On The Frontier

For those interested in understanding how to drive high performance teams, create focus in an organization, and drive organizational excellence, this episode is jam-packed with tactics and anecdotes across software industries. Zack Urlocker is an active Board Member and advisor to many different startups. His resume is too long to fully write out but he previously has served as CEO, COO, VP Market...

This episode is a perfect fit for anyone who wants to learn how to apply AI into their product especially for high fidelity analytics use cases. Utkarsh Ohm is Director of AI at Thoughtspot. He previously was a Co-Founder & eng leader at various startups. In this episode, we cover applying LLMs alongside other models to customer facing products. We discuss where LLMs in particular are helpful vs t...

This episode is a perfect fit for anyone who wants to get tactical insights on how to automate aspects of the SDR role without sacrificing quality and first principles thinking on managing inbound leads. Hank Taylor is a Fractional CMO & advisor to many different startups. He previously was VP Marketing & RevOps at Vercel and held leadership & IC roles at companies like Gitlab, Neo4j, and Tray.io....

At Atlassian’s scale, it’s mind-boggling to consider how rapid innovation and product architecture changes are implemented on a daily basis. This episode covers the “how” spanning effective team collaboration to cloud transitions. Swati Raju is Head of Engineering, Confluence Cloud at Atlassian. She previously was a CTO, eng manager and IC at various companies including Groupon, Yahoo, and Ticketm...

Nowadays we hear about “the consumerization of IT” and removing friction from user funnels everywhere. This episode covers how sometimes that can be the wrong move for the business even if users and the market think a freemium go to market is the best approach. Bobby Pinero is Co-Founder & CEO of Equals, a next-gen spreadsheet. He was previously the first finance hire at Intercom and employee 20....

Intercom was shipping and experimenting with AI enabled products since 2017. This episode is for those interested in hearing about the evolution of AI models, the customer results, and how these models can be applied in production. Fergal Reid is Vice President of AI at Intercom. He started at Intercom nearly 7 years ago to help the company begin delivering products leveraging AI. In this episode,...

One of the most exciting private companies today is Databricks, growing over 50% at $1.5B ARR with a recent valuation of $43B announced in September 2023. This is the deep dive you’ve been waiting for to understand the product, growth, and competitive landscape. Chris Huskey is a Partner at Octahedron Capital, a hedge fund that invests in public and private markets. Databricks is a large position...

Curious about how to scale Open Source companies. Want to hear anecdotes of existential company killing moments that turned into defining assets? This episode has everything from leadership tactics, hard earned advice, managing in competitive industries, new category creation and much more. Marten Mickos is CEO of HackerOne and the OG of Open Source. He has 36+ years of enterprise software experie...

This episode is for whomever is curious about Secure Service Edge (SSE) or Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Security and why seemingly every public security company seems to be trumpeting their solutions in this space which Gartner predicts will be one of the fastest-growing categories of spend in the coming years. Kunal Agarwal is the Founder & CEO of Dope Security which is building a modern Sec...

Many of us in the private markets are curious about how public markets view AI’s impact and the approach that public market investors take to investing in companies. This episode uncovers that from one of the top public software investors in my opinion. Glen Kacher is Chief Investment Officer at Light Street Capital. He founded Light Street 13 years ago after stints at Integral Capital Partners an...

This episode is packed with tactical advice for all things sales and go-to-market. It’s relevant across stages whether your company is at $0M ARR or at $100M+ ARR. Ethan Schechter is VP Sales at Snyk. He started at Snyk 6 years ago as the first sales leader. In this episode, we cover tactical insights from Ethan’s experience leading early sales to scale at Snyk and ZeroTurnaround. He describes how...

This episode is useful for all founders, startup employees, and investors who are interested in early stage startup advice, enterprise product tips, and learning how employees can scale from Day 0 to public markets. Kevin Wang is Chief Product Officer at Braze. He started at Braze ~12 years ago as employee #5 going from software engineer, to PM, and eventually to CPO. In this episode, we cover lea...

This episode is useful for all founders, startup employees, and investors who are interested in product marketing, self serve, and PLG for developer focused, enterprise software products. David Dorman is VP, Self Serve at Grafana and formerly Director of Product Marketing at DigitalOcean. In this episode, we cover learnings from DigitalOcean’s incredible content strategy, what Self Serve means and...

This podcast episode is a new format where I introduce everyone to my go-to brain trust to chat new technologies with. This episode can be consumed end to end or you can jump to specific categories that particularly interest you (timestamped below). Alex Mackenzie is a Partner at Tapestry VC and Ian Livingstone is a Team Lead at Snyk. In this day and age, there’s a new technology that seems to cap...

This podcast episode is for all of those who are interested in trends like cloud data warehouses, data & AI, edge networks, SASE security, zero trust security and companies like Snowflake, Databricks, Cloudflare, Z-Scaler, Palo Alto Networks, and of course the big cloud providers. Muji is the Founder of Hhhypergrowth , which is my favorite research publication for all things software infrastructur...

Jake Saper is a General Partner at Emergence Capital which has backed leading SaaS companies like Salesforce, Zoom, Gusto, Bill.com, and Veeva. Jake is a Board member of companies like Guru, Textio, Ironclad, Maze & many others. When I wanted to do a deep dive into SaaS business models, I could think of no one better than Jake and this episode absolutely delivered. We cover everything from single-...

Ian Swanson is the Co-Founder & CEO of Protect AI which secures AI and ML systems. He was previously the Co-Founder & CEO of Datascience.com which sold to Oracle, where he was VP AI & ML and then was Worldwide Leader of AI & ML at AWS before starting Protect AI. I’m also joined by Emilio Escobar , CISO of Datadog as a special co-host! In this episode, we dive into what is ML & AI Security, the dif...

Jade Rubick is a Eng Advisor to multiple startups (23 and counting). He was previously Vice President Engineering at New Relic and has taken on interim VPE roles at multiple other startups over the years before he began solely focused on advising startups. In this episode, Jade joins us to cover common anti-patterns he sees in eng teams, how teams can better communicate, what hiring practices work...

Julia Schottenstein is a Product Lead at dbt and an active angel investor. Julia was previously a VC at NEA focused on software and data infrastructure. She joins us today to share learnings from product and VC, why analytics engineering is continuing to proliferate, and how dbt has been able to manage and grow the community over time. We dive into the data transformation and semantic layer and co...

Kiersten Gaffney is the Chief Marketing Officer of Codefresh and a Go-To-Market Advisor for AtomicJar, CodeSee, Fermyon, Redis & many more companies. Kiersten was previously a marketing leader at Buoyant and Mesosphere, with many years of experience in software infrastructure and developer tools. She joins us today to share detailed tactics for dev tools founders on how to “do more with less”, des...

Dan Scheinman is a full-time Angel Investor and Board Member of Zoom, SentinelOne, and Arista Networks. He joins us today to share learnings about M&A from his time running Corp Dev at Cisco, backing multiple public companies from day one, and how public boards differ from private ones. There’s numerous anecdotes that Dan shares about how he finds outlier founders, how founders are able to succeed...

Phillip Carter is a Principal Product Manager at Honeycomb, which develops a software debugging product for distributed systems. Phillip recently published one of the most interesting blog posts I’ve read titled “All the Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About when Building Products with LLMs”. The post is excellent and everyone should give it a read. In this episode, we dive deep into what the hard stuff a...

Julian Alvarez is the CEO & Co-Founder of Logixboard, which is enabling freight forwarders to deliver a modern, digital customer experience to their customers with the Logixboard platform. He joins us today to talk about how to understand customer pain points in a specific vertical and gives a detailed overview of the freight forwarding and supply chain industry. Julian covers how to build a verti...

Mia Wang is the M&A & Strategy Director at Cloudflare. Oren Falkowitz is the Co-Founder of Area 1 Security, a phishing security company, which was acquired by Cloudflare in April 2022. In this episode, Mia & Oren demystify the M&A process for startups (founders and employees) by discussing the real steps and decisions that both sides had to make as the acquisition was being contemplated and comple...

Kyle Poyar is Operating Partner at Openview focused on PLG, pricing & growth. He writes the amazing and widely read newsletter, Growth Unhinged , which is one of my favorite weekly reads (multiple times a week!). It’s a wealth of information and I highly recommend listeners subscribe. Kyle joins us today to dive into all things PLG. He shares detailed and highly actionable tips with real-world exa...