Brick by Brick

Amy Fox is the COO and co-founder of ATH Media and the All the Hacks podcast. A former tech operator, she was employee number five at Zimride (which became Lyft), helping the company grow from a seed-stage startup to a post-IPO company. In this episode, she shares insights into Lyft's early days, startup culture, and the importance of building strong team relationships. In this episode, we talk ab...

Raj Chopra is the Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer for Security Products at Cisco. With a computer science background and extensive enterprise software experience, Raj has been a key player in transforming security products across multiple platform shifts, including cloud and AI. In this episode, Raj shares insights from his journey through enterprise software, highlighting his expe...

Shreyans Bhansali is a serial entrepreneur who was employee #1 at Venmo, co-founded Socratic (acquired by Google), and is currently building Maven. He studied computer science and economics at UPenn before diving into the startup world. In this episode, we talk about : - Shreyans first foray into tech in middle school - Why he left his stable consulting job to join Venmo as employee #1 - The early...

Sid Sridhar is Head of Business at Wave, a leading fintech company in Africa. Prior to Wave, Sid had stints at companies like Google, Uber, and Sendwave, and has the unique distinction of being Venmo user number 5! Through these experiences, he gained deep expertise in international payments, finance, and fintech broadly. Sid shares his journey into startups, the lessons he's learned from building...

Uma Chingunde is a seasoned engineering leader. She was previously the VP of Engineering at Render and engineering leader at Stripe and started her career at VMware. In this episode, Uma shares her advice on how to balance uptime and reliability with feature release cadence, staying level-headed through engineering incidents, and how startups that are selling to the engineering function should thi...

Justin Roberts has over 20 years of experience selling software at companies like Salesforce, Box, Lever, and SignalFX. He also advises and coaches founders, sales executives, and account executives on how to become better sellers. In this episode, we cover: • Justin's first job at Salesforce and how it launched his startup career • Justin's decision to leave Salesforce and join the early...

Christy Augustine is the Chief Operating Officer at Bloomreach, a global company that provides AI-powered e-commerce personalization products. Christy was previously at Bain, Hewlett Packard, and Walmart.com. In this episode, Christy discusses her career journey from engineering to business strategy, her experience joining and growing Bloomreach over the past decade, and advice for early career pr...

Mike Smith is the Co-founder and General Partner at Footwork, an early-stage venture fund. Mike also happens to be one of the most highly regarded and skilled operators in and around commerce. Prior to getting into venture he was the President and COO at Stitch Fix, where he joined as employee number 4, and for over 10 years there held most of the senior roles at the company from COO to CFO to int...

Avanish Sahai is a former technology executive with experiences in product, marketing, and ecosystems. He has held leadership positions at both early-stage and established companies including Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Google Cloud. Avanish has served on the boards of tech companies HubSpot, Birdie.ai, and Scribe, as well as of non-profits World Affairs and BayBrazil. Born in India, raise...

In this episode of Brick by Brick, Rishi Taparia sits down with Tom White. After stints at Sandhill Markets, On Deck, and Google, Tom now writes, edits, researches, and ghostwrites professionally for a number of startup/F500 executives, VCs, and institutional fund managers. Past work includes writing The Observer Effect with Sriram Krishnan. He also advises and consults on web3, growth, storytelli...

In this episode of Brick by Brick, Arpan Punyani sits down with Ben Sabrin. Ben is a seasoned early sales leader at iconic enterprise infrastructure businesses such as JBoss, MongoDB, Rackspace among other startups. Ben is currently Head of Global Sales at Weaviate - the vector database company. In this episode, we cover - - What founders should look for in early-stage GTM talent? - His experience...

In this episode of Brick by Brick, Rishi Taparia sits down with Jared Fliesler, a seasoned operator who has held key roles at companies like Slide, Square, and Scribd. Jared shares his untraditional path into the startup world, the importance of storytelling as a leader, his philosophy on making the most of "mundane" tasks, and how to hire and fire well. He also discusses his own venture...

In this episode, Andrew Peterson, co-founder of Aviso Ventures, engages in an insightful conversation, sharing insights on the founding story of Signal Sciences, strategies for hiring and managing employees in early-stage startups, the importance of scaling a company while maintaining culture, and advice for founders and early employees in the startup ecosystem. The discussion also touches on the...

In this episode, our guest Aston Motes shares his experience as the first employee at Dropbox, sharing insights into the early days of the company's growth, decision-making processes, and challenges faced. We explore the importance of product-market fit, the dynamics of startup culture, the impact of talent and diversity in teams, and the transition from early employee to founder. Aston also s...

Brick by Brick is presented by Garuda Ventures ( https://garuda.vc ) Welcome to the Brick by Brick podcast, hosted by Rishi Taparia and Arpan Punyani, co-founders of Garuda Ventures. Garuda is a first-check pre-seed and seed venture firm backing ambitious B2B founders right when they’re getting started. We’ve both had the pleasure (and experienced the pain) of operating at early-stage companies, A...