Mission Daily

“At the core of what HashiCorp does, almost everything is open source for us. And so in terms of traditional marketing, we do very little of it. It's very much driven around creating great products in open source as to make it broadly available to developers and users.” — Armon Dadgar Chad is joined by Armon Dadgar , co-founder and CTO of Hashicorp . As CTO of Hashicorp, Armon has spent a large am...

“Don't obsess about the fact that you don't always understand what the next step is.” — Jay Fulcher Today, Chad sits down with Jay Fulcher , CEO and chairman of Zenefits which offers cloud based software as a service for companies to better manage their human resources. Having learned the ropes of leadership by being a serial entrepreneur and CEO, he was brought on to lead Zenefits in 2017 after t...

“People think that when you start a company that it is this immensely risky thing but the upside is so disproportionately higher if you just looked at it from an expected value standpoint. Worst case scenario your company fails and you go to work for a McKinsey or something similar.” — John Arrow Today, Chad is joined by John Arrow , CEO of Mutual Mobile , an agency that designs and develops break...

Today, Ian is joined by Chris Hsu , a West Point graduate, an Army veteran, and now CEO of Zibo , a digital financial services platform that provides individual landlords banking, insurance and payment services. Prior to founding Zibo and post-military, Chris held roles as Executive Vice President for Hewlett Packard and a Senior Vice President at HP. He also served as a top executive in private e...

“Have a plan, but don't have it so rigorous that you miss opportunities. Don't let people talk you out of what your gut thinks is the right thing.” — Mark Testoni Today, Chad is joined by Mark Testoni CEO of SAP NS2 . At the age of 20, Mark worked as a high school janitor but decided to turn the page and join the Air Force. He served in the military for 20 years, and since retiring , Mark has beco...

Today, Chad is joined by Alex MacCaw , founder and CEO of Clearbit . Alex’s road to entrepreneurship was anything but conventional. Having taught himself programming at a young age, he dropped out of high school at the age of 17 to pursue a full-time career as a software engineer. Living in the London, Alex had intentions to get his visa and move to San Francisco to start his own company. But when...

Chad and Ian are joined by Bill Draper and Pitch Johnson , both of whom were instrumental in starting venture capital in the early 1960’s, shaping the industry even to this day. Bill and Pitch first met at Inland Steel in the late 1950s, instantly becoming friends and forming a lifelong personal and professional relationship. Both Bill and Pitch decided to leave the steel mill to form Draper and J...

“You are building features that your customers need right here, right now. You educate them on what can be done and the art of the possible. Then, you execute way better than your competitors. That's it.” — Amr Awadallah Today, Stephanie is joined by Amr Awadallah , co-founder and Global Chief Technology Officer of Cloudera . Amr is fondly called the “geek from Egypt” as he migrated from Egypt and...

“I think an entrepreneurial spirit is within somebody.” — Michele Bolos  Today, Chad is joined by Michele Bolos , founder and CEO of NT Concepts , a leading national security solution provider applying AI and machine learning to help strengthen the operations of government agencies such as the Department of Defense. Michele built the business by staying lean and cultivating an employee culture of...

On today’s episode of Mission Daily, Chad shares what we’ve been working on at Mission.org and how we are building culture. Courage and forgiveness are two of our values at Mission, guiding our culture every day. Chad explains, “courage is in really short supply right now and it always has been. It is the most valuable currency.”  In our upcoming episodes, Chad will be sharing more on Mission’s co...

“I have always firmly believed that work should have a higher purpose.” — Lenny Stein  Lenny Stein , SVP of Global Affairs at Splunk , heads up Splunk’s global corporate, government affairs and social impact initiatives including Splunk for Good , an “effort to identify means and work with groups that can use the power of data to improve the human condition.” Partners of Splunk for Good include Th...

“The more that people can get exposed to the data, the more people can tinker with it, the more people can exert their intuition and ideas onto that data, the better society is going to be.” — Monzy Merza  Monzy Merza, Vice President and Head of Security Research at Splunk, works at the cutting edge of cybersecurity. With over 15 years of experience in the field, he has seen how the evolution of t...

When Tracy Edkins joined Splunk four years ago there were just over 1,000 employees. Today, Splunk is hitting 5,000 employees and Tracy is right in the middle of this explosive growth as Chief Human Resource Officer at Splunk.  At Splunk, values and culture are the two main drivers for all hiring decisions and it is what, Tracy believes, has made the company so successful. First, there is an empha...

“Just about every problem needs some data to solve it. We cannot manage what we cannot measure.” — Carrie Palin What makes a great marketer? Carrie Palin , Chief Marketing Officer at Splunk , shares her experience in marketing and why she thinks every CMO needs a data scientist in their marketing department. Prior to joining Splunk, Carrie served as CMO at SendGrid, and was the first CMO at Box. C...

Over the past year we've had the opportunity to interview guests such as Alec Baldwin, Jeffrey Wright, Greg Becker, Doug Merritt, Sophia Bush, Liz Wiseman and many others. We've passed 2.1 million downloads and the show (and our team!) is only continuing to grow and change.  We couldn't have gotten to where we are without the support from all of you. That being said, we want to give you a chance t...

“I think the best leaders and the best contributors are competent. They understand their own intelligence, their own capability and what they bring, they bring it fully. But perhaps, they are competent enough that they have gotten over themselves to the point where they understand their own genius but they see the genius of others.”  — Liz Wiseman On this special episode of Mission Daily, Stephani...

“Don’t be afraid. Think about your personal experience and how you can leverage it.” — Susy Schöneberg Flexport is a digital freight forwarder that “helps companies to bring their goods from point A to point B, and helps companies to find their goods, and provide the technology and data to up their supply chain.” Susy Schöneberg  is the Head of Flexport.org , which is “using Flexport’s expertise,...

Collaboration at work is on the rise and so are work management tools to help team members manage progress. Chris Farinacci is the Chief Operating Officer at Asana where he is responsible for the company’s, now global, go to market strategy. Chris breaks down execution of this strategy into three parts: revenue, customer, and market. With over 70,000 paying customers and another three million free...

Everyone knows that data is exploding. What most people don’t realize is the pace and ways in which data is changing our everyday lives. According to Rahul Pathak , we’re seeing a “roughly 10x increase in data every 5 years, and the types of data that’s being generated is changing” as new devices are created every day. What does this data explosion mean for the future of business? And how is block...

Sophia Bush is many things; an actress, activist, and avid reader. She hosts a new podcast called Work in Progress and is working on several soon-to-be-released films. She is an LA native and, as the daughter of two immigrant parents, understands the value of the American Dream and the value of the life she’s built for herself.  But what many might not know is that Sophia is also a self-proclaimed...

From Senior Military Cyber Advisor at the Pentagon to VP and Federal Chief Security Officer at Palo Alto Networks , John Davis is an experienced cyber security professional focused on educating the public on cyber threats and preventing the next national and international cyber attack. Palo Alto Networks is at the forefront of cyber security and uses the latest in tech such as artificial intellige...

You may think everything in IKEA is easy to piece together, but what you see in-store and online has taken years, even decades, of iteration to create. Unlike their mattress frames, IKEA’s technology takes more than just an Allen wrench to build. And leading it all is Susan Standiford . Susan grew up with an innate interest in technology. Her father was a historian and journalist and her mother wa...

Ali Diab is the co-founder and CEO of Collective Health , a healthcare technology company that makes employee sponsored health insurance more transparent and simple to navigate. Ali was motivated to start Collective Health after his own medical event. As he was busy recovering from a life saving operation, Ali was served numerous health care bills with no clear understanding of what was owed and f...

Whitney Bouck is the Chief Operating Officer of HelloSign , a tool that lets users sign documents with legally binding e-signatures. As COO, Whitney is responsible for leading the sales, marketing, customer operations, and business development team. However, she wasn’t always a COO, in fact, she came from the marketing world. She served as SVP of Global Marketing at Box and, prior to that, was Chi...

“ We all are doing a hero's journey over and over and over and over again. Every time we seek to improve or change something about our lives or try to do something we've never done before it is a hero’s journey in itself. ” — Tara-Nicholle Nelson Tara-Nicholle Nelson is a marketer and writer at heart, but before realizing her true passions, it was as a real estate agent that she started her first...