Owner Mode

Three corporate executives left high-paying careers, ran multi-year acquisition searches, and now run the companies they bought. Mitch Harris, Mario Antwine, and Rock Irvin sit down for an unfiltered account of what the acquisition path actually looks like. The trigger for Mario was a Fortune 500 CFO telling him his exact career track to his face. He went on to self-fund a contact center business...

Dave Salvant left JPMorgan. Songe LaRon left a Yale Law partner track at Skadden Arps. Neither could code. Together they built Squire, the barbershop technology platform, to a $750 million valuation. In this Owner Mode conversation, the two co-founders walk through the long game. They explain the two different frameworks that got them to leave stable, high-status careers: Songe's asymmetry of risk...

Samir Goel ran a $500M business unit at LinkedIn while building Esusu on nights and weekends. Esusu is now a $1.2 billion fintech that turns rent payments into credit for 12 million renters across all 50 states. In this Owner Mode conversation, Samir breaks down the full arc. He explains the insight at the core of the company, that rent is the most consistent monthly payment in tens of millions of...

Arlan Hamilton was homeless until September 2015, the year she started building Backstage Capital. She had no money and no connections, just a Twitter account and a plan to become the first call any underestimated founder made when they started a company. In this Owner Mode conversation, she traces how she turned a point of view into real leverage. She built the fund in public, tweeting the journe...

Chris Lyons has spent over fifteen years inside Andreessen Horowitz watching who actually gets access to private markets, and his answer is not the one most people expect. He founded a16z's Cultural Leadership Fund, the vehicle that brought cultural leaders like Nas, Kevin Durant, and Jada Pinkett Smith into early equity in companies like Coinbase, Airbnb, and Instagram before they went public, an...

Two kinds of people on this planet: earners and owners. Owner Mode is the series for high-earning professionals who've built real careers and income, only to discover they may be climbing the wrong mountain. Host Brandon William Jones, founder and CEO of Gravy Wealth, convenes luminaries like Mellody Hobson, top VC partners like a16z's Chris Lyons, and people building ownership on the side or all...