalebuff also serves on the board of Nationwide Insurance. An expert on game theory, Barry has written...

Mike Cassidy who is currently a vice president at Google and Project leader on Google x’s project loon which is an attempt to blanket the globe in wireless connectivity using hot air balloons. Before joining google Mike was a serial entrepreneur founding companies like rubber, xfire, direct hit, and stylus innovation.  Mike has a BS/MS in Aerospace Engineering from MIT and graduated from the Harva...

Christine Tsai, the founding partner of 500 Startups, one of the worlds most active, well known, and internationally focused incubators. Tsai has invested in over 150 companies including Ipsy, Sprig, Bombfell, and Storefront, and also oversees the accelerator and distribution teams at 500. Prior to 500 Christine was in product marketing at Google and YouTube for many years. She worked on Developer...

Sarah Wood the founder of the video ad tech startup Unruly. Sarah co-founded Unruly in 2010 and it was named the UK’s second fastest growing tech companies in 2012. Unruly’s core mission is to deliver the most awesome social video campaigns on the planet. They are currently the leading programmatic platform for social video advertising, powered by their proprietary supply side mobile distribution...

Paul Singh who is a former partner at 500 Startups and currently the director of the 1776 incubator co-working space in Washington DC. previously Paul was the founder of Disruption Corporation which provided tools, research and advisory services to corporations, angel investors and venture capital firms. Paul is also an investor via the Crystal Tech Fund. Previously, he was a Partner at 500 Startu...

Steve is one of America’s best-known and most accomplished entrepreneurs and a pioneer in making the Internet part of everyday life. He currently serves as Chairman and CEO of  Revolution LLC , a Washington, D.C.- based investment firm he co-founded in 2005, where he partners with visionary entrepreneurs to build significant “built to last” new businesses. The mission is to establish Revolution as...

Gagan Biyani is CEO and co-founder of Sprig, whose mission it is to make eating well simple. Open your phone when you're hungry, tap a button and get a healthy meal delivered in 15 minutes. Sprig has raised $57M from Greylock Partners and Social Capital Partnership and is available in San Francisco, Chicago and Palo Alto. Prior to founding Sprig, he was a Growth Advisor for Lyft where he led suppl...

Bob is the co-author of the startup owners manual, a manual for starting up companies that aims at preventing many of the cardinal startup sins many founders make. together along with steve blank, the two spent 2 years conceiving, outlining, drafting, rewriting, and revising the global bestseller. A serial entrepreneur, bob left a lucrative broadcasting job at the age of 22 because the had a passi...

Hey there and welcome to Monday’s episode of the startup grind podcast. Today we have an awesome chat with the legendary Guy Kawasaki. Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva, trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation, and executive fellow at the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley. Formerly, he was an advisor to the Motorola business unit of Google and Chief evangelist of Apple. He is the au...

Hey there and welcome to wednesday’s episode of the startup grind podcast. Today we have a great chat with Adam Lashinsky, author of the wildly popular and revealing book "inside apple". Adam is the senior editor at large for fortune covering silicon valley and wall street. He’s been on the magazines staff since 2001. Prior to that he worked at the Street.com and the san jose mercury news. He is a...