Grit

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...

Freshworks president Dennis Woodside copes with stress by running as often as he can, a habit that began when he was CEO of Motorola Mobility. So far, he has run “16 to 17” Ironman triathlons. He’s also continually challenging himself in his professional life, leaving Motorola in 2014 to advise the founder-CEOs: Dropbox’s Drew Houston, Impossible Foods’ Pat Brown, and now Freshworks’ Girish Mathru...

The best advice Brex founder and co-CEO Henrique Dubugras ever received came from Snap CEO Evan Spiegel: The best CEOs, Spiegel told him, are “extremely authentic to themselves ... If you try to emulate being Elon Musk and you’re not like that, you’re just gonna fail.” This wisdom has empowered Dubugras and his co-founder, Pedro Franceschi, to focus on the places where they can be most effective a...

“When you create something,” says ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott, “that gives you the ability to help and do good and achieve for the most people possible.” Bill left his first corporate job at Xerox for a short stint at Gartner, then served as CEO of SAP for nearly a decade. He made one more transition three years ago because he saw a great opportunity to help make ServiceNow a defining enterprise...

With more than 1,200 employees, it isn’t easy for Gong co-founder and CEO Amit Bendov to stay in touch with everyone. So, his team has established a series of regular programs to communicate the company’s priorities and give workers a chance to ask questions. And despite the revenue intelligence company’s scale, they’ve established a core value called No Royalty: “You’re supposed to be able to com...

Jon Levin has been teaching at Stanford for more than 20 years, and has been the dean of the famous Graduate School of Business since 2016. Although teaching at Stanford puts him in contact with some of the most promising future entrepreneurs in tech, he says he hasn’t yet been tempted to leave academia for a startup because “I actually love being part of an institution that’s gonna be around for...

“Think about the pandemic without the internet,” says Cloudflare co-founder and COO Michelle Zatlyn. The world’s sudden shift to doing almost everything online only worked because network engineers, IT administrators, and internet infrastructure companies like Cloudflare had done the work. Michelle says that, both personally and professionally, she’s fine being under the radar because she doesn’t...

Grit has never been just about business, and success is not a vaccine against stress, anxiety, or depression. On today’s special episode, Joubin looks back at nine past interviews and the advice shared by guests who have been through difficult personal challenges. You can find links to the full interviews these clips came from below. In this episode:  CCO Forter, Ozge Ozcan on burning out like a p...

SAP Executive Board Member Scott Russell used to avoid talking about his personal life with coworkers. But “we want to understand and relate to each other,” he says, and being more open has made people more willing to trust and follow him. “Authenticity, you cannot manufacture that,” Scott says. “When you’re only showing a part of who you are to your team, you’re not showing your true, authentic s...

In Silicon Valley when business is good, it's normal for top talent to hop from company to company to company. But GE's Linda Boff, described by at least one of her peers as the "Beyoncé of CMOs," has stayed at the 130-year-old conglomerate for nearly 20 years, through radical changes to the business structure, and with plans to split into three public companies on the horizon. She attributes her...