Grit

Guest: Noam Bardin, founder of Post News One of the “aha” moments that could sway a dubious Waze user, recalls former CEO Noam Bardin, was navigating around “all those idiots sitting in traffic... and you’re like, ‘I’m a genius.’” Now, at the social news app Post, Noam says the “aha” is avoiding partisan gridlock and paywalls. Social incumbents boost engagement by making users angry, while Post ju...

Guest: Bipul Sinha, co-founder and CEO of Rubrik When Bipul Sinha graduated from the Indian Insitute of Technology and came to America to work in tech, his mother told him: Don’t start a company. His ambitious father was a failed pharma entrepreneur, and Bipul was content for most of a decade to hold a steady job at Oracle. But in his early 30s, he began to shed his risk aversion, pursuing a part-...

Guest: Ted Purcell, CRO of Tealium The biggest difference between small companies and big companies, says Tealium CRO Ted Purcell, is that at untested early-stage firms, you have to convince workers “to truly believe in what they believe... It’s not just ‘do this’ or ‘do that.’” To unlock high performers, Ted explains, you need to give them a “religious level” of belief in the company and the valu...

Guest: Jay Parikh, CEO of Lacework Jay Parikh describes himself as a “stickler” for meetings that start and end on time, and holds himself to the same expectations as his workers. “It’s just really important as a leader to set the standard for how everybody else should be respected,” the Lacework CEO says. “Too often in our industry, executives think that they can show up late, hold a meeting late...

Guest: Dave McJannet, CEO of HashiCorp To scale a company effectively, says HashiCorp CEO Dave McJannet, you will have to make something like 10 decisions every single day. “There’s generally one that really needs to be right, but there are eight that if you get them wrong, you will cause real damage to yourself,” he says. “It won’t be fatal, and a lot of times, it’s cultural damage.” Sometimes, h...

Guest: Robert Chatwani, President and General Manager of Growth at DocuSign Robert Chatwani’s first reinvention was in his early 20s, when he left McKinsey & Company to start a people-powered commerce startup called MonkeyBin. And in the ensuing decades, his entrepreneurial energy hasn’t slowed down, with hops to eBay, Spring, Atlassian, and now DocuSign, where he is the President and General...

Guest: Ariel Cohen, CEO and co-founder of Navan As a business travel-focused startup, Navan (previously known as TripActions) was heavily impacted by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020; after laying off 24% of the staff, CEO Ariel Cohen says he became a “wartime CEO,” spending three months in “complete denial and just executing.” By June, employees were leaving and he was depressed — but he still be...

Guest: Seth Dallaire, CRO at Walmart When Seth Dallaire was approached by Walmart about joining their team as CRO, he had one question: Are they serious? Seth knew that Walmart wanted him for his digital experience, having worked at Instacart and Amazon, but he also knew that building alternative revenue streams at a traditional retailer could be an uphill battle. “I knew I was gonna have to [figh...

Guest: Matt Mochary, CEO of Mochary Method Matt Mochary was only 31 when he sold the company he co-founded, Totality, to Verizon, “and I made enough money that that was it,” he recalls. “I didn’t have to make more money anymore.” Instead, he decided to pursue projects that in one way or another would help other people, including a documentary about the slums of Rio de Janeiro and a program to trai...

Guest: Shoaib Makani, CEO of Motive “When we fail,” says Shoaib Makani, “it is because we have not understood the customer problem deeply and allowed them to guide us.” This wisdom is hard-won: Motive’s first product, an app for fleet management of trucks, idled for four years before becoming a runaway success story. Emboldened by this, the CEO tried to make an orthogonal push into all kinds of fr...

Guest: Tom Hale, CEO of Oura When he was growing up, Tom Hale’s family had pretty ordinary dinner-table conversations: What happened today, how was school, etc. But every day after dinner, Tom and his father would play backgammon, an experience that indirectly taught him a lot about business. Now the CEO of wearable health company Oura, he recalls that the game helped him understand risk-taking, s...

Guest: Rachel Pike, COO at Modern Treasury Payment operations startup Modern Treasury is not afraid to do things in “our own weird way,” says COO Rachel Pike. Its values statement is a 150 word essay, it has gone viral by writing about nerdy ACH payments minutiae, and it has an unusual rule for quarterly internal reviews: No slides. Instead, departments have to write one to two page essay, which a...

Guest: Ashley Kramer, CMO & CSO of GitLab One day, when Ashley Kramer was an SVP at Alteryx, one of her direct reports hit her with a dose of reality: “She said, ‘I think you are trying to put me on a path to be you, and to have your job. I don’t want any of that.’” Now the CMO and CSO of GitLab, Kramer — who has been a perfectionist since childhood — used to hold her team to the same high bar...

Guest: Jen Vescio, Chief Business Development Officer at Uber and founder of Awestruck Ventures If you were to look at Jen Vescio’s calendar, it might look like a pack of Skittles: Every single one of her meetings is color-coded according to the Insights Color Focus system, which assigns the colors red, blue, yellow, and green based on what methods they emphasize in their work. As the chief busine...

Guest: Nikesh Arora, CEO and Chairman of Palo Alto Networks Nikesh Arora has been in the C-Suite for more than two decades, including a 10-year stint as Google’s chief business officer and — most recently — five years as Palo Alto Networks’ CEO. But the COVID-19 pandemic made him radically reconsider the gap between the executive floor and the rest of the company. “There was a tremendous amount of...

Guests: Alex Smith and Shaun Livingston, former players for the San Francisco 49ers and Golden State Warriors “I just thought, the best of my life is behind me.” That’s what former NFL quarterback Alex Smith recalls of a devastating leg fracture in 2018 that threatened to end his football career forever. Former NBA guard Shaun Livingston suffered a similar injury early in his career, and both men...

Guest: Andre Iguodala, forward for the Golden State Warriors The average professional basketball career lasts around four years. By the first time Andre Iguodala came to play for the Golden State Warriors, in 2013, he was already on year 10 in the NBA. “All I wanted to do was get somewhere where I just truly enjoy going to work every day,” he says. And on his podcast with Evan Turner, Point Forwar...

Guest: Al Gore, Former Vice President and chairman of The Climate Reality Project Al Gore has been talking about all kinds of renewable energy for decades. The former U.S. Vice President, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and star of An Inconvenient Truth says it’s “thrilling” to see things like wind power and sustainable forestry becoming the norm. But as humanity continues its struggle against the clima...

Guest: Giancarlo “GC” Lionetti, CRO of Zapier “I live in a constant state of paranoia,” says Zapier CRO Giancarlo “GC” Lionetti, “which I guess is healthy and unhealthy.” A lifelong hard worker who shows up early and stays late, GC could have kept his job at team collaboration company Atlassian, which he joined before the company even offered stock options to employees. But his hunger for new expe...

Guest: Claire Hughes Johnson, author of Scaling People and Corporate Officer at Stripe Former Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson’s new book, Scaling People , is not your typical business book: Informed by her experience scaling one of the most valuable private companies in the world, it’s a tactical reference manual, “almost like a textbook,” aimed at helping managers wrestling with a variety of pro...

Guest: Rania Succar, CEO of Intuit Mailchimp Ten years out of college, and with two advanced degrees under her belt, Rania Succar knew she wanted to be an operator. Taking a job at Google taught her a lot, but she chafed under the limitations imposed on her control and personal impact. At Intuit, she finally found what she had been searching for: “We really do have a structure that's set up to giv...

Guest: Lesley Young, CRO of Gem Lesley Young’s favorite book is “The Obstacle Is The Way,” in which Ryan Holiday argues that the process of working hard to achieve something is more important than the achievement itself. When you find yourself in a position of leadership, the Gem CRO says, “you realize there’s a lot of wisdom that you’ve gained in those experiences that you’ve had.” One of her pas...

Guest: Javier Molina, CRO of Starburst Starburst CRO Javier Molina’s peers, former colleagues, and even his wife often tell him the same thing: He’s difficult to read.  That doesn’t mean he’s not listening, though. In fact, he’s focusing on many different things such as speech patterns, the words being used, and the priority of those words while simultaneously keeping a pulse on social cues as wel...

All of Dennis Lyandres’ mentors — and even his parents — thought he was making a mistake when he joined Procore in 2014. At the time, he was working at the “it” company in Silicon Valley, Cloudera, and the startup was more than 10 years old without any major wins under its belt. But he knew someone “was gonna build a massive company” in construction software, and he found out that Procore’s team w...

In the middle of the Great Recession, Thomas Dohmke quit a stable job at a good company because “I wanted to build stuff again.” Specifically, he was inspired by the release of the first software development kit for iOS, and wanted to be part of the mobile revolution. Two companies later and halfway around the world, he is the CEO of software development powerhouse Github and on the precipice of a...