Grit

Guests : Joe Thomas, CEO and co-founder of Loom; and Ilya Fushman, partner at Kleiner Perkins Loom CEO Joe Thomas had a lot of things to think about before he sold his company to Atlassian for $975 million: The impact an acquisition might have on the product, how to keep the Loom brand alive, the risk of remaining independent... but it wasn’t until after the deal was announced that he really under...

Guest : Rony Abovitz, founder & CEO of SynthBee SynthBee CEO Rony Abovitz grew up “really believing” in Star Wars and the idea that there could be benevolent, artificially intelligent beings like R2-D2 and C-3PO. “It wasn't a dystopian vision of the future,” he says. “It wasn't HAL from 2001.  It wasn't the Terminator. It wasn't Skynet.  It was this kind of friendly, empathetic, more utopian v...

Guest : Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO and co-founder of Klarna Living and working in Stockholm, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski thinks a lot about how he’s perceived in Silicon Valley: “I feel like here I am, I am the small, country cousin from Sweden.” And on top of that, he knew that someone like Sam Altman wouldn’t initially think of a European banking startup as an ideal partner for OpenAI —...

Guest : Kyle Hanslovan, CEO & co-founder of Huntress; and Ev Randle, partner at Kleiner Perkins Talk is cheap, says Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan: “I learned real early on that integrity is like one of the very few things, if not the only thing, you can't buy.” En route to Huntress’ current status as a $1.5 billion firm with $100 million in ARR, he took a long time to hire new execs, or partner...

Guest : Mark Fields, former president & CEO of Ford Motor Company and chairperson at Planview In 2005, Mark Fields was asked to run the Americas for the Ford Motor Company, a role he would serve in for 7 years, later becoming COO and then CEO. His wife and kids were used to relocating for Mark’s job, but had just put down roots in Florida. He told them that this time, they should stay put — he...

Guest : Jack Conte, CEO & co-founder of Patreon For many YouTube video creators, getting millions of views on your videos may seem like the goal. But when Jack Conte and his wife Nataly Dawn became YouTube stars through their band Pomplamoose, they didn’t automatically find gold at the end of the rainbow. “You check your ad revenue and you make 48 bucks in ad revenue and you're like, ‘Oh my Go...

Guest : Mark Pincus, founder & chairman of Zynga, and managing member & co-founder of Reinvent Capital Before Zynga and Facebook made social gaming mainstream, the video game industry was “extreme on this being about art and crafting,” recalls Zynga founder Mark Pincus. He believes his winning instinct was the realization that games were “at least 50 percent science” — but it’s not enough...

Guest : RJ Scaringe, CEO and Founder of Rivian “I’m very comfortable with things not being in their end state,” says Rivian CEO and founder RJ Scaringe. The company’s challenging mission — to help make 100% of the world’s cars electric — will take a long time, and a lot of willingness to build the metaphorical plane in midair.  As Rivian has grown from one person to seven to 17,000, though, RJ adm...

Guest : Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO of Snowflake “People underestimate what it is to go through a complete reset,” says Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy. And he knows it: After an incredible 15-year run at Google, he started over from zero with an AI search startup, Neeva. And in hindsight, he regrets not trying to port over more of the skills that had made him a successful leader before. “You should be...

Guest : James Freeman, Founder and Former CEO of Blue Bottle Coffee In the six or so years since he sold his last shares of Blue Bottle Coffee to Nestlé, James Freeman has had a lot of time to ruminate — about how he succeeded in creating a unique café experience, and also the ways he failed his workers as a manager. But he’s already thinking about how he’ll be better in round 2.  “I've changed so...

Guest : John Hanke, CEO of Niantic When Pokémon Go launched, Niantic CEO John Hanke was enjoying a tranquil walk through a bamboo forest near Kyoto with his son. When he got back, it was all hands on deck: Building on a platform Niantic had developed for its previous game, Ingress, Pokémon Go was a runaway success story, earning $100 million dollars in revenue in its first week, and $1 billion in...

Guest : Mark McLaughlin, chairman of the board at Qualcomm  When he was 24, Mark McLaughlin thought his career was over. Since childhood, he had dreamed of attending West Point and joining the Army, but a helicopter crash left him unable to serve, with a medical discharge. However, the crash also let him stay closer to his then-girlfriend Karen. They married and raised three children, and Mark fou...

Guest : David Risher, CEO of Lyft David Risher can measure his career in phone calls, from the one that introduced him to Jeff Bezos in 1995, to the call from the Lyft board in 2023, asking him to vie for the CEO job. But initially, he believed his life’s legacy might be the nonprofit Worldreader, which has brought books to more than 22 million readers around the globe; he had to convince himself...

Guests : Vipul Ved Prakash, CEO and co-founder of Together AI; and Bucky Moore, partner at Kleiner Perkins No one knows for sure whether the future of AI will be driven more by research labs and AI-native companies, or by enterprises applying the technology to their own data sets. But one thing is for sure, says Together AI CEO and co-founder Vipul Ved Prakash: It’s going to be a lot bigger. “If y...

Guest : Andrew Bialecki, CEO of Klaviyo Whenever the marketing platform Klaviyo is hiring, says CEO Andrew Bialecki, “we sort of don't care so much what skills you have.” Instead, the company looks for “high slope” individuals who are curious and able to continually learn new things. “A big turnoff for me is [when] somebody says, ‘Oh, well, I was never good at that when I was growing up,’” Andrew...

Guest : Niraj Shah, CEO and co-founder of Wayfair Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah caught the entrepreneurship bug in his mid-20s, when he and his longtime co-founder Steve Conine sold their first company just a few years out of college. They left the acquirer and independently realized “we absolutely wanted to start something else,” Niraj recalls. “Once you’ve done that, if you enjoy that, it’s very hard t...

Guest : Jay Chaudhry, CEO, chairman, and founder of Zscaler Much of the media coverage of Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry is quick to identify him as the wealthiest Indian-American person, with a net worth of $10.8 billion . But to hear Jay himself tell it, that number has never been very important to him: “My family had no money,” he says of his childhood in India. “I had no attachment for money. There...

Guest : Bill Magnuson, CEO and co-founder of Braze The deployment of smartphones around the world was more impactful than any other technology to date, says Braze CEO Bill Magnuson — and that has big implications for emerging fields like generative AI. “If we get to the point where they [LLMs] really can be useful, human-like companions ... they will be usable by everyone that has smartphone techn...

Guest : Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI In 2020, Clara Shih quit Hearsay, the company she founded and ran for 11 years; in hindsight, she says “I probably should have quit a little bit sooner.” But at the time, she cared a lot — too much — about what everyone else thought. “There's a lot of guilt around leaving initially and feeling bad for feeling bad,” Clara says. But her worries subsided when...

Guest : Marissa Mayer, CEO and Founder of Sunshine and former CEO of Yahoo When Marissa Mayer was first hired as the CEO of Yahoo, the company had lost nearly a quarter of its workforce in the preceding six months. Early on, she was chatting with employees in the cafeteria and one of them got her attention by smacking her tray. “Is it go time?” he asked. He was asking if the board and C-suite were...

Guest : Sarah Friar, former CEO of Nextdoor Sarah Friar has worked with some of the top leaders in Silicon Valley, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, Block CEO Jack Dorsey, and most recently Nextdoor founder Nirav Tolia, who just replaced her as CEO in May. And one of the things that sets top performers apart from the rest, she argues, is their compassion and their r...

Guest : Stanislav Vishnevskiy, CTO and co-founder of Discord For many years, the conventional wisdom was the gaming was not social because it was something you usually did at home. “But people who play games are often the most social,” says Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy. “They’re spending 10, 20 hours with other people online, hanging out.” As a teenager, Stanislav logged more than 1,000 days...

Guest : Eoghan McCabe, CEO, Chairman, and Co-Founder of Intercom “We are not ready for the degree to which our world is going to change,” says Intercom CEO Eoghan McCabe, “in insane and incredible ways.” When he co-founded the company in 2011, the Irish-born entrepreneur was making it easier for companies to offer human customer service to their customers. But Eoghan believes “every single type of...

Guest : Mark Cuban, co-founder of Cost Plus Drugs and costar, Shark Tank “I just love to compete,” says Mark Cuban. “And the day I stop is the day I’m dead.” Previously the co-founder of MicroSolutions and Broadcast.com , Cuban is probably best known to the public today for competing with the likes of Daymond John and Barbara Corcoran on the reality TV show Shark Tank . But his real focus — and hi...

Guest : Taylor Francis, co-founder of Watershed One day when he was 13, Taylor Francis walked out of the movie theater, and he was pissed off. He had just seen Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth and internalized a “generational call to arms, that my parents had screwed our generation” by causing the climate crisis, he says. 14 years later, he was working at Stripe and felt another call to...