Traction Podcast

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Greg Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of Thinkific.   With over 400+ employees and 10M+ students, tech unicorn Thinkific brings the incredible power of education and business to entrepreneurs across the globe.   Greg shares his lessons learned from building Thinkific from 0 to IPO through navigating many hard fought battles....

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Michelle Zatlyn, Co-Founder & COO at Cloudflare, Shawn Abbott, Partner at Inovia Capital, and Mahendra Ramsinghani, Founder at Secure Octane & Author at Startup Boards. Together, they give us a masterclass on building high-performing boards and productive relationships.    Topics covered include:   12:22 - What do inve...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Rishi Mandal, Co-Founder and CEO of Future.   You hear the term ‘saturated market' and, naturally, you are struck with the fear of limited growth.   But a competitive market also shows that there’s a real demand, and with that comes customers. You just need to out-innovate and outgrow the competition.   Future, backed...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Anu Bharadwaj, Chief Operating Officer at Atlassian.   Anu shares how to start a movement in your organization to encourage, inspire, and motivate your employees to drive transformational change and exponential growth.   The most successful companies of the last decade, from Amazon to Netflix and Microsoft, have been t...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Jason Lemkin, Trusted Advisor at SaaStr.   Jason, who is often regarded as the godfather of SaaS, shares 10 things you can do to grow 10x faster in 2022.   Jason runs SaaStr, the world's largest SaaS community and $100M+ SaaS venture fund. Previously, Jason founded the web's most popular electronic signature service, E...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Nick Mehta, Chief Executive Officer at Gainsight.   The goal of every startup is to exit via IPO, and if not, then by way of acquisition. But what should founders know about the process of getting there? Everything — from turning an idea into a scalable business to seeking potential buyers to what the reality of being...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Rahul Vohra, Founder and CEO at Superhuman.   How do you build products that are 10X better than the competition? It almost always starts with a counterintuitive approach to the conventional.   Rahul is one of the rare founders and product builders with this conviction, building the fastest email experience in the worl...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Eren Bali, Co-Founder and CEO at Carbon Health.   Eren previously founded Udemy and helped pioneer the online learning industry. Now, he's disrupting healthcare with Carbon Health and has grown the company 7x since January 2020, increasing its clinic footprint from 7 to 27 clinics, introducing virtual care to 16 states...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Meagen Eisenberg, Chief Marketing Officer at TripActions.   Meagen is one of the most sought-after marketing leaders and has won a number of accolades, including Most Influential Marketing Tech Leaders and Top 25 B2B Marketing Influencers.   She spent more than 20 years growing and scaling tech companies through many a...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Kerel Cooper, Chief Marketing Officer at LiveIntent, Inc.  Hiring has turned into gatekeeping, but building a great company is not about selecting people who fit your existing culture and keeping out those who don’t. Culture should expand like your business. Just like we want people to contribute new skills and ideas,...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Noah Kagan, Chief Sumo and CEO at AppSumo. Noah started his career as employee #30 at Facebook, before getting fired and losing $185M in company shares. He was then #4 at Mint.com and built their first 100K customers as director of marketing. Today Noah runs two multimillion-dollar businesses: AppSumo and Sumo.com . Bu...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Tomasz Tunguz, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures and co-author of Winning with Data . To build a massive long-term sustainable business, you need strong defensive moats around your company. However, the dramatic shifts in technology are rendering traditional moats useless and leaving companies feeling like it’s al...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Brian Rothenberg , Partner at defy.vc. Finding exponential growth is the holy grail of every startup, but many fail in pursuit of it. Brian’s career has spanned every stage of startup growth, from scrappy zero to triumphant IPO. He founded SkillSlate which was acquired by TaskRabbit (acq. Ikea), then went on to scale E...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Martin Basiri, co-founder and CEO at ApplyBoard. ApplyBoard is the world’s largest online platform for international student recruitment, with over 750 employees in 20 countries. It has recently closed its latest round of financing and the company is now valued at $1.4 billion. In this session, Martin shares the secret...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Startup Helper, Elad Gil. The Information recently had a cover article with the headline, “The Rise of Elad Gil, Silicon Valley’s Biggest Solo Venture Capitalist.” Investing in one or two unicorns is already magic, but Elad has invested in over 40, including helping companies like Airbnb, Gitlab, Gusto, Instacart, Noti...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Shiven Ramji, chief product officer at Auth0. Building a developer product is probably one of the hardest things for startups to build, because you're selling to people who don't really hold the budget. What are the fundamentals (or secrets) to building successful developer products and companies? Shiven has built two...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Laurie Schultz who was most recently CEO at Galvanize which was acquired for $1 billion..   Early-stage startups often act like pirates, fighting to scale in pursuit of treasure while being rough around the edges and breaking things along the way.   But eventually, it comes time to evolve into something more like the n...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, I welcome Andy Johns, venture partner at Unusual Ventures.   Some of the fastest-growing products have artfully constructed a series of content flywheels, resulting in nearly unstoppable organic growth for years or decades. To put the power of a content flywheel in perspective, Reddit recently claimed 430M monthly active users—it’s 15 years old and still sp...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Sridhar Vembu, founder and CEO of Zoho Corporation (moderated by Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch) .   Sridhar built Zoho, a software product firm valued at over a billion dollars, without a rupee of external funding—almost completely bootstrapped. Months before the pandemic, he moved from Silicon Valley to a village i...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Ali Tamaseb, partner at Data Collective Venture Capital (DCVC).   What are the key traits of billion dollar startups?   Ali embarked on a journey to answer that question with real data.   In the process, he has collected the largest data set on startups (30,000+ data points) to analyze every piece of them and understan...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Farhan Thawar, VP of engineering at Shopify, a global commerce company that provides tools to start, grow, market, and manage retail businesses of all sizes.   Farhan studied computer science despite his parents’ disapproval, which was because at the time there were computers but no computer industry to speak of and ve...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Harness. There’s a .00006% chance of becoming a billion-dollar company. Now imagine building two in your lifetime. Is it luck, or is there strategy involved? Jyoti is an engineer turned serial entrepreneur with 2x unicorns. Harness recently attained unicorn status with a $1.7B valuat...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Mandy Sebel, operating partner, people and talent at Radian Capital and former chief people officer at UiPath. Mandy has spent many years in the people and culture space, so we talked about everything from recruiting to onboarding to building a culture that fosters high retention.   Mandy believes that early-stage comp...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Vidya Peters, chief marketing officer and interim chief product officer at Marqeta, a card issuing and payment processing company that broke many records with an IPO valuation of $16 billion.    Following her love of math and science, Vidya studied engineering as an undergraduate student. She says her career path was l...

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast. AI welcomes Jeff Lawson, CEO and Co-Founder of Twilio, for a lively discussion about how to build high performing software teams.    Jeff goes over his career journey, which included stops at Stub Hub and Amazon before starting Twilio. Along the way, he discovered that it is difficult to put in the time and energy needed to build...