Grit

From Airbnb to Linear: How Karri Saarinen Redefined Product Design

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 02:42:43 -0700

In a market that hadn’t changed in decades, Linear didn’t win by being faster. They won by being more thoughtful.

Karri Saarinen helped shape design at Airbnb and Coinbase before building Linear around small teams and high standards.

On Grit, he shares how Linear is building for a new era of software development.

Guest: Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear

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How Kevin Mandia Built the Most Trusted Name in Cybersecurity

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 02:22:54 -0700

What does security look like when attackers use AI better than you do?

Armadin recently raised $200M to build for the “attacker of the future,” where attacks are autonomous and harder to contain.

On the Kleiner Perkins Grit podcast, Kevin Mandia joins Joubin Mirzadegan to share how he’s thinking about this shift, why cybersecurity has always been a calling, and why customer trust is what ultimately compounds into market leadership.

Guest: Kevin Mandia, Founder and CEO, Armadin

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The Silicon Valley Insider In The Pentagon | DoW Emil Michael

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 02:01:27 -0700

Emil Michael went from scaling Uber across 600 cities to rewiring the world's largest military.

In the midst of the Pentagon-Silicon Valley debate, the now U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering opens up about what a real partnership demands from both sides.

He also shares how he's built three new entry points for defense tech companies, and why America's military is called the "Department of War" again.

Guest: Emil Michael, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering

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How Sierra Is Pulling Ahead in the AI Race | Co-founder Bret Taylor

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 03:44:27 -0700

Few founders have seen Silicon Valley from every seat at the table.

After co-creating Google Maps at Google, serving as CTO at Facebook, and later as co-CEO of Salesforce, Bret Taylor is now building AI agents at Sierra to redefine customer experience.

On Grit, he explains why “competitive intensity” is a core value at their fast-growing company and why he believes AI won’t lead to a world where people stop working.

Guest: Bret Taylor, co-founder of Sierra

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The AI Era of Cybercrime: How Malwarebytes Is Evolving Its Security Stack | Marcin Kleczynski

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 01:59:50 -0800

What began as a 14 year old fixing infected computers became Malwarebytes, an 800 person cybersecurity company trusted by millions of customers.

On Grit, Marcin Kleczynski joins Joubin Mirzadegan to explore AI driven cyber threats, strategic reinvention, and the discipline of evolving before the market forces you to.

“We’ve exceeded. Now, what do we do to protect individuals against the next wave of threats, which are plentiful?”

Guest: Marcin Kleczynski, CEO at Malwarebytes

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The Truth Behind Automation Claims in Customer Support | Cresta CEO Ping Wu

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 02:06:03 -0800

Can you scale customer support without burning out agents or frustrating customers?

Ping Wu shares how Cresta combines AI and human intelligence into a single system that scales sustainably for companies like United Airlines and Porsche.

In this episode, Ping also breaks down the three constraints that shape automation in the real world: conversation complexity, infrastructure debt, and customer demographics.

Guest: Ping Wu, CEO of Cresta

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The Safest Dollar on the Internet | Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 02:29:06 -0800

USDC closed the gap between software and law in modern finance.

On Grit, Jeremy Allaire discusses how fully reserved, dollar backed digital currency became part of the financial system after more than a decade of work.

He also shares why for him grit is about sustaining belief through deep uncertainty, even when Circle faced the threat of bankruptcy in 2019.

Guest: Jeremy Allaire, Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO at Circle

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Why We’re Only Using 1% of AI | Glean CEO Arvind Jain

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 02:17:12 -0800

Glean has grown into a $7.2B company by giving employees AI assistants and agents that extend their capabilities.

CEO Arvind Jain is back on Grit alongside Joubin Mirzadegan. Here’s what stood out:

“My mindset by default is that if you build something last year, that it's got to be obsolete. There has to be a new way to do that thing better today. If not, then it's just lack of imagination.”
“I have no doubts that AI capabilities are just going to increase more and more over the next few years. But even more important is this concept of how much are we even leveraging what AI can do today? I would say that we've not even used 1% of current capabilities of these models”
“If you're trying to be everything to everyone, then you just cannot compete with somebody who's focused on a smaller problem and going deep into that.”

You can also listen to Arvind’s earlier episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIH0Qp6d6bg&list=PLRiWZFltuYPF8A6UGm74K2q29UwU-Kk9k&index=96

Guest: Arvind Jain, founder and CEO, Glean

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The Grittiest Conversations of 2025: AI, Business & Beyond

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 02:00:19 -0800

In this recap episode, we highlight the best moments from our 2025 interviews and reflect on the ideas that defined the year.

Featuring:

David Rubenstein (co-founder of Carlyle)
Yamini Rangan (CEO of HubSpot)
Ben Chestnut (co-founder of Mailchimp)
Winston Weinberg (co-founder and CEO of Harvey)
Garrett Lord (co-founder of Handshake)
Aidan Gomez (co-founder and CEO of Cohere)
Michelle Zatlyn (co-founder of Cloudflare)
Evan Spiegel (co-founder and CEO of Snap)

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How Brands Stay Visible When AI Decides | Profound CEO James Cadwallader

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 02:21:12 -0800

What happens when AI becomes your most influential referrer?

As consumers turn to ChatGPT for answers, James Cadwallader and his team at Profound help brands like Eight Sleep and MongoDB gain visibility and leverage inside AI models.

On this episode of Grit, he explains why brand narrative has shifted away from content, and why Profound is scaling globally ahead of traditional SaaS timelines.

Guest: James Cadwallader, co-founder and CEO of Profound and Ilya Fushman, partner at Kleiner Perkins

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How Snap Plans to Win the AR Race | Evan Spiegel on Spectacles

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 02:36:02 -0800

Turning down a $3B offer from Facebook is a bold move for any young CEO.

Evan Spiegel shares how Snap’s early dream was to stay independent and give its community an authentic voice, a bet that proved right.

He also explains why they are now doubling down on AR glasses and why the anxiety around AI deserves far more attention from tech leaders.

Guest: Evan Spiegel, co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc. and Bing Gordon, Advisor at Kleiner Perkins

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The Pull to Build: Joubin Mirzadegan on Grit and Starting Roadrunner

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 02:57:06 -0800

What does it take to go from advising founders to becoming one?

On this week’s special Reverse Grit episode, we flip the script and put our Grit podcast host Joubin Mirzadegan in the guest seat.

Joubin recently founded Roadrunner, where he is now co-founder & CEO. Roadrunner is building an AI‑native CPQ to modernize the quote‑to‑cash stack, drawing on years of conversations he’s had with enterprise revenue leaders.

Stepping into the host role, Mamoon Hamid joins Joubin to talk about his transition from sales leader to founder, how Roadrunner came together, and why it became our first incubation since Glean.

Roadrunner is hiring! Check them out: https://www.roadrunner.ai/

Guest: Joubin Mirzadegan, Partner, Kleiner Perkins

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Building Cloudflare for the Next 50 Years | Co-founder Cloudfare Michelle Zatlyn

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 02:46:36 -0800

Fifteen years in, it can still feel like “we’re just getting started.”

Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder of Cloudflare, returns to Grit with Joubin Mirzadegan to share how Cloudflare secures the internet for millions, with a vision built to last generations.

She also shares why staying close to reality and to customers becomes harder as success compounds, and how Cloudflare is helping content creators regain control in an AI driven internet.

Guest: Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder and President of Cloudflare

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She Sold Her Startup for $500 Million, Here’s Her Next Idea

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 02:31:23 -0800

Screens have pulled families apart.

Brynn Putnam set out to bring them back together with Board, the world’s ‘first face-to-face game console.’

On Grit, she tells Joubin Mirzadegan how every venture she’s built, including Mirror, started as a personal need, and how her true edge is the ability to strip an idea down to what actually matters.

Guest: Brynn Putnam, founder and CEO of Board

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Synthetic Data and the Future of AI | Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 02:46:17 -0800

How do companies like Salesforce and Dell scale intelligence across every cloud?

Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, explains how they’re building AI that works across all enterprise systems and deploys anywhere, giving companies true flexibility and security.

He joins Joubin Mirzadegan for a wide-ranging conversation on why synthetic data went from dismissed to indispensable, and how the race among AI labs is really unfolding.

Guest: Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere

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From Yext to Roam: Howard Lerman’s Second Act

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 02:00:00 -0800

The hardest company to build is the one you start after you’ve already succeeded.

After scaling Yext into a platform powering millions of businesses, Howard Lerman chose to start over with Roam, the “Office of the Future,” where humans and AI work side by side from anywhere.

On Grit, he joins Joubin Mirzadegan to talk about the solitude of leadership and what happens when you stop building for Wall Street.

Guest: Howard Lerman, co-founder and former CEO of Yext, and founder and CEO of Roam

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Rebuilding Front for the AI Era | CEO Dan O’Connell

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 02:00:00 -0800

The hardest part of transformation is knowing what to let go of.

Dan O’Connell, now leading Front as CEO and formerly on the board at Dialpad, joins Joubin Mirzadegan to explore the delicate balance between legacy and innovation as he leads a decade old company through the AI revolution.

He also reflects on why courage and control can coexist in leadership, and what it means to “make decisions that give you energy.”

Guest: Dan O’Connell, CEO of Front

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ElevenLabs’ Vision for Voice Interfaces | CEO Mati Staniszewski

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 02:00:00 -0700

Before AI became a buzzword, a few true believers were already building.

Since early 2022, Mati Staniszewski and his team at ElevenLabs have been among them, working to create voices that “actually represent emotions.”

He shares with Joubin Mirzadegan how voice AI is transforming diverse fields, from delivering personalized healthcare for different age groups to amplifying creativity in filmmaking.

Guest: Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs

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95% Faster Video Production with Synthesia | Victor Riparbelli

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 02:00:00 -0700

What’s product-market fit like when you give people the power to do what they never thought was possible?

On this rerun of Grit from April 2024, Victor Riparbelli, co-founder and CEO of Synthesia, shares how his platform gave billions a new way to create video without cameras, and explores a future where video and audio replace text as the primary way to share knowledge and content.

Guests: Victor Riparbelli, CEO and co-founder of Synthesia and Josh Coyne, Partner at Kleiner Perkins

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From Idea To Impact: How Gamma Is Redefining Presentations | Grant Lee

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 02:31:27 -0700

Make your product irresistible, and everything else will follow.

That’s the philosophy of Grant Lee, co-founder and CEO of Gamma, an AI design platform with an 'anti-PowerPoint approach', used by over 50M people.

This week on Grit, he also shares why enduring businesses aren’t one person shows, and how their deliberate hiring process shapes and strengthens company culture.

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Leadership Lessons From Snowflake’s Sales & Marketing Duo | Chris Degnan and Denise Persson

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 02:53:26 -0700

Scaling a business globally comes down to leaders who align teams and drive them forward together.

Snowflake serves over 12,000 customers, and early executives Chris Degnan and Denise Persson share how they scaled the company while keeping the unlikely pairing of sales and marketing perfectly aligned through hypergrowth.

They join Joubin Mirzadegan to share insights from their new book, Make It Snow, revealing how they built Snowflake’s ‘go-to-market engine’ and fostered a customer-first culture across every function.

Guests: Chris Degnan, former CRO and advisor to the CEO at Snowflake, and Denise Persson, CMO at Snowflake.

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The Man Who Builds for the Decade Ahead | Founder of Google X, Waymo, and Udacity

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 02:45:01 -0700

What does it take to reinvent entire industries, over and over again?

This week on Grit, Sebastian Thrun, the “godfather” of self-driving cars and massive open online courses, reflects on a career pushing the boundaries of technology across mobility, education, and AI.

With Joubin Mirzadegan, he shares why he believes autonomous driving could become the biggest lifesaving technology in history, and how a wake-up call led him to found Udacity to truly democratize higher education.

Guest: Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Stealth Startup, founder of Google X and Udacity

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How WordPress Became a Web Giant | Automattic Founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 02:36:55 -0700

What kind of founder builds a billion-dollar company around something anyone can use for free?

Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, joins Joubin Mirzadegan to reflect on two decades of building the platform that now powers over 43% of all websites through cycles of doubt, decline, and reinvention.

He also shares how Automattic aligns employees with its mission to democratize publishing and commerce through paid sabbaticals and remote work.

Guest: Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and founder and CEO of Automattic

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The Central Nervous System for Modern Business | Confluent CEO Jay Kreps

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 02:43:36 -0700

The apps and websites we use every day depend on systems most of us never see.

Jay Kreps joins Joubin Mirzadegan to share how Confluent became the ‘central nervous system’ for companies like Expedia and eBay, letting them respond to business operations instantly.

They also break down why the myth of AI-driven efficiency falls short, and why building truly transformative companies takes far longer than most people expect.

Guest: Jay Kreps, Co-Founder & CEO of Confluent

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Airtable’s AI Reboot with CEO Howie Liu

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 02:18:48 -0700

Can a no-code giant reinvent itself in the AI-native era?

This week on Grit, Airtable CEO Howie Liu shares what it means to “refound” a company, how speed comes from tearing up old playbooks, and why conversational AI is reshaping his product—and his company.

Guest: Howie Liu, Co-Founder & CEO of Airtable

Chapters:

00:00 Intro
01:04 First startup & YC
04:06 Salesforce acqui-hire
07:31 Life-changing exit at 22
11:07 Scaling too fast, layoffs
14:04 Sparks vs. coasting growth
19:33 Two years to launch
24:04 Could AI Build It Faster?
27:06 Vibe coding & AI startups
36:47 Everyone can build software
41:08 Refounding Airtable with AI
51:04 Sprint vs. marathon
58:15 Cap tables & control
01:03:29 Always be hiring
01:05:00 What grit means

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Inside the Mind of the World’s Most Optimistic CEO

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 02:44:33 -0700

For Bill McDermott, work has never been just a job.

On this Labor Day rerun of Grit, first published Jan 9, 2023, the ServiceNow CEO reflects on what he learned from his earliest jobs and how he carried those lessons from a deli counter in Long Island to the boardroom of an $80B software company.

We cover:

Why Bill bought a deli when he was in high school — and how he competed against 7-Eleven (04:00)
Interviewing at Xerox and wanting it more than anyone else (08:17)
Unwavering optimism and being a source of strength for others (12:34)
How a love of work has shaped Bill as a person (16:44)
Facing challenges and keeping a promise to his father (22:00)
Enjoying the present and keeping an eye on the future (30:01)
Leaving Xerox for Gartner and learning from a tough experience (33:29)
Sloan Kettering and Father Michael Judge (39:22)
Following the “original dream” vs. building something new at ServiceNow (44:59)
Losing an eye and getting a pep talk from two Medal of Honor winners (51:15)
Why Bill started and ended his book with quotes from two Kennedys (01:01:21)

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How Dropbox Beat Big Tech in the Cloud Wars

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 02:29:38 -0700

How do you win when your competitors are the biggest companies in the world?

This week on Grit, Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston retraces the path from a bus-stop prototype to competing head-on with Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

He explains why grit is “learning to run toward discomfort,” and the moments he realized founders keep going “for the love of the game.”

Guest: Drew Houston, Co-Founder & CEO of Dropbox

Chapters:

00:00 Trailer
00:52 Introduction
01:35 Towards full autonomy
16:20 Coming back to school
21:45 Golden ticket to California
25:23 No one’s born a CEO
28:15 Y Combinator and a co-founder
37:53 The craft of being a great CEO
53:41 Metabolizing the stress
1:10:14 Tactical advices and frameworks
1:27:48 Who Dropbox is hiring
1:29:35 What “grit” means to Drew
1:32:10 Outro

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Building High-Impact Sales Teams | Dan Lee and Nooks

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 02:42:28 -0700

Even with AI, sales still comes down to human connection.

This week on Grit, Dan Lee shares how Nooks automates busywork like research and dialing for thousands of sales teams, letting reps focus on the conversations that close deals.

He also shares his “do more with less” approach, why cold calls still convert, and how to maximize human impact alongside AI.

Guests: Dan Lee, CEO and Co-founder of Nooks and Leigh Marie Braswell, Partner at Kleiner Perkins

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Shishir Mehrotra on Building Tools Creators Love

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 02:34:57 -0700

What if your tools shared context like your team does?

This week on Grit, Shishir Mehrotra shares how the Coda and Grammarly collaboration unlocks context as a “superpower,” reflects on his early days at Google and YouTube, and hints at a future where tools anticipate intent and amplify how we work.

He also shares how this paves the way for agent-based workflows and AI-native communication, beginning with Superhuman’s email experience.

Guest: Shishir Mehrotra, co-founder of Coda and CEO of Grammarly

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Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
01:24 Introduction
02:09 Zoo vs safari
12:02 A TV ahead of its time
21:25 Product decisions
31:25 The data behind the algorithm
37:26 The AI native productivity suite
48:06 Agents are digital humans
57:55 Pressure trade-off
1:12:50 Insulated from judgment
1:25:19 Who Grammarly is hiring
1:25:51 What “grit” means to Shishir
1:29:30 Outro

Mentioned in this episode:
YouTube, Ray William Johnson, Spotify, Twitch, MTV, Chris Cox, Facebook, TikTok, Google TV, Centrata, Google Chrome, Android, Gmail, Microsoft, Super Bowl, Mosaic, Panasonic, Sony, Susan Wojcicki, Rishi Chandra, Apple TV, Amazon Firestick, Comcast, LoudCloud (Opsware), Quest Communications, AT&T Southwestern Bell, Salar Kamangar, Patrick Pichette, Eric Schmidt, OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Platforms, Sundar Pichai, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Hamilton, Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, Tesla, Waymo, Airtable, Notion, Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, Superhuman, Duolingo, Luis von Ahn, Khan Academy, MrBeast, Facebook Messenger, Snap (Snapchat), WhatsApp, Google+, Meta LLaMa, Satya Nadella, Tim Cook, Daniel Gross

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How Notion Reimagined Productivity Tools | Ivan Zhao

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 02:30:00 -0700

Ivan Zhao joins Joubin Mirzadegan on Grit to break down how the company’s minimalist design became a strategic edge in a world overwhelmed by bloated software.

He shares why the AI agent still hasn’t arrived, and how Notion’s modular approach might be the closest thing to making it real.

Guest: Ivan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Notion

Mentioned in this episode: Fuzzy Khosrowshahi, Airbnb, Sequoia Capital, Linear, Figma, Apple, Things, Microsoft, BMW, Lumiere, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Rippling, Matt MacInnis, Inkling, Steve Jobs, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, Bill Gates, OpenAI ChatGPT, Y Combinator, Andrej Karpathy, Toby Schachman, Simon Last, Spotify, Slack

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The Travel Giant Built on Billions of Reviews | Steve Kaufer on TripAdvisor

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 02:56:08 -0700

How did Tripadvisor become every traveler’s starting point?

Steve Kaufer joins Joubin Mirzadegan on Grit to break down how Tripadvisor became the internet’s trusted travel companion, built on over a billion reviews and decades of trust. He also shares why early personalization fell short and how AI is finally doing what travel agents once did by understanding the traveler, but faster, smarter, and at scale.

Guest: Steve Kaufer, co-founder of TripAdvisor

Chapters:

(00:00) Trailer
(00:45) Introduction
(01:32) Early days of Tripadvisor
(08:14) Catching the startup bug
(18:42) Luck and timing
(26:54) $200M: a combo of money and risk
(37:37) I love creating stuff
(40:45) Hardest part of being a public CEO
(46:21) Never let a good crisis go to waste
(51:54) An average traveler
(55:49) Social proof vs artificial intelligence
(1:02:59) Back in the saddle
(1:09:54) Not for the faint of heart
(1:12:16) What “grit” means to Steve
(1:12:31) Outro

Mentioned in this episode: Google, Expedia Group, Barry Diller, Interactive Corporation (IAC), Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, OpenAI ChatGPT, IMDb, CJ Affiliate (Commission Junction), Amazon, Google Chrome, Give Freely, Honey, Rakuten, Macy’s, American Cancer Society, Google Gemini

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The Expert Network Behind Handshake AI’s Model Training w/ Garrett Lord & Mamoon Hamid

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 02:30:00 -0700

Guests: Garrett Lord, co-founder and CEO of Handshake; and Mamoon Hamid, partner at Kleiner Perkins.

Handshake set out to democratize career opportunity. In the process, it unlocked something more: a high-trust expert network built on verified talent and earned trust.

This week on Grit, Garrett Lord shares how what began as a platform for student job seekers is now partnering with leading labs, enabling experts to train real-world AI systems. He explains how owning verified domain talent has become their core strategic edge, bypassing middlemen and turning a decade of trust into lasting advantage.

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How Plaid Turned a Failed $5.3B Deal with Visa into Momentum | Zach Perret (Plaid)

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 02:10:00 -0700

Zach Perret saw a fintech explosion coming—and built the rails before it arrived.

On this week’s Grit, the Plaid co-founder and CEO retraces his path from building tools for developers to linking the world’s largest banks, and how a failed $5.3B acquisition by Visa became a launchpad.

He unpacks the pressure of operating in a tightly regulated industry, why rebuilding trust after the deal collapse was harder than expected, and how Plaid is navigating the shift from startup to staple—while staying obsessed with the end user.

Links:

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Episode 250: AI Special Featuring Sierra, Harvey, Windsurf & More

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 02:31:18 -0700

Six leaders from across tech — from SaaS and semis to law and logistics — come together for our 250th episode milestone in this very special AI recap, where we unpack how new advances are transforming the way industries function, and how work gets done.

Featuring:

• Bret Taylor (Sierra Co-founder)
• Winston Weinberg (Harvey Co-founder and CEO)
• Matt Murphy (Marvell Technology Chairman and CEO)
• Yamini Rangan (HubSpot CEO)
• Chris Urmson (Aurora CEO)
• Varun Mohan (Windsurf Co-founder and CEO)

Connect with Joubin:

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joubin-mirzadegan-66186854/
- X: https://x.com/Joubinmir

Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com

Learn more about Kleiner Perkins: https://www.kleinerperkins.com

How Imprint Is Reinventing Credit Cards for Modern Brands | Daragh Murphy

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 02:32:26 -0700

Daragh Murphy is giving brands their own credit-card platform—no legacy bank required.

On this week’s Grit, the Imprint co-founder and CEO traces the leap from being a junior lawyer to closing nine-figure card deals.

He breaks down the hidden economics of credit-card loyalty, the discipline of treating capital “like the last dollar,” and how AI will slash risk-and-support costs.

Guest: Daragh Murphy, CEO & Co-Founder of Imprint

Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:48 Introduction
01:30 Actualizing the dream
08:37 Imprint
11:37 Partnerships are massive
16:48 Understand the market
18:42 “Get more, spend more” tradeoffs
23:57 Fishing in the wrong ponds
31:32 Can’t skip work
32:43 Exciting and scary
34:56 Pride and ownership
46:50 The way you spend your day
50:20 New technologies
54:51 Who Imprint is hiring
54:59 What “grit” means to Daragh
55:34 Outro

Mentioned in this episode: Figma, Rippling, H-E-B Grocery Company, LP, Barclays US, IBM, Coinbase, Charlie Munger, Instagram, Hamptons, Google, Nick Huber, Ribbit, Ireland, WeWork, Adam Kim, Amazon, Shopify, Tobias Lütke, Duolingo, Parker Conrad

Links:
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GitLab’s CEO on Why the Next Great Developer Might Not Write Code | Bill Staples

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 02:41:53 -0700

Bill Staples has spent 30 years redefining how the world writes, ships, and secures code.

On this week’s Grit, the GitLab CEO shares what it takes to lead a public, all-remote DevSecOps company trusted by more than half of the Fortune 100.

He breaks down the discipline of managing energy instead of hours, why weekly operating cadences beat quarterly plans, and how AI will 10× software engineers by auto-debugging code and closing security gaps.

Guest: Bill Staples, CEO of GitLab

Chapters:

00:00 Trailer

00:42 Introduction

02:34 True joy in life

08:16 Winning teams

13:53 When the energy isn’t there

18:00 Super ambitious

21:01 It’s not just technology

29:27 Elevating quality and standard

41:36 Lifelong collaborator

51:22 Competent intelligence

54:22 Structuring goals and time

1:03:59 Who GitLab is hiring

1:04:17 What “grit” means to Bill

1:04:54 Outro

Links:
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Stord’s Plan to Take on Amazon’s Logistics Advantage | Sean Henry

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 02:18:47 -0700

What does it take to build the logistics backbone for the next generation of commerce?

Sean Henry, founder and CEO of Stord, joins Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman and Grit host Joubin Mirzadegan to talk about scaling a national fulfillment network that now moves 50 million packages a year and reaches 15% of U.S. households.

They explore how Stored is using AI to connect warehouses, middle-mile routes, and delivery promises into one smart system. The goal: to give every brand an Amazon Prime-like advantage.

Guest: Sean Henry, Co-Founder & CEO of Stord

Links:

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Family, Focus, and 350M Users: Inside Zoom with Eric Yuan

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 03:14:02 -0700

Eric Yuan turned a simple belief into Zoom, the platform that kept the world moving through a once-in-a-century shutdown and redefined modern work.

On this episode of Grit, the Zoom CEO shares why velocity beats size, how a family-first ethos powered his leadership during COVID, and why the coming wave of AI dwarfs the original internet boom.

He details how he’s refreshing Zoom’s culture for 7,500 people, opting for virtual deal calls over in person meetings, settling into life as an empty-nester, and keeping Zoom nimble enough to outpace Big Tech and the next wave of AI startups.

Guest: Eric S. Yuan, Founder & CEO of Zoom

Chapters:

00:00 Trailer

00:44 Introduction

01:47 Walking with swagger

03:48 Extremely exciting moment

10:05 Classic innovators’ dilemma

12:59 Laser-focused bandwidth

17:56 Family first: lead by example

22:09 Everybody was doing their road shows

25:34 The entire world was dependent

28:04 Community care

31:57 Valuation and a co-founder

35:17 A lot of unhappy days

39:25 Building Zoom for consumers

46:57 Holograms?

52:01 Home

53:23 Huge competition, high velocity

1:00:33 Where companies get wrong

1:04:52 Giving back

1:13:12 Who Zoom is hiring

1:13:24 What “grit” means to Eric

1:14:24 Outro

Mentioned in this episode: Webex by Cisco, Glean, Apple, HP, Netscape, Yahoo, Brian Armstrong, Emilie Choi, Coinbase, New Limit, Elon Musk, Windy Hill, Magic Leap, Rony Abovitz, Jony Ive, OpenAI ChatGPT, Bill McDermott, ServiceNow, Carl Eschenbach

Links:

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Bret Taylor’s Journey Leading Salesforce, Sierra & OpenAI

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 02:25:07 -0700

Over the past two decades, Bret Taylor has quietly helped shape the arc of Silicon Valley.

From co-creating Google Maps to steering Facebook, Salesforce, and OpenAI, he’s been behind some of the most consequential products in tech. Now, with his new company Sierra, he’s starting from zero—again.

In this conversation, Bret opens up about how founders navigate identity, why the best ideas often come from everyday friction, and how staying relentlessly focused can unlock real momentum in AI.

Guest: Bret Taylor, Co-Founder of Sierra

Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:49 Introduction
01:57 Saving OpenAI
09:15 Overwhelming yet capable of a lot
13:36 Father and founder
16:49 History is written by the victors
22:13 How you price matters
35:58 Stickiest piece of software
49:48 The first realtime social network
55:34 Facebook CTO who rewrote Google Maps
1:02:10 Least known, most impressive
1:11:39 The best way to predict the future
1:16:22 Most personally passionate
1:21:22 Currency of reputation
1:27:17 Away from work
1:28:35 Who Sierra is hiring
1:28:58 What “grit” means to Bret
1:29:18 Outro

Mentioned in this episode: Google Maps, Salesforce, OpenAI ChatGPT, Meta Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Google, Marissa Mayer, Excite, MSN, AltaVista, Amazon, Harvey, Airbnb, Coinbase, Apple, John Doerr, Cursor, Codeium Windsurf, Perplexity, xAI, Kleenex, Amazon Web Services (AWS), FriendFeed, Tumblr, Kevin Gibbs, Google Maps, Yelp, Trulia, iOS App Store, Blackberry, Facebook Messenger, Marvel Avengers, Slack, Quip, Leonardo da Vinci, Clay Bavor, Microsoft, Eric Schmidt, Alan Kay, Brian Armstrong, Brian Chesky, Shopify, SiriusXM, Patrick Collison

Links:

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Inside Aurora’s Push to Make Autonomous Trucking Real | Chris Urmson

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 26 May 2025 02:44:03 -0700

Chris Urmson has spent the last 20 years pushing the limits of autonomous driving—first at Carnegie Mellon’s DARPA Grand Challenge team, then as co-founder of Google’s self-driving car project, now Waymo.

On this week’s episode, the Aurora CEO retraces that journey—from building robot cars in the desert to leading a public company pioneering driverless trucking.

He shares why autonomy was always a matter of when, not if, how he handled a high-profile departure from Waymo, and what it takes to build at the intersection of deep tech, safety, and infrastructure.

Now eight years into Aurora, Urmson says the future he’s been chasing is finally within reach.

Guest: Chris Urmson, Co-Founder & CEO of Aurora

Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:43 Introduction
01:59 FSD: are we there?
14:31 The competition, a million dollar check from LA to LV
22:50 Dream like an amateur, execute like a pro
32:30 Operate with integrity
42:49 The future is here, unevenly distributed
49:36 Underestimated decisions, minimizing regrets
1:03:55 Retaining value
1:16:45 Integrating self-driving
1:28:20 Lifer
1:29:25 Who Aurora is hiring
1:29:53 What “grit” means to Chris
1:30:15 Outro

Mentioned in this episode: Waymo, Google, Rivian, Dmitri Dolgov, Uber, Tesla, The DARPA Grand Challenge, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, United States Department of Defense, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, FedEx, Werner Enterprises, Hirschbach, Schneider Electric, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Sebastian Thrun, Batman, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Anthony Levandowski, Donald Trump, Apple iPhone, Airbnb, Blackmore, Stripe, Titan, Ford, Volkswagen, RJ Scaringe, Peterbilt Motors Company, The Volvo Group, Continental AG, Dara Khosrowshahi

Links:

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X
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com

From Scaling Cisco to Seeding AI: John T. Chambers on Speed, Strategy, and Reinvention

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 19 May 2025 03:16:35 -0700

John Chambers led Cisco through the rise of the internet—transforming it into the world’s most valuable company at its peak.

On this week’s Grit, the former Cisco CEO unpacks how he scaled the business from $70M to $50B+, pioneered M&A as a growth strategy with 180 acquisitions, and built what many called the best sales force in tech.

Now leading his own venture firm, Chambers shares how he’s backing the next generation of AI-native startups.

Guest: John T. Chambers, Former Cisco Executive Chairman & CEO, JC2 Ventures Founder & CEO

Chapters:

00:00 Trailer

00:45 Introduction

01:45 Track record, relationships, trust

13:21 Acquisitions every year

17:32 Product-focused

24:40 Family, dyslexia, and without shame

30:46 Wang Laboratories

35:59 Ready being CEO

40:17 Reinventing your business

50:08 Numbers don’t lie

54:09 Sales calls and making mistakes

56:20 Adapting leadership style

1:06:32 Best leadership year ever

1:13:35 A busy, exhausting schedule

1:22:07 Candid with me

1:25:21 What “grit” means to John

1:26:43 Outro

Mentioned in this episode: John Doerr, OpenAI, Wang Laboratories, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple Inc., Meta Platforms, FMC Corporation, DuPont de Nemours, Inc., John Mortgage, Don Valentine, Sequoia Capital, Alcatel Mobile, Lucent Technologies, Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., AT&T Inc., Rick Justice, Pankage Patel, Larry Carter, CNBC, Jim Cramer, George Kurtz, CrowdStrike, Randy Pond, Rebecca Jacoby, Mel Selcher

Links:

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How Matt Murphy Made Marvell Essential to AI and Cloud

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 12 May 2025 02:30:00 -0700

Matt Murphy transformed Marvell from a broad-based chip supplier into a $100B data infrastructure leader—powering the rise of AI, cloud, 5G, and custom silicon.

On this week’s Grit, the Marvell CEO shares how he refocused the company’s strategy, led major acquisitions like Inphi ($10B) and Cavium ($6B), and positioned Marvell at the center of the next era of compute.

He also reflects on lessons from his father, a longtime CEO, the discipline of running 90 miles a week, and how staying steady through industry cycles has set him apart.

Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:47 Introduction
03:00 Huge company, taking the long view
10:28 Market cap shift to big tech
14:44 The data infrastructure opportunity
20:30 Massive economic opportunity
31:33 Semiconductor industry and geopolitics
40:46 Taiwan and Moore’s Law
44:05 Getting hammered down 50%
47:05 Silicon Valley
51:15 All in despite risks
55:37 The CEO checkbox
1:01:22 Email from Matt, subject: Grit
1:07:35 The higher you go
1:15:44 Who Marvell is hiring
1:20:14 What “grit” means to Matt
1:24:40 Outro

Mentioned in this episode: Jim Cramer, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC), Maxim Integrated, Mattel, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc, Juniper Networks, Meta Platforms, Amazon.com, Inc., Cavium, Inc., Inphi Corporation, Aquantia Corporation, Mellanox Technologies, Nvidia Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, OpenAI, Anthropic, John Chambers, Facebook, Spotify, Airbnb, Google, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Intel Corporation, Robert Norton Noyce, Gordon Moore, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), Andrew "Andy" Stephen Grove, Bloomberg, Intuit Inc., Lip-Bu Tan, Sehat Sutardja, Whay S. Lee, Starboard Value, Rick Hill, Novellus Systems, Inc., Michael Strachan, Deloitte & Touche LLP, Apple Inc., Steve Jobs, Chris Koopmans

Links:

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HubSpot CEO on the Future of SaaS, AI, & Leading Through Change

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 05 May 2025 02:16:26 -0700

From a 350-square-foot home in South India to leading HubSpot, a $30B CRM powerhouse, Yamini Rangan’s journey is nothing short of remarkable.

In this episode, Yamini shares how she’s guiding HubSpot through a post-pandemic shift toward product-led growth, the hard-won lessons behind building go-to-market alignment, and why human-centric leadership is her edge in an AI-first world. Plus, her take on why data is the new battleground in tech.

Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:52 Introduction
02:22 Fire in my belly
10:06 Constraints
12:19 Peak performance
16:38 Helping while in sheer panic
21:43 The general ethos
30:14 Customer value
36:08 Excited and scared
47:25 Becoming CEO
54:19 Feeling behind
1:01:51 Very lonely
1:05:34 Losing credibility
1:08:42 Slowing down, sitting still
1:12:31 No patience to finish a book
1:15:39 Who HubSpot is hiring
1:15:54 What “grit” means to Yamini
1:16:45 Outro

Mentioned in this episode: Sequoia Capital, Carl Pieri, Brian Halligan, Zoom Workplace, Meta Platforms, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, Salesforce, Blockbuster Video, BlackBerry Limited, Axon Enterprise, Netflix, Snapchat, Harvey, Dharmesh Shah, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Links:

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From White House to Wall Street: David Rubenstein

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 02:43:31 -0700

David Rubenstein helped pioneer modern private equity—building The Carlyle Group into a $400B global investment firm from a modest D.C. office and a relentless fundraising streak. But beyond PE, his legacy spans presidential libraries, historic American artifacts, and a lifelong obsession with civic contribution.

In this episode, David shares how he raised billions without a background in finance, why owning a baseball team was more than just a trophy purchase—and what building true generational success really means beyond wealth alone.

Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:53 Introduction
01:40 Family, wealth, class
14:40 Happiness disparity and longevity
19:25 I need more to give away more
25:04 The relentless fundraiser
33:53 Kids and travel
36:06 No track record, the great white buffalo
38:59 Business and politics
43:53 Fired from Washington
45:52 Fundraising, presidents, podcast guests
48:04 Private equity and sports
53:44 Expenses — no charges
55:49 Waking up with energy
57:26 Preserving copies
1:02:05 Organizational architecture
1:03:41 Bury me in my plane
1:08:11 Not a big luxury spender
1:10:32 What “grit” means to David
1:10:50 Outro

Mentioned in this episode: Andrew Rubenstein, Stanford University, Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett, Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Procter & Gamble Company, Forbes 400, Duke University, University of Chicago, Harvard Corporation, Johns Hopkins University, California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, Jimmy Carter, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Smithsonian Institution, National Gallery of Art, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Arianna Huffington, Xi Jinping, Hank Greenberg, Stephen A. Schwarzman, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Baltimore Orioles, Fred Trammell Crow, Harlan Crow, National Basketball Association (NBA), National Football League (NFL), Arctos Partners LP, Anthropic, Magna Carta Libertatum, Declaration of Independence, Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln, US Constitution, National Archives, Lincoln Memorial, Thomas Jefferson Memorial, Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier, Mark Cuban, Paul McCartney

Connect with David:
X: @DM_Rubenstein

Connect with Joubin:

X: @Joubinmir

LinkedIn: Joubin Mirzadegan
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com

kleinerperkins.com

No Reset Button: Reinventing Amplitude in a Post-AI World (Spenser Skates)

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 02:30:07 -0700

Amplitude helped define the modern analytics stack, powering digital products with deep behavioral insights. But in a world shifting toward agentic interfaces and vertically integrated AI, even a category leader has to evolve.

In this episode, CEO Spenser Skates shares how he’s rethinking AI within the constraints of a 13-year-old codebase, why analytics remains Amplitude’s competitive edge—and why taking the company public early was a risk worth taking.

Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:43 Introduction
01:26 AI is still very early
05:48 The urgency of building from the ground up
08:49 Bringing in new blood
11:23 Higher valuations and going public
15:00 Who’s leading who
18:39 Markets being open and closed
21:14 Being the incumbent in AI
24:40 Slow innovation
31:43 The ultimate founder
37:06 Things willing to relinquish
44:04 Being the person I want to be
46:41 Between family and work
50:08 Becoming the person you hate
55:16 Chief general, chief justice, chief priest
1:02:56 Tired founders
1:04:32 Missing out
1:14:51 Who Amplitude is hiring
1:15:41 What Spenser means to Spenser
1:16:54 Outro

Mentioned in this episode: OpenAI ChatGPT, Command AI, Oracle Corporation, Anthropic Claude, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Rippling, Stripe, Meta Platforms, Inc., Mark Zuckerberg, Figma, Canva, Peter Thiel, Anne Lee Skates, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Michael Jordan

Links:

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Flexport’s Third Act: Winning in a Broken Global Trade System

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 02:32:23 -0700

Flexport was a breakout success—reimagining global trade with tech at its core. But when the freight market cooled and efficiency overtook service, things started to unravel. Founder Ryan Petersen stepped aside, handing the CEO role to former Amazon exec Dave Clark. Months later, he was back at the helm.

In this episode, Ryan explains what went wrong, how he’s rebuilding Flexport—cutting $300M in costs, restoring customer focus—and why promoting from within beats chasing outside stars. He also weighs in on Trump’s proposed tariffs and what they could mean for the future of global trade.

Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:31 Introduction
02:07 Meeting smart people, seeing the world
03:40 Eroded margins
09:52 Charismatic and overconfident
15:32 Not an overnight decision
20:08 The founder has returned
23:10 Redoing the hiring
26:38 No substitute for passion
31:00 Working for and with my brother
37:28 Working with forwarders
42:14 Being a founder can be lonely
47:49 Life’s work
54:06 The right person for the job
1:00:55 19 countries
1:04:57 Blowing people up
1:07:24 Work and being a good dad
1:08:34 Not doing it for money and loving money
1:17:52 Import and export tariffs
1:22:57 De minimis
1:25:54 Panama and the Suez Canal
1:36:50 Going public
1:42:24 Who Flexport is Hiring
1:42:42 What "grit" means to Ryan
1:43:06 Outro

Mentioned in this episode: Founders Fund, Amazon, Toyota Motor Corporation, Slack, Brex, Pedro Franceschi, Henrique Dubugras, United States Customs and Border Protection, ImportGenius, Michael Kanko, Y Combinator, Paul Graham, Intel Corporation, Shopify, Geely Holding (Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co., Ltd.), The Volvo Group, Intuit TurboTax, David Petersen, BuildZoom, TechCrunch, Google, Figma, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Jimmy Carter, Panama Canal Authority, United States Navy, Coinbase, Uber, Airbnb

Links:

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Brex 3.0: Inside the Radical Turnaround with Pedro Franceschi

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 02:58:40 -0700

Guest: Pedro Franceschi

Pedro Franceschi is the co-founder and CEO of Brex, a fintech company reshaping how businesses manage their finances.

Originally from Brazil, Pedro went from teenage hacker to leading one of the most well-known names in modern financial technology—building a platform trusted by startups and enterprises alike.

In this episode, Pedro shares what it took to launch “Brex 3.0,” why he moved to a single-CEO model, and how tough structural changes set the stage for leaner, faster growth.

Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:46 Introduction
01:45 Startup roller coaster
05:21 Founders know how to have fun
07:12 Belief barrier evolution
12:00 Early state of life in Brazil
13:23 Controlling variables
15:32 Screen time
19:23 Making small decisions
23:27 Learning raises the bar
26:15 People manager
38:49 Getting underwater
42:05 Growth accelerated
47:51 Vision from the top down
52:13 Leadership organization
54:01 AI software engineering physics
54:43 People complain about change
59:42 Believers and non-believers
1:04:09 Equity and bonus controversy
1:08:40 Big swings and going public
1:14:15 Control in unpredictability
1:18:04 Living in a pixel

1:19:52 Meditate, sleep, diet, exercise

1:24:36 Mental health and stress
1:33:12 Who Brex is hiring
1:33:49 What "grit" means to Pedro
1:34:39 Outro

Mentioned in this episode: Silicon Valley, Facebook, Meta Platforms, Inc., Mark Zuckerberg, Mastercard, Rio de Janeiro, iPhone, Bill Gates, Tim Urban, Jony Ive, Apple Inc., LinkedIn, Salesforce, Brian Chesky, Airbnb, Anthropic Claude, Cursor, Codeium Windsurf, Cognition Labs Devin, Vercel, Retool AI, Amplitude, Spenser Skates, Elon Musk, Tesla, Inc.

Links:

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This episode was produced by Kleiner Perkins and edited by IQvideo.

The trailer and distribution for this episode were handled by Atomik Growth.

From India to Silicon Valley: The Jay Chaudhry & Zscaler Story

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 05:50:58 -0700

Before Zscaler was a $32B cloud security giant, it was just 10 engineers—half in Bangalore, half in a borrowed U.S. office.

As founder and CEO of Zscaler, Jay Chaudhry bet $50M of his own money on one radical idea: secure the internet in the cloud.

Born in a Himalayan village with no electricity, he built Zscaler into one of the world’s top cybersecurity giants.

In this episode, Jay breaks down why 50% of the Fortune 500 trusts Zscaler, why he still interviews candidates, and how he’s incubating the company’s next big AI bet.

Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:42 Introduction
01:21 His fifth company
04:26 Entrepreneurs’ existential fear
10:53 Customer engagement and new innovations
12:46 No private jets, no business class
19:34 “I never used money”
23:38 Born and raised in India
26:17 Hiring legends
30:35 Walking on water
35:09 “Dolphining”
39:55 Areas of weakness
42:11 Passionate even on the weekends
44:56 Work during roller coasters
47:35 The weight of the world is on your shoulders
49:21 Leveraging AI
56:20 Outro

Mentioned in this episode: Elon Musk, Microsoft, Bill Gates, BlackBerry, Steve Ballmer, Satya Nadella, Hewlett-Packard (HP), IBM, John Fellows Akers, Steve Jobs, NeXT, Inc., Linux, Cisco, United Airlines, San Francisco International Airport, Sundar Pichai, Ravi Mhatre, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Six Flags, AI (artificial intelligence), security

Links:

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The Unlikely Path to Building a Billion-Dollar Gov Tech Company | Zac Bookman

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:30:00 -0700

Guest: Zac Bookman, CEO and Co-Founder of OpenGov

Thirteen years after co-founding the government transparency startup OpenGov, Zac Bookman is still finding ways to surprise people. In 2024, Cox Enterprises bought the company for $1.8 billion — but as far as Zac is concerned, “we’re just getting started.”

“ I left the vast majority of my net worth in the company,” he says. “So I'm a believer. I'm all in.”

The mission of powering “more effective and accountable government” has been stable since OpenGov’s earliest days, and that mission has informed everything from hiring to M&A to the decision to sell.

“These people buy and don't sell,” Zac said of Cox. “They're all in on the mission. And they're all in on taking care of employees. So I see a triple win: A win for employees, win for the investors, win for the customers, maybe a quadruple win for me and the management.”

Chapters:

(01:46) - OpenGov’s mission
(04:34) - Shrinking the product-market fit
(07:34) - Super misson driven
(08:59) - Why OpenGov almost shut down
(13:08) - Zac’s early career
(16:16) - Picking (and losing) a CTO
(22:50) - Growing upside-down
(25:29) - The SPAC backstabber
(31:26) - Why Zac didn’t get fired
(33:24) - Selling in 2024
(37:04) - Growth by acquisition
(42:31) - John Chambers and PMF
(49:32) - Zac’s cross-country bike ride
(56:25) - Expectations vs. reality
(58:57) - The coup attempt
(01:01:59) - Tiring work
(01:05:47) - Going to the White House
(01:09:40) - DOGE & disrespect
(01:12:54) - “We’re just getting started”
(01:14:18) - Who OpenGov is hiring (and where)
(01:15:13) - What “grit” means to Zac

Mentioned in this episode: Joe Lonsdale, Cox Enterprises, OpenAI, the Department of Government Efficiency, Workday, H.R. McMaster, Stanford University, Formation 8, 8VC, the National Academy of Sciences, the Stanford Review, Kamala Harris, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase, Earn, Ben Horowitz, Facebook, Steve Laughlin, Cisco, Laurene Powell Jobs, Glynn Capital, Acme, Allen & Company, Harry You, Joe Tucci, EMC, Bill Green, Accenture, Tyler Technologies, HP, Josh Kushner, GTY Technology Holdings, John Keker, Palantir, CKAN, Oracle, Kevin McCarthy, The American Technology Council Summit, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Satya Nadella, Pat Gelsinger, Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, Elon Musk, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore.

Links:

Connect with Zac

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Bootstrapped to $12B: Mailchimp’s Ben Chestnut on Life After the Exit

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:30:00 -0700

Guest: Ben Chestnut, Former CEO and Co-Founder of Mailchimp

If you find yourself selling your startup, then Mailchimp co-founder Ben Chestnut has some important advice for you: Get a dog.

When Intuit bought Mailchimp in 2021 for $12 billion, the company asked Ben if he wanted to stay on as CEO, but he chose to “walk off into the sunset” and let the new owners take over.

After that, he estimates it took 6 to 12 months before he stopped checking his email, social media, and calendar with the same level of stress a CEO might have. Adopting a dog, he discovered, forces you to “get OK with the voices in your head."

“After the acquisition, that's all I do, I walk the dog,” Ben says. “And the dog was good therapy ... No judgments from a dog.”

Mentioned in this episode: Intuit, Wolt, DoorDash, LinkedIn, Dan Kurzius, Salesforce, ExactTarget, Pardot, Constant Contact, Rackspace, Free by Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine, Charles Hudson, the Freemium Summit, Drew Houston, Dropbox, Evernote, Phil Libin, TechCrunch, Brian Kane, Catalyst Partners, Georgia Pacific, Scott Cook, Bing Gordon, Vinay Hiremath, Loom, Joe Thomas, Caltrain, Flickr, Saturday Night Live, Droga5, Cannes Film Festival, Strava, Twitter, LinkedIn, Nvidia, Glean, Rubrik, Amazon AWS, and Mechnical Turk.

Links:

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Meet the Man Who’s Making Supersonic Flight Possible Again | Blake Scholl

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:30:00 -0700

Guest: Blake Scholl, Founder & CEO of Boom Supersonic

“Passion and drive trumps knowledge and experience,” says Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl. Long before he was running Boom — which earlier this year successfully tested the world’s first privately-developed supersonic jet — he was enabling “the world’s most obnoxious spam cannon” at Groupon, or designing a barcode-scanning game for retail shoppers.

But eventually, Blake found the courage to be more audacious and do something closer to his lifelong love of aviation. He began educating himself about things he had never thought to learn, and tapping his LinkedIn network to get intros to the smartest people in the industry.

“If you imagine yourself on like the day of IPO, 99 percent of what you needed to know to get to that day, you didn't know on day one,” he says. “So, why not take 99 percent to 99.5 percent, and work on the thing you really want to exist, even if you don't know anything about it yet?”

Chapters:

(01:07) - Blake on Boom’s beginnings
(01:52) - Breaking the sound barrier
(05:23) - Concorde’s legacy
(09:36) - Navigating regulations
(12:08) - Boomless supersonic flight
(16:48) - The test flight
(20:11) - Day-of nervousness
(24:26) - Carrying passengers
(26:55) - Cost & wi-fi
(30:19) - “No middle seats”
(32:35) - Hard tech
(36:48) - What if Apple made a plane?
(39:08) - Blake’s career journey
(43:29) - The risk of failure
(49:12) - Finding the courage
(52:49) - Balancing life with Boom
(56:42) - Learning how to build a jet
(01:00:20) - The power of LinkedIn
(01:02:38) - Y Combinator Demo Day
(01:08:24) - Richard Branson
(01:11:38) - Dividing yourself
(01:14:19) - Being a focused dad
(01:20:05) - Exuberance vs. fear
(01:24:15) - Hiring slowly
(01:27:17) - What “grit” means to Blake

Mentioned in this episode: Chuck Yeager, ChatGPT, the Apollo program, Elon Musk, SpaceX and Falcon 1, Boom Overture, Starlink, Boeing, Airbus, iPhone, Jony Ive, Uber, Airbnb, Anduril, United Airlines, American Airlines, Eclipse Aviation, Tesla, Scott Kirby, Mike Leskinen, Inktomi, Yahoo!, Amazon, Pelago, Google Ads, Kima Labs, Barcode Hero, Groupon, iPad, Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs, Khan Academy, Sam Altman, Loopt, Virgin Atlantic, Paul Graham, Michael Seibel, Ashlee Vance, Bloomberg, Hacker News, Jared Friedman, Sen. Mark Kelly, SV Angel, Ron Conway, Virgin Galactic, Lockheed Martin, Gulfstream, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Holden, and How It’s Made.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#232 CEO NetApp, George Kurian: New Chapters

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:30:00 -0800

Guest: George Kurian, CEO of NetApp

For almost 10 years, George Kurian has been CEO of the data infrastructure firm NetApp, overseeing its pivot to cloud services. After he took the job — a surprise promotion dropped on him just days before it was announced — he had to learn on the job how the job could be.

“ There are a lot more stakeholders that a CEO has to deal with than a chief product officer,” George says, referring to his previous role. “There's also a lot more external commitment ... It was a really all-consuming effort to get the company turned around.”

He said the CEO job can be “fairly lonely” because you may want to be peers or friends with your team and your board — but in fact, they are sometimes your subordinates and your superiors, respectively.

“ We wouldn't be here without others having contributed significantly on the journey,” George says. “[But] there are times when you have to step back and say, ‘I see a pattern that my team is not seeing,’ or ‘Do I think that we can do a better job than we are doing?’”

Chapters:

(01:10) - Commuting to Sunnyvale
(04:49) - Growing up in India
(08:04) - Protect the child
(09:33) - Raising kids in Silicon Valley
(12:44) - Money motivation
(15:04) - NetApp’s renaissance
(21:39) - Writing new chapters
(23:15) - Culture shifts
(26:38) - Coming to NetApp
(29:41) - Surprise! You’re the CEO
(32:41) - Making sacrifices
(35:04) - Work vs. family tension
(37:18) - Doubt & lonely decisions
(42:38) - The data wave
(45:27) - Enterprise AI
(51:36) - Starting your own company
(53:33) - Navigating difficulty
(56:28) - Who NetApp is hiring
(57:11) - What “grit” means to George

Mentioned in this episode: EMC, OpenAI, DeepSeek, CalTrain, the San Francisco 49ers, Princeton University, Subway, Vons, Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud, Stanford University, Brian Cox, Oliver Jay, the Quakers, Jay Chaudhry, zScaler, Manmohan Singh, Oracle, IBM, Sun, Amazon, Microsoft, Glean, Kobe Bryant, Steph Curry, McKinsey, Akamai, Cisco, Gwen McDonald, and the San Francisco Friends School.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#231 CEO & Co-Founder Harvey, Winston Weinberg w/ Ilya Fushman: Worthy Sacrifices

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:30:00 -0800

Guests: Winston Weinberg, CEO & co-founder of Harvey; and Ilya Fushman, partner at Kleiner Perkins

“If you think about pretty much any job out there in the world, we will have some sort of [AI] copilot,” says Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman. “The question is, who are the right folks to build it, and what’s their vision?”

For Harvey CEO & co-founder Winston Weinberg, the vision is clear: Silicon Valley cannot and should not try to disrupt the legal profession by automating the job of lawyers. Instead, he says, they need to have “respect for the industry” before designing AI solutions that speed up specific tasks.

“These industries are incredibly complex,” Winston says. “Legal is one of the oldest professions known to man. There are firms that are over a hundred years old. There are firms that are hundreds of years old, and having a brand that says, ‘We are partnering with the industry to transform it’ versus ‘We are just going to steamroll the industry’ is really important for us.”

Chapters:

(01:16) - The zeitgeist switch
(02:58) - What is Harvey?
(06:10) - Chief Law Officers
(07:58) - Agentic workflows
(09:43) - Ilya’s investment thesis
(12:48) - Collaborating with AI
(16:05) - Task automation
(20:52) - Why is it called Harvey?
(23:14) - Respecting the legal industry
(26:43) - Winston’s past jobs
(28:47) - First steps
(32:13) - Scaling the company
(35:02) - Scaling yourself
(37:19) - Who works for Harvey
(40:50) - Making mistakes
(43:15) - Making sacrifices
(45:51) - Growing too fast
(50:50) - Setting priorities
(54:54) - Harvey’s competitors
(57:38) - Internal virality
(01:00:46) - Testing Harvey’s limits
(01:03:29) - Who Harvey is hiring
(01:04:01) - What “grit” means to Winston

Mentioned in this episode: ChatGPT, the Fortune 500, Microsoft Copilot, Gabe Pereyra, Activision, Excel, Counsel AI Corporation, Suits, Harvard University, Netflix, Dell, O'Melveny & Myers, Hueston Hennigan, Meta, Reddit, Jason Kwon, Anthropic, Marissa Mayer, Eric Schmidt, Google, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Glean.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#230 Co-founder & CEO, Wolt & Head of DoorDash International, Miki Kuusi: The Next Mountain

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:30:00 -0800

Guest: Miki Kuusi, head of international at Doordash + CEO & co-founder of Wolt + co-founder of Slush tech conference

Before Miki Kuusi launched the Finnish delivery startup Wolt, which DoorDash acquired in 2022, he wasn’t just another startup entrepreneur. From 2011 to 2015, Miki was the CEO of the hugely influential European tech conference Slush, which brings thousands of founders and VCs to Helsinki every winter.

“You could argue that Slush was my university for things leading up to Wolt, and what I do today,” Miki says. “That's where I learned most of the core lessons that I put into action.”

One thing he remembers thinking in those early days: Everything was going to be redefined by the internet.

“I just wanted to get a shot at building one of these services of the next hundred years,” he says. “And that was the driving motivator for me. If the driving motivator had been money, I don't think we would be here today.”

Chapters:

(01:14) - Act 3
(03:36) - Unlocking local commerce
(06:13) - Selling Wolt
(09:27) - The competition
(14:20) - DoorDash’s and Wolt’s origins
(17:50) - “Maybe we’re the idiots in the room”
(22:44) - Difficult years
(25:13) - Startups in Europe vs. U.S.
(28:56) - Learning from DoorDash
(31:51) - Market correction
(35:24) - Delivery around the world
(39:17) - “ Glorified recruiting companies”
(42:31) - Convincing restaurants
(44:11) - Slush
(48:21) - The next mountain
(54:13) - Ambition and concentration
(59:58) - Family and distractions
(01:04:34) - Email overload
(01:07:07) - Time as currency
(01:09:25) - Priorities and onboarding
(01:15:49) - The power of culture
(01:19:32) - Who Wolt and DoorDash are hiring
(01:20:39) - What “grit” means to Miki

Mentioned in this episode: Tony Xu, Uber, Lyft, Uber Eats, Postmates, Delivery Hero, GrubHub, DeepSeek, OpenAI, Anthropic, Kees Koolen and Booking.com, 83North, Supercell, DashPass, Wolt+, Microsoft Excel, Amazon, Parker Conrad and Rippling, Andreeseen Horowitz, Fortnite, WhatsApp, Barry’s Bootcamp, and Slack.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#229 Former CEO Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotick w/ Bing Gordon: Change the Game

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:30:00 -0800

Guest: Bobby Kotick, former CEO of Activision Blizzard; and Bing Gordon, Advisor at Kleiner Perkins

In 2020, when President Trump signed the executive order that would ban TikTok in the U.S., Bobby Kotick called his old friend Steven Mnuchin. The former Secretary of the Treasury told him that, if TikTok’s U.S. operations were to be sold to an American company, Microsoft would be the only bidder.

A couple calls later, he reached ByteDance founder and CEO Zhang Yiming, who said he’d rather sell to Bobby than Microsoft. Concerned about his ability to get the deal done solo, Bobby called Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and offered to make a joint bid.

Nadella declined, but added, “ if the deal doesn't get done, we should sit down and talk about us buying Activision.” TikTok currently remains Chinese-owned, but three years later, Microsoft paid $75 billion for Activision Blizzard.

Chapters:

(01:16) - Forming Activision Blizzard
(04:19) - Good acquisitions
(09:21) - Electronic Arts and “Schedule C”
(15:08) - Nintendo and Mediagenic
(21:19) - Steve Wynn
(29:24) - Wynn cashes out
(35:14) - Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
(40:38) - Blizzard’s many sales
(44:44) - World of Warcraft and Call of Duty
(47:59) - Jurassic Park
(50:40) - Chris Metzen
(55:06) - David Geffen
(58:11) - New competitors
(01:02:25) - The harassment lawsuits
(01:06:53) - Trying to buy TikTok
(01:08:51) - Hardware design
(01:12:52) - Polymarket, Donald Trump, and TikTok
(01:15:19) - The Call of Duty Endowment
(01:18:31) - Brian Stann and Hire Heroes USA
(01:21:49) - Steve Jobs and Pixar
(01:29:41) - The first Macintosh
(01:31:29) - The Wii demo
(01:33:42) - Nintendo 64, PlayStation and VR
(01:37:35) - The hardest year
(01:40:17) - Working with Brian Kelly
(01:41:26) - Satya Nadella and Microsoft
(01:44:39) - Xbox Game Pass
(01:49:35) - What “grit” means to Bobby

Mentioned in this episode: Vivendi, Bruce Hack and Arnaud de Puyfontaine, EA, Call of Duty, Bizarre Creations, Atari, Apple II, Commodore 64, Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple Lisa, Howard Lincoln, Philips, Magnavox Odyssey, Sutter Hill Ventures, Infocom and Zork, Toys-R-Us, Howard Hughes, E. Parry Thomas, Sun Valley, Thom Weisel, William Morris Endeavor, Guitar Hero, Davidson & Associates, Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham, World of Warcraft, Medal of Honor, Steven Spielberg, Michael Crichton, Chris Roberts, Overwatch, Tencent, Time Warner, Jeff Bewkes, Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In, Lina Khan, Samsung, Elon Musk, James L. Jones, UFC, E. Floyd Kvamme, Toy Story 2, Procter & Gamble, Ron Doornik, John Lasseter, Xerox PARC, Shigeru Miyamoto, Satoru Iwata, Goldeneye 007, James Bond, Barbara Broccoli, Oculus, Apple Vision Pro, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Sam Altman, Mustafa Suleyman, Spotify, Candy Crush Saga, Disney, Phil Spencer, Clarence Avant and Motown Records.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#228 Co-Founder Alinea & Tock: Selling Experience

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:30:00 -0800

Guest: Nick Kokonas, co-founder of the Alinea Group and former CEO of Tock

As of October 1, 2024, Nick Kokonas is no longer an owner of the Alinea restaurant group, which he co-founded and ran for almost 20 years. When he bought a vineyard in Napa Valley prior to the exit, one of his sons remarked, “He's given up. Time to go out to pasture.”

Nick admits that the work ahead of him is “not the same” as the high-pressure world of a Michelin-starred restaurant in Chicago. But he’s started working with the magician Nate Staniforth on a new restaurant concept that will present diners with illusions and surprises over the course of a two-hour experience.

“If you want to feel wonder and feel childlike again, go see a magician,” Nick says. “[But] there’s so much bad cultural baggage ... what we wanted to do was create an experience that is not really about magic.”

Chapters:

(02:29) - Celebrity restauranteurs
(07:14) - The next act
(12:30) - Buying the vineyard
(15:37) - Fear is motivating
(17:59) - Opening night
(22:03) - Tongue cancer
(27:56) - “OK, let’s fix this”
(31:10) - Selling experience
(38:32) - The table plate
(42:40) - Feeling full
(44:14) - Next Restaurant and Tock
(49:33) - Being still
(51:19) - Nate Staniforth’s lottery illusion
(56:57) - The magic restaurant
(01:02:29) - Being misunderstood
(01:07:44) - Working via email
(01:11:43) - “Enemies”
(01:18:23) - Who Nick is hiring and what “grit” means to him

Mentioned in this episode: Mike Gamson, Shaquille O’Neal, Jeff Kaplan, Steve Bernacki, Robin Anil, Grant Achatz, OpenTable, American Express, The Big Lebowski, The New York Times, eGullet, Gourmet Magazine, Roger Ebert, Eddie van Halen, Goodfellas, The Devil Wears Prada, Batman, the Chicago Bears, Madonna, Taylor Swift, Bavette’s and Brendan Sodikoff, Pablo Picasso, Chef’s Table, Google, Brian Fitzpatrick, Finding Real Magic, David Blaine, Mark Cuban, Mark Caro, Chicago Magazine, John Mariani, Cat Cora, Homaro Cantu, Dave Portnoy, Pete Wells, and Eric Asimov.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#227: CEO & Founder Axon, Rick Smith: Push Risk

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:30:00 -0800

Guest: Rick Smith, CEO & Founder of Axon (formerly TASER)

Being a founder-CEO is a “unique superpower,” says Axon’s Rick Smith: People like him get a longer leash from the board to try things that outside CEOs might not.

“My job is to push risk into the organization,” Rick says. “If there's a project with a 50 percent chance of success, a 50 percent chance of failure, but it's going to pay 100 to 1, any finance person will tell you, you should take that bet all day long.”

One of those bets was the transition from running a weapons company called TASER into a broader public safety firm called Axon, which makes cloud-supported body cameras fro police, tactical drones, AI records management software and more. “If we never have a product failure, then we're not taking risks anymore and we're going to end up getting disrupted,” Rick says.

Chapters:

(01:09) - Tasers vs. guns
(03:35) - Axon’s growth
(07:09) - Biggest surprises
(09:33) - How TASER got started
(13:11) - Reinventing the taser
(17:24) - A humiliating launch
(23:33) - Rick’s family
(26:14) - The Auto Taser failure
(30:21) - The darkest days
(34:26) - Hans Marrero
(37:25) - Family and burnout
(42:49) - Rick’s family
(45:49) - Pivoting the business
(51:37) - Axon body cameras
(53:46) - Axon’s current products
(58:08) - Re-educating the cops
(01:02:09) - Pushing risk
(01:05:44) - Competing with the gun
(01:10:16) - Exponential stock plans
(01:14:17) - Who Axon is hiring
(01:14:46) - What “grit” means to Rick

Mentioned in this episode: UnitedHealthcare and Brian Thompson, Harvard University, human-machine interfaces, Star Wars, Timecop, Star Trek, Jack Cover, Project Apollo, Ed Owen; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; Tom Smith, Rodney King, the Sharper Image, Steve Filmer, Phil Smith, Silicon Valley Bank, Emil Michael, Bob Kagle, Benchmark, Norwest Ventures, Molly Wuthrich, Josh Isner, The Terminator, Ferrari, Richard Branson, Burning Man, Steve Jobs, Brenda Smith, Hadi Partovi, Amazon AWS, Microsoft, DraftOne, Ambience Health, OpenAI, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Brown, Computer Aided Dispatch, Elon Musk and SpaceX, and Luke Larson.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#226 President & COO Coinbase, Emilie Choi: Through the Storm

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:30:00 -0800

Guest: Emilie Choi, president & COO of Coinbase

After the collapse of FTX in 2022, “the whole industry was tarnished,” recalls Coinbase COO Emilie Choi. “Politicians came out criticizing crypto, saying it was a fraud.”

But unlike FTX, Coinbase was a public company in the U.S. So when the SEC served it a Wells notice, announcing its intent to charge the company with violating securities laws, the executive team took an unusual step: They went on the offensive, publicly calling BS on the agency.

“Well-regarded CEOs from TradFi, they were like, ‘You don’t do that,’” Emilie says. “’You don’t antagonize your regulator.’ ... It was a combination of chutzpah and maybe desperation that we were like, ‘We have to go tell our story, because if we don’t, nobody else will.’”

Chapters:

(01:14) - Working with founder CEOs
(04:12) - Mission first
(07:16) - Reviewing candidates
(09:48) - Unusual hiring
(11:22) - Crypto after FTX
(16:29) - Operation Choke Point 2.0
(19:19) - Grin and bear it
(21:24) - Channeling negativity
(24:21) - Going to war with the SEC
(26:20) - Donald Trump and Gary Gensler
(28:38) - Was it worth it?
(31:19) - Shipping challenges
(34:03) - OKRs and personal goals
(36:41) - Brian Armstrong and structure
(40:56) - The COO guidebook
(43:30) - Removing bureaucracy
(46:50) - Investing in crypto
(49:41) - After Coinbase
(53:03) - Constantly on
(54:53) - Favorite interview questions
(56:28) - Who Coinbase is hiring
(58:28) - Standing for something

Mentioned in this episode: Google Chat, executive coaches, Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, speed reading, Warner Bros., Elizabeth Warren, Sam Bankman-Fried, Wells notices, Paul Grewal, Chris Lehane, Airbnb, OpenAI, FOIA requests, Balaji Srinivasan, Dan Romero, Kevin Scott, Microsoft, Patrick McHenry, Ritchie Torres, Fairshake PAC, A16z, Ripple, Stand With Crypto, Dogecoin, Robinhood, Charles Schwab, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Paul Ryan, Faryar Shirzad, Kara Calvert, Elon Musk, Earn.com, Ben Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures, Claire Hughes Johnson and Scaling People, Directly Responsible Individuals, Fidelity, BlackRock, Yahoo!, Stewart Butterfield, Brad Garlinghouse, Alibaba, Flickr, cognitive tests, and Loom.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#225 CEO Lattice, Sarah Franklin: Trailblazer

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:30:00 -0800

Guest: Sarah Franklin, CEO of Lattice

As the CEO of a growing company, Lattice’s Sarah Franklin has learned that one of her most important contributions is taking a leap of faith. “You have to have the courage to be the first one to do it,” she says,” and to show that it can be done, and to pave the way so that then your team feels trust.”

Sarah cautions, though, that sometimes courage is deciding to stop and go a different direction. As agentic AI becomes more common, the people building companies like Lattice should look to the “cautionary tales” of how social media and mobile phones have changed society, she says.

“We can have the courage to say, what are the outcomes that we want to prevent? Or what are the outcomes that we want to make sure happen? This all takes, courage, because it’s all unknown.”

Chapters:

(01:14) - Schooling in Mexico
(04:09) - Raising brave children
(10:28) - Sarah’s upbringing
(13:29) - The pursuit of money
(16:23) - Measuring success
(19:28) - Learnings, not regrets
(22:55) - Make an impact
(26:44) - Pitching Trailhead
(32:56) - Elevating a B2B company
(35:27) - How to colonize Mars
(38:39) - Marketing, the Salesforce way
(44:21) - Dolphining and truth-tellers
(50:56) - Renewed purpose
(56:30) - The challenges of being CEO
(01:00:18) - Pave the way
(01:03:25) - “Humanizing AI”
(01:06:57) - Handling controversy
(01:11:04) - Who Lattice is hiring and what “grit” means to Sarah

Mentioned in this episode: FaceTime, Salesforce, Marc Benioff, Mahatma Gandhi, Instagram, the Fortune 500, Java, Jerry Maguire, National Parks, Nike, Michael Jordan, Apple and “Think Different,” Sara Varni, Scott Holden, Andy Kofoid, Databricks, Datadog, Behind the Cloud, Oracle, Microsoft, Elon Musk, Amazon AWS, George Hu, Mike Rosenbaum, Cheryl Feldman, Zac Otero, Guidewire Software, AI agents, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and LinkedIn.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#224 CTO & Co-Owner 37signals, David Heinemeier Hansson: Perfect Flow

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:30:00 -0800

Guest: David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO & co-owner of 37signals and creator of Ruby on Rails

37signals CTO David Heinemeier Hansson has organized his life around his passions: Writing, racing sports cars, and coding. “ Why aren't we all doing that?” he wonders. “Why aren't we all trying to optimize our life in such a way that much of it is enjoyable?”

Part of the problem, David argues, is that it’s impossible to find a creative or productive flow inside of mainstream work culture. Open offices, managerial over-hiring, and sloppy scheduling prevents people from reaching a flow state.

“40 hours a week is plenty than most people,” he says. “... So many people today are focused on just adding more and more hours. They're not thinking about how those hours are spent.”

Chapters:

(01:19) - 24 Hours of Le Mans
(06:48) - Amateurs in sports car racing
(10:54) - Flow and meditation
(15:25) - Mundane bulls**t
(18:14) - Optimizing for flow
(21:09) - Calendars and open offices
(24:30) - Full-time managers
(29:06) - Small companies
(32:20) - Selfishness and work
(40:21) - Taking other people’s money
(45:43) - Temptation
(49:49) - Moderately rich
(55:19) - “The day I became a millionaire”
(58:56) - The hassle
(01:03:58) - Achieving the dream
(01:08:34) - Shopify and Tobias Lütke
(01:14:50) - Trade-offs and downsides
(01:18:43) - The impact of Ruby on Rails
(01:22:02) - “I love being wrong”
(01:25:37) - DEI and illegal drugs
(01:29:49) - Not hiring
(01:30:35) - What “grit” means to David

Mentioned in this episode: TikTok, Minecraft, Mario Kart, Formula One, NASCAR, Lewis Hamilton, the NBA, Tesla Model S, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Steve McQueen, Jason Fried, Tetris, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber, Elon Musk and Twitter, the Dunbar number, Zappos, Google, Adam Smith, Stripe, Meta, Jeff Bezos, Basecamp, Zapier, 1Password, GitHub, SpaceX, private jets, Aesop, the Pagani Zonda, the Porsche Boxster, Lamborghini, Coco Chanel, LeBron James, Hey, Steve Jobs, Michael Arrington and TechCrunch, Y Combinator, Dr. Thomas Sowell,Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn, Grit by Angela Duckworth, and LEGO.

Links:

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#191 CEO & Co-Founder Intercom, Eoghan McCabe: Second Beginning
#209 Former President & CEO Ford, Mark Fields: All Cylinders
#203 CEO Niantic, John Hanke: Buried Ships
#212 Founder Magic Leap & SynthBee Rony Abovitz: Underdog
#202 Chairman of Qualcomm, Mark McLaughlin: The Right Pitch
#189 Co-Founder Watershed, Taylor Francis: Worthy Missions

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#223 Great Stories and Gritty Advice for 2025

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 08:56:21 -0800

On this special episode of Grit, we look back at some of the coolest stories and best advice our guests have shared in 2024.

Chapters:

(00:49) - David Risher on his Amazon easter egg & moving on
(07:02) - Jason Kilar on bouncing between relevance & irrelevance
(15:13) - Eoghan McCabe on "re-founding" the company he started
(22:59) - Mark Fields on battling with Trump & running to the fire
(29:41) - John Hanke on intensity and balance
(38:00) - Rony Abovitz on whether losing he's bitter about losing Magic Leap to COVID
(47:42) - Mark McLaughlin on sacrificing personal time
(57:39) - Taylor Francis on building culture

Listen to all of these episodes:
#201 CEO Lyft, David Risher: The Ride
#214 Former CEO Hulu & WarnerMedia Jason Kilar: No Labels

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#222 CEO San Francisco Giants, Larry Baer: Winning Plays

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:30:00 -0800

Guest: Larry Baer, CEO of the San Francisco Giants

In 1992, Larry Baer was part of the ownership group that bought the San Francisco Giants and successfully prevented the team from being moved to Tampa, Florida. Back then, they had a big problem to solve: An old, uncomfortable ballpark that voters wanted to see replaced, but didn’t want to pay for.

20 years after the construction and financial success of Candlestick Park’s replacement, Oracle Park, Baer — now the CEO of the Giants — embarked on an even bigger project, developing an entire neighborhood near Oracle called Mission Rock. “We’re in the baseball business, but really, we're in the media, entertainment, sports, real estate business,” he says.

Chapters:

(01:05) - Growing up a fan
(04:37) - Larry’s dad
(07:28) - Stopping the move
(13:28) - The Giants in 1992
(15:18) - “What am I doing here?”
(19:31) - Hiring with urgency
(23:34) - Last out to first pitch
(27:45) - Buster Posey
(30:13) - The Candlestick problem
(36:36) - Making a new stadium
(43:00) - Always hungry
(45:01) - Becoming CEO
(49:52) - Homegrown talent
(52:55) - The Mission Rock neighborhood
(57:27) - Revitalizing San Francisco
(01:03:20) - “It all starts here”
(01:07:20) - What Oracle Park means
(01:09:52) - What “grit” means to Larry

Mentioned in this episode: Barry Bonds, Candlestick Park, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, Josh Harris, Larry and Bob Tisch, CBS, Peter Magowan and Safeway, Charles Schwab, Don Fisher, Bill Hewlett, Arthur Rock, Charles Johnson, Harmon Burns, Bank of America, Walter Shorenstein, Dianne Feinstein, Bob Lurie, Bobby Bonds, Dennis Gilbert, Roger Craig, Al Rosen, Dusty Baker, Bob Quinn, Brian Sabean, George Steinbrenner, Bob Lillis, Matt Williams, Greg Johnson, the 1994 baseball strike, Chase Manhattan Bank, Warren Hellman, Jimmy Lee, Pacific Bell, Coca-Cola Company, J.T. Snow, Jeff Kent, Bill Neukom, Brandon Crawford, Brandon Belt, Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, Madison Bumgarner, Sergio Romo, Hunter Pence, Marco Scutaro, Joseph Lacob and the Golden State Warriors, Tishman Speyer, Al Kelly, Ryan McInerney, Visa, Che Fico, Arsicault, Trick Dog and Josh Harris, the Chase Center, Sam Altman and Open AI, Anthropic, Daniel Lurie, Salesforce and Dreamforce, Imagine Dragons, Pink, the Moscone Center, and Billy Crystal.

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#221 CEO & Chairman Sony Pictures, Tony Vinciquerra: Into the Fire

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:30:00 -0800

Guest: Tony Vinciquerra, outgoing CEO of Sony Pictures

Tony Vinciquerra never planned to get into the entertainment business, let alone to become one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. After seven years, he’s about to leave the CEO role at Sony Pictures (although he will stay on as chairman for one more year) and attributes much of his success to luck: “I’ve been in the right place at the right time a lot of times.”

That said, he also encourages his children to proactively be curious, something that has served Tony well across his whole career. “I don’t have as deep an education as many of the people that [I] compete with,” he says. “So I try to make up for that by knowing what’s going on and being more curious ... working harder at it and being more — I don’t know what the right word is, but sucking more information in, all the time.”

Chapters:

(00:54) - The perks of being a studio boss
(03:38) - Hulu and Peter Chernin
(06:41) - Fox Television
(10:03) - Building relationships
(13:37) - Not retiring
(15:34) - Fixing Sony
(23:29) - Intellectual property
(26:58) - Juggling and baseball
(29:30) - Setbacks and cable networks
(34:58) - The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes
(37:22) - AI and replacing writers
(39:46) - Adapting to new tech
(44:38) - Changing consumer behavior
(49:25) - Sports media and live TV
(55:31) - Bad days
(58:57) - Tony’s family
(01:02:47) - Looking back
(01:05:04) - Proactive curiosity
(01:07:33) - What “grit” means to Tony

Mentioned in this episode: Jason Kilar and Warner Bros., Jeff Zucker, John Waldron and Goldman Sachs, FX, Drayton McLane, Netflix, Variety, PlayStation, Spider-Man, Tom Rothman, CBS and Paramount, Comcast and NBC, Disney, Mike Hopkins, Amazon Prime, Funimation, Crunchyroll, Breaking Bad, The Last of Us, HBO, Uncharted, WBZ-TV, the Game Show Network, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, Joker: Folie à Deux, Miramax, Here, Tom Hanks, Venom: The Last Dance, Michael Ovitz, Sam Altman and OpenAI, Pixomondo, Neal Mohan and YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, DirecTV and AT&T, NFL Sunday Ticket, Qualcomm, the New York Knicks, the Golden State Warriors, Larry Baer and the San Francisco Giants, Major League Baseball, Walmart and Vizio, Madame Web, Capital Cities, Mark McLaughlin, and Mark Fields and Ford.

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#220 Former CEO Amazon Worldwide Consumer, Jeff Wilke: Exponential

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:30:00 -0800

Guest: Jeff Wilke, former CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer and chairman of Re:Build Manufacturing

Jeff Wilke worked more than 20 years at Amazon, overseeing the million-person team that speedily gets packages from warehouses to doorsteps. In hindsight, he observes that Amazon Prime’s exponential growth was actually an incremental daily process.

“I used to say things like, ‘If God was running this plant, whoever is your God ... they can’t violate physical laws. How well would they do?’ And then we know where we are,” Jeff says.

“If we’re perfect in it, compounding over all this time, we’re going to get there. But when you’re in the middle of it, it can feel almost impossible.”

Chapters:

(01:37) - Grit and longevity
(02:24) - Flow state
(07:29) - Refining mental models
(12:29) - The ivory tower and the shop floor
(16:49) - Gnarly holidays
(20:41) - Identifying grit
(24:28) - Reflecting and learning
(27:36) - Christmas 2000
(31:06) - The duplicate bug
(34:01) - Incremental progress
(38:36) - Prime Video
(43:05) - Organizing the day
(46:42) - Amazon’s leaders
(49:55) - The Whole Foods acquisition
(53:33) - Amazon Fashion
(59:54) - The great Kindle battle
(01:02:40) - How to work with Jeff Bezos
(01:05:11) - Leaving Amazon
(01:09:48) - Re:Build Manufacturing
(01:14:35) - What “grit” means to Jeff

Mentioned in this episode: Peloton, Andy Jassy, Daniel Kahneman, Zoom, Allied Signal, Toyota and the Gemba Walk, MacKenzie Scott, Bob Thomas and Crucibles of Leadership, David Risher, Toys “R” Us, Amazon Prime, Jeff Blackburn, Louis Pasteur, Netflix, Bill Carr, Steve Kessel, Larry Bossidy, Rick Dalzell, West Point, John Mackey, Liesl Wilke, Tony Hsieh, the Met Gala, Anna Wintour, the Pittsburgh Steelers, Tim Tebow, the New York Jets, Shopbob, Gucci, Zara, Cathy Beaudoin, Walmart, Dave Clark, John Doerr, Bill Baumol, and Bing Gordon.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#219 CEO Tanium, Dan Streetman: Critical Responsibility

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:30:00 -0800

Guest: Dan Streetman, CEO of Tanium

A graduate of West Point who served in Iraq combat operations, Tanium CEO Dan Streetman can’t help but compare his business career to his military experience. Understanding huge structures and processes is a crucial skill at both Tanium and in the Army, he says, as are the skills for aligning people around a shared mission.

“Before you go on an operation, you write a thing called an operations order ... [and] one of the most important things at the operations order is this paragraph called the commander's intent,” he explains, “which describes how you believe the mission is going to be accomplished and why it's important.”

“You may end up doing something completely different. But as long as you understand the mission and the commander's intent, the organization can do amazing things.”

Chapters:

(01:05) - Election Day
(02:44) - Ranger School
(06:42) - Parenting and business school
(09:59) - Military structures
(12:27) - Serving in Iraq
(15:59) - Back to normal life
(21:37) - Working out
(24:14) - Quality sleep
(26:37) - Non-founder CEOs
(31:35) - Getting the job
(35:56) - Earning respect
(38:49) - TIBCO
(43:40) - Redline
(46:37) - Going public
(53:54) - Time horizons
(58:35) - Free AI
(01:03:11) - Whar “grit” mans to Dan
(01:03:40) - Who Tanium is hiring

Mentioned in this episode: Ronald Reagan, Terri Streetman, Ironman Triathlons, Jeff Bezos and Amazon, Stanley McChrystal, Jon Abizaid, Charles Jacoby, Thomas Siebel and C3, Salesforce, Bill McDermott, Carl Eschenbach, Marc Benioff, Garmin, Mark McLaughlin, Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke, World Series of Poker, Amdocs, David and Orion Hindawi, Citrix, Harvard University, Pets.com, Ben Horowitz, Vista Equity Partners, Vivek Ranadivé, Robert Smith, Operation Warp Speed, BreakLine, Bipul Sinha and Rubrik, Mikhail Gorbachev, F. Scott Fitzgerald, OpenAI and ChatGPT, and Google.

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#218 CEO Etsy, Josh Silverman: Second Acts

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:30:00 -0800

Guest: Josh Silverman, CEO of Etsy

When Josh Silverman joined the board of Etsy, he had one condition: “Don’t ask me to the be the CEO.” And technically, they didn’t ask. One day, he got a phone call informing him the board had elected him as the new CEO, just days before an earnings miss. He knew the odds were against him — layoffs would be necessary, and “I was going to have to be the villain” — but decided to say yes out of a sense of duty to Etsy’s users and workers. “If I can be helpful, I have a responsibility to do it,” Josh says.

Chapters:

(00:55) - Energy management
(02:42) - Meetings
(09:56) - Etsy’s strategy
(13:36) - Learning to delegate
(17:10) - Setting an example
(24:17) - Evite’s rise and fall
(27:46) - Self vs. company
(30:22) - Legacy
(34:21) - Control and agency
(37:44) - Joining Etsy’s board
(40:40) - Becoming CEO
(46:16) - Culture shock
(48:09) - “We need you, trust us”
(51:25) - eBay and Skype
(57:15) - Pushed out
(01:00:40) - Accountability and family
(01:03:53) - Time horizons
(01:05:55) - Gen AI-supported art
(01:08:29) - Who Etsy is hiring and what “grit” means to Josh

Mentioned in this episode: Ken Chenault and American Express, Nick Daniel, Rachana Kumar, Ticketmaster and IAC, Etsy Studios, Silverlake, Shopping.com, Google, Microsoft, and Austin City Limits.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#217 CEO & Co-Founder Codeium, Varun Mohan w/ Leigh Marie Braswell: Limitless

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:30:00 -0800

Guests: Varun Mohan, CEO & Co-Founder of Codeium; and Leigh Marie Braswell, partner at Kleiner Perkins

“A lot of people are really bad at knowing what good is,” says Codeium CEO Varun Mohan. Specifically, he’s thinking of startups that hire based on a “logo” — a well-known company on the résumé — rather than exceptional talent. Codeium is based in Mountain View, CA, and Varun believes that it’s incumbent on any new startup to hire in the San Francisco Bay Area, because of how exceptional talent is concentrated there.

“When you hire someone that’s 10x better,” he says, “you can’t replace them with 10 1x people. Because the the 10x person is going to be thinking of ideas that none of these 1x people are ever going to think of.”

Chapters:

(01:05) - Ludicrous growth
(03:54) - Seizing opportunity
(07:29) - Product-market fit
(13:05) - Scale AI & MIT
(17:42) - Coding efficiency
(22:58) - Larger companies
(25:20) - Varun and Leigh Marie’s working relationship
(29:51) - Pivoting to Codeium
(34:00) - Giving away the product
(37:01) - The code-gen landscape
(42:20) - Annual reinvention
(45:00) - Picking a problem
(47:07) - Bipul Sinha’s help
(50:43) - Ambition
(53:13) - Building in Silicon Valley
(55:11) - Spotting talent
(59:11) - Who Codeium is hiring
(59:43) - What “grit” means to Varun

Mentioned in this episode: Graham Moreno, Wiz, ChatGPT, Google, Nuro, Goldman Sachs, Waymo, the DARPA Challenge, Alex Wang, Douglas Chen, Safeway, Equinox, Carlos Delatorre and MongoDB, The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft, Exafunction, Mamoon Hamid, Figma, JPMorgan Chase, Starlink, SpaceX, Rubrik, Michael Dell, Stripe, and John Doerr.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#216 Founder Khan Academy, Sal Khan: Dangerously Curious

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 00:30:00 -0800

Guest: Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy

AI is poised to change nearly every business, but few are changing as quickly as education. And Sal Khan, who has spend more than a decade manually creating more than 7,000 educational videos, says that’s a good thing. He’s encouraged Khan Academy to focus on “disrupt[ing] ourselves ... more than almost any other organization that I know of.”

The reason is backed up by the data: Personalized tutors — designed to help students achieve mastery in a subject, but previously thought to be unscalable — could shift the educational bell curve “significantly to the right,” Sal says.

Chapters:

(00:52) - John and Ann Doerr
(05:20) - Khan Academy’s origins
(07:42) - What it is now
(12:43) - Emotional fortitude
(15:25) - Generating revenue
(19:36) - The two-sigma “problem”
(21:31) - OpenAI and Sam Altman
(24:47) - What AI can do
(27:56) - Cheating and other fears
(30:06) - Video production
(34:08) - Standardized tests
(38:36) - AI tutors’ tone
(40:22) - Not leaving the closet
(43:20) - Who Khan Academy is hiring
(45:58) - What “grit” means to Sal

Mentioned in this episode: Nasdaq, Dan Wohl, Vedic and Buddhist literature, Microsoft, Benjamin Bloom, ChatGPT, the Turing Test, Greg Brockman, Donald Trump, Bing Chat and Sydney, Khanmigo, the SAT and ACT, Schoolhouse.world, Craig Silverstein and Google, John Resig and jQuery, and Angela Duckworth.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#215 COO Rippling Matt MacInnis: Learn the Engine

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 00:30:00 -0800

Guest: Matt MacInnis, COO of Rippling

One of the most important things a non-founder can do, says Rippling COO Matt MacInnis, is to learn how to operate in the context of the company they’re joining. His CEO, Parker Conrad, “spikes” in certain skill areas, and the rest of the executive team needs to maximize his ability to thrive while “taking care of the rest of it.” Matt likened the work to being a hobbyist airplane pilot, who can’t get a license without knowing all the minute details about their plane’s engine and aerodynamics.

“You can’t be a good pilot if you don’t understand the engine, because if something goes wrong, you want to be able to troubleshoot it,” he says. “An executive coming in to fly your airplane better learn the engine.”

Chapters:

(01:08) - Telling Rippling’s story
(04:27) - Founding & failing at Inkling
(09:30) - Different types of hard
(13:55) - Discipline and stamina
(15:22) - Meeting with Steve Jobs
(19:20) - Definitely, give up!
(22:29) - Product-market fit
(27:15) - Founders and culture
(33:24) - Executive instincts
(36:06) - Talent Signal and AI
(40:06) - 150 former founders
(44:08) - Zero to one projects
(48:06) - The failure of Silicon Valley Bank
(55:25) - Routines and discipline
(59:37) - Disagreeing with Parker
(01:02:25) - Who Rippling is hiring
(01:03:37) - What “grit” means to Matt

Mentioned in this episode: Parker Conrad, London Breed, Apple, Sequoia Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Tenaya Capital, digital textbooks on iPad, Oricom, Netscape, Peter Cho, Eddy Cue, John Couch, iBooks, Slack, Airbnb, Paul Graham, Brian Chesky, “founder mode,” Larry Ellison, Ivan Zhao and Notion, Intel and ARM, Salesforce, United Airlines, LLMs, GitHub, DocuCharm, Peter Thiel, Mamoon Hamid, Expensify, Navan, Costco, Comcast, HBO’s Silicon Valley, Jensen Huang and NVIDIA, and Taylor Swift.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#214 Former CEO Hulu & WarnerMedia Jason Kilar: No Labels

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 00:30:00 -0700

Guest: Jason Kilar, former CEO & co-founder of Hulu and former CEO of WarnerMedia

When Jason Kilar was a child, he was obsessed with Walt Disney — not just as a filmmaker or the creator of Disneyland, but as an entrepreneur. He started his career at the Walt Disney Company (where else?) but then got his first opportunity to help build something new when a young startup entrepreneur from Seattle visited his business school classroom. Most of Jason’s classmates predicted the failure of this startup, Amazon.com, which elicited “this awesome laugh, the Jeff Bezos trademark laugh.” How a leader reacts to criticism or doubts, Jason learned, says a lot about their conviction and intelligence.

Chapters:

(01:08) - Bing Gordon and John Doerr
(04:11) - Warner Bros.
(06:12) - Walt Disney
(11:10) - Working at Disney
(14:32) - What makes it special
(18:31) - Meeting your heroes
(20:06) - “Walt’s folly,” Disneyland
(22:45) - Harvard and Amazon
(25:09) - Meeting Jeff Bezos
(29:10) - “Help people understand Amazon exists”
(33:25) - Amazon’s culture
(38:07) - What Warner Bros. makes
(40:55) - Obscurity and relevance
(45:53) - Feeling the lows
(50:09) - Launching Hulu
(53:36) - NewCo or ClownCo?
(59:13) - Over-communication
(01:03:14) - The future of TV memo
(01:06:46) - Innovator’s dilemma
(01:08:57) - No labels
(01:14:04) - Unfinished business
(01:16:22) - Staying present
(01:20:26) - The theatrical window
(01:26:19) - What’s next?

Mentioned in this episode: Amazon, The Matrix, Star Wars: A New Hope, Disney World, Diane Disney Miller, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Michael Eisner, Universal Studios and Harry Potter, Disney University, Jeffrey Rayport, Barnes & Noble, Joel Spiegel, David Risher, Joy Covey, Garry Trudeau and Doonesbury, Andy Jassy, Brian Birtwistle, Jim Kingsbury, Vessel and Verizon, HBO, Friends, Hogwarts Legacy, Sony, Netflix, NBCUniversal, Paramount, AT&T, Discovery, Richard Tom, Kara Swisher, Fox, YouTube and Google, Saturday Night Live, Peter Chernin, Jeff Zucker, Bob Iger, Andy Rachleff and Benchmark, CBS, Miracle on 34th Street, Marissa Mayer and Yahoo, Rony Abovitz and Magic Leap, House of the Dragon and Industry, Dune, Christopher Nolan, and the TSA.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#213 CEO & Co-Founder Loom Joe Thomas w/ Ilya Fushman: After the Exit

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 understood what it meant for his team.

“I didn't know how emotional it'd be for me,” Joe says. “All of the Loom employees, current and former, that reached out when this was announced, they did their calculation and they're like, ‘Oh my God.’ That, to me, was the most emotionally transformative part of the process. I didn't fully recognize what that would be like, on the individual front.”

Chapters:

(01:34) - The Atlassian acquisition
(05:25) - The bittersweet moment
(08:15) - Transforming Loom
(13:30) - Ilya’s perspective
(18:04) - Life-changing
(22:55) - Doing it again
(25:00) - Loom’s early days
(28:26) - The Series A
(32:33) - Turning on monetization
(35:37) - The Series B
(37:05) - Loom AI
(43:13) - Revenue orientation
(48:18) - The acquisition landscape
(52:27) - Working inside Atlassian
(54:04) - Atlanta tech
(55:00) - Who Atlassian is hiring
(55:24) - What “grit” means to Joe

Mentioned in this episode: Wilson Sonsini, Vinay Hiremath, Andrew Reed and Sequoia Capital, Zoom, Mike Cannon-Brookes, Shahed Khan, COTU Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Scott Farquhar, the Lindy Effect, SVB, Google Chrome, Dropbox, Slack, Snapchat, HubSpot, the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter, Dylan Field and Figma, Atlassian Rovo, Palo Alto Networks, Salesforce, and Garrett Langley and Flock Safety.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#212 Founder Magic Leap & SynthBee Rony Abovitz: Underdog

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 vision.”

George Lucas himself told Rony to tone it down and not “take it so literally” — but he was undeterred. The way he describes today’s leading AI powers sounds like an idealistic Rebel conceptualizing the Evil Empire.

“You’ve got companies that receive massive funding that want to take all the data in the world ... I feel that's a massive mistake,” Rony says. “We become serfs. They become the Lords. They become the Kings. I'm completely opposed to that. So I started to imagine for SynthBee what is a different form of computing intelligence, one that could help us, but have much more safety [and] human centrism.”

Chapters:

(01:12) - Fundraising
(02:27) - Meeting John Doerr
(07:05) - The Beast
(10:06) - Unfinished business
(11:47) - Apple and Meta
(15:20) - The COVID-19 pandemic
(21:12) - “Investors panicked”
(25:28) - Shaquille O’Neal vs. digital Shaq
(29:43) - Magic Leap alumni
(32:45) - Financial outcomes
(38:27) - Peggy Johnson
(40:27) - “A weird version of hell”
(44:08) - A strange intro to Google
(50:42) - Larry Page and Sergey Brin
(54:27) - Founder voting power
(01:00:40) - Mako Surgical
(01:03:04) - The 9/11 term sheet
(01:06:40) - The worst pitch ever
(01:09:55) - The 2008 IPO
(01:16:15) - Selling to Stryker
(01:18:30) - What is SynthBee?
(01:26:44) - Humility in tech
(01:31:44) - Who SynthBee is hiring

Mentioned in this episode: Scott Hassan, Bing Gordon, Chewy, Mary Meeker, Suitable Technologies and Beam, NASA, Mark Zuckerberg, Matthew Ball, NTT Docomo, Blade Runner, Wired Magazine, CES, Dow Jones, Tesla, Zoom, OpenAI and Anthropic, Adam Silver and the NBA, John Monos, the Apple Vision Pro, Madden NFL, McLaren, Satya Nadella and Microsoft, the HoloLens, Godzilla and King Kong, Willow Garage and ROS, Trading Places, Z-KAT, Frederic Moll, John Freund, Christopher Dewey, John and Christine Whitman, Sycamore Ventures, Andy Bechtelstein, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, Kevin Lobo, Muhammad Ali, Star Wars and George Lucas, Yuval Noah Harari, and Infosys.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#211 CEO & Co-Founder Klarna, Sebastian Siemiatkowski: Country Cousin

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 — so, he made up an excuse to fly to San Francisco and meet with Altman.

“I felt like, OK, this is going to be the busiest man in the world very soon,” Sebastian recalls. “When I first booked it with Sam, I think I got three hours in his calendar. By the time I arrived in San Francisco, it was down to 30 minutes.”

Chapters:

(01:02) - Workday and Salesforce
(06:01) - Rolling your own
(08:45) - AI-driven customer service
(15:33) - Automation at scale for business
(19:28) - The Toyota way
(23:40) - Sam Altman
(25:36) - Playing offense
(28:25) - Reinventing Klarna
(31:44) - The startup journey
(35:37) - Common equity
(39:28) - Champions League
(42:24) - Hype cycles
(47:35) - Sebastian’s father
(52:28) - Control and stability
(57:23) - Comfort zone vs. stretch zone
(01:02:27) - Creating resilience
(01:06:23) - Why Klarna isn’t hiring

Mentioned in this episode: OpenAI, Seeking Alpha, Slack, Workday, ChatGPT, Stripe, CRMs, Mark Benioff, Twitter, Anthropic, Waymo, Devin AI, the Collison brothers and Stripe, Pieter van der Does and Adyen, Daniel Ek and Spotify, General Atlantic, DST Global, Anton Levy, Michael Moritz, Sequoia Capital, Niklas Adalberth, PayPal, CNBC, “Under Pressure” by Queen, Boris Johnson, Elon Musk, Google, Sam Walton, Made in America, Nina Siemiatkowski, and Snoop Dogg.

Links:

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#210 CEO & Co-Founder Huntress Kyle Hanslovan w/ Ev Randle: Deep Roots

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 with VC firms.

Indeed, Kleiner Perkins partner Ev Randle recalls the deliberation Hanslovan underwent before signing KP’s term sheet. “It's pretty rare for a founder's diligence process on you to increase your conviction on them and the business that they're building,” he says. “You just saw that the effort extended across to so many different places and so many details that it's typically not.”

Chapters:

(01:03) - Learning how things work
(03:31) - Default trusting
(05:07) - Over-sharing
(10:50) - Kyle’s leadership style
(15:44) - Hiring for conflict
(19:24) - Scaling execs
(22:52) - Evaluating VCs
(28:55) - Pattern-matching
(32:13) - Why Huntress is worth $1.5 billion
(38:34) - Kyle’s childhood and early career
(42:00) - The 99 percent
(47:49) - Bootstrapping
(51:14) - Deep roots
(57:47) - Customer love
(01:01:14) - “Nothing will stop us”
(01:05:50) - Who Huntress is hiring
(01:07:22) - What “grit” means to Kyle

Mentioned in this episode: Sony, Sam Altman, Nike, Elad Gil and High Growth Handbook, Kim Scott and Radical Candor, JMI Equity, Vinod Khosla, Todd Park, Capterra, Reddit, FUBU, Rippling, the NSA, QuickBooks, Amazon AWS, and South Park.

Links:

Connect with Kyle

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#209 Former President & CEO Ford, Mark Fields: All Cylinders

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 would commute between Florida and Detroit every week, and call home for an hour every night.

“I probably communicated more with [my wife] because we were apart, than if I was there,” Mark says. “Because if I was there, I'd come home for dinner, we'd spend a little bit of time together, I'd grunt at her, and then I'd go back to my emails, and ignore the kids. Whereas, by being away, I actually had really focused time every day to talk.”

Chapters:

(01:01) - The auto business in ‘89
(05:27) - The business now
(08:47) - Ford vs. Trump
(11:44) - Becoming a leader
(17:35) - The next chapter
(20:01) - Relocating the family
(24:45) - Bring the kids to work
(29:19) - “You have one life”
(33:52) - Ego and purpose
(42:06) - Retirement adrenaline
(45:10) - Leading with passion
(48:06) - Avoiding bankruptcy
(52:55) - Grading Mark’s CEO years
(55:12) - The board
(58:32) - Electric vehicles
(01:04:50) - 24 Hours of Le Mans
(01:11:36) - Selling a $580,000 car

Mentioned in this episode: Harvard Business School, Ronald Reagan, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, CNBC, Volkswagen, American Icon, Donald Trump, Rutgers University, Mazda, Hertz, the Range Rover, Michigan University and Michigan Stadium, Mamoon Hamid, work/life balance, Mark McLaughlin and Palo Alto Networks, the Great Recession, GM, Chrysler, the North American International Auto Show, Bill Ford, Argo AI, Chariot, autonomous vehicles, Ford v Ferrari, Enzo Ferrari, the Ford GT, Jaguar Racing, and De Beers.

Links:

Connect with Mark

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#208 CEO & Co-Founder Patreon, Jack Conte: Crowd Surfer

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 God, I'm worthless,’” Jack recalls. “And you check that dashboard every day ... and eventually you start to believe that you're worth $48 a month. That's a bad f**king feeling.”

That’s why in 2013, he co-founded the artist-funding platform Patreon, and discovered that there were a lot more creators like him out there. As of 2022, those creators have earned more than $3.5 billion from Patreon.

Chapters:

(01:06) - Barriers to entry
(03:04) - The creator economy
(08:36) - Patreon’s mission
(11:22) - Its name
(13:12) - Talking to artists
(17:26) - Detail obsession
(24:07) - “Nobody has an answer”
(27:17) - Playing empty rooms
(31:09) - Success feels like failure
(33:37) - “I’ll be happy when...”
(39:26) - Type one vs type two joy
(45:32) - Self-confidence
(48:30) - Obsession, humility, and kindness
(53:51) - Figuring out your sound
(56:18) - “I’m f**king terrified”
(01:00:33) - Pedals
(01:04:04) - Starting Patreon
(01:07:04) - Who Patreon is hiring

Mentioned in this episode: Jason Kilar, Spotify, YouTube, Pomplamoose, Google Docs, GoDaddy, LaCroix, James Freeman and Blue Bottle Coffee, Woody Allen, Medium, YCombinator, Apple and the App Store, MySpace, Matthew “The Oatmeal” Inman, AdSense, Home Depot, Skrillex and Fred Again, Matt Bunting, and Sam Yam.

Links:

Connect with Jack

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#207 Co-Founder & Chairman Zynga, Mark Pincus: Speed of Play

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 to just have the instinct.

Mark says entrepreneurs like him have to quickly take multiple shots on the goal and “look for feedback loops that tell you your instinct is right ... you need to get to a minimum viable idea state and you need to find true signal around that idea state, that it’s right or wrong, and move on.”

Chapters:

(01:40) - Rubbing sticks together
(07:01) - Virtual businesses
(12:10) - Pre-Zynga companies
(13:51) - Setting the real intention
(17:44) - Internet treasures
(23:21) - Disrupting gaming
(30:14) - The chip on Mark’s shoulder
(33:19) - The end of Tribe
(37:24) - Zynga Poker
(42:59) - Explosive growth
(46:57) - Making the virtual real
(52:02) - The downturn
(58:12) - Stepping aside (sort of)
(01:01:50) - Back into the fire
(01:08:45) - In the abyss
(01:11:46) - What “grit” means to Mark

Mentioned in this episode: Dot Earth, Elon Musk and the Boring Company, Uber Eats and Dara Khosrowshahi, ChatGPT, Roblox, Madhappy, Reid Hoffman, Craigslist, Google, Napster and Sean Parker, the California Culinary Academy, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, Yahoo, John Doerr, Words with Friends, LinkedIn, Tribe.net, Supercell and Ilkka Paananen, FarmVille and Hay Day, Parker Conrad and Rippling, Bing Gordon, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, the Game Developer’s Conference, CNET, Matt Cohler, Don Mattrick, Microsoft and the Xbox, Joe Biden, Jason Citron and Discord, Steve Jobs, Super Labs, Marcus Segal, Frank Gibeau, The Courage to Be Disliked, and Stewart Butterfield.

Links:

Connect with Mark

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#206 CEO & Founder Rivian, RJ Scaringe: Electrified

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 admits that there’s a lot more pressure to not screw up. “There’s all these conflicting emotions I had ... is this the right product?” he recalls. “Is it the right strategy? Am I capable of doing this? But at the end of the day, I try really hard not to let that be overly distracting.”

Chapters:

(01:58) - Starting from scratch
(05:35) - Auto tech innovation
(08:03) - The supply chain
(09:52) - Rivian’s deal with Volkswagen
(14:28) - Outsourcing
(16:10) - Capable EVs
(19:06) - Brand and customer satisfaction
(21:05) - That nagging feeling
(27:26) - Raising capital
(31:31) - RJ’s father
(32:35) - The dark side of cars
(34:43) - Tesla’s influence
(37:13) - Financial challenges
(42:38) - Entrepreneurial mindset
(44:59) - Hard decisions
(46:46) - Don’t screw this up
(49:56) - 25,000 decisions a day
(52:16) - Daily routines
(54:57) - Who Rivian is hiring
(55:34) - What “grit” means to RJ

Mentioned in this episode: Porsche, Alex Honnold, Amazon AWS, Mercedes, Elon Musk, Lotus, U.S. News and World Report, MotorTrend, J.D. Power, Ford, Blue Origin, SpaceX, MIT, Jeff Bezos, and the Tesla Roadster.

Links:

Connect with RJ

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#205 CEO Snowflake, Sridhar Ramaswamy: Visibility

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 truthful with yourself about what is it that you know that you're really good at,” he says.

In this episode, Sridhar and Joubin discuss Morgan Stanley, working with urgency, avoiding comparisons, following your passions, Steph Curry, summer school, the Google bubble, axes of improvement, Vivek Raghunathan, Bill Coughran, Bell Labs, Mark McLaughlin, Nikesh Arora, daily emails, Chris Degnan, competitiveness, aircraft carriers, and size 31 pants.

Chapters:

(01:05) - Travel challenges
(03:55) - Crisis mangement
(08:59) - Parenting
(14:01) - Defining success
(20:37) - From Google to Neeva
(27:57) - Transition troubles
(31:06) - Glean vs. Neeva
(34:08) - Becoming Snowflake’s CEO
(38:41) - Authority
(39:58) - Frank Slootman
(44:24) - Palo Alto Networks
(48:27) - Transparent culture
(50:56) - Sridhar’s morning ritual
(54:23) - Complete visibility
(57:49) - Priorities
(01:00:10) - Snowflake’s stock price
(01:02:33) - Who it’s hiring

Links:

Connect with Sridhar

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#204 Founder & Former CEO Blue Bottle, James Freeman: After the Exit

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 much — physically, mentally, emotionally — I feel like I could be a better collaborator,” James says.

In this episode, James and Joubin discuss All About Coffee by William Ukers, Oliver Strand, performance anxiety, MongoMusic, farmers’ markets, “first touch” design, Parisian cafés, self-deception, Facebook ads, “great exits,” The Picture of Dorian Gray, “frictionless” coffee, Zeno’s Paradox, Yoda, iced oat lattes, espresso machines, The Devil Wears Prada, Steve Jobs, Angela Duckworth, and sandpaper.

Chapters:

(02:25) - Coffee is culture
(07:10) - James’ music career
(11:20) - Moving into business
(15:17) - Starting Blue Bottle
(17:55) - “Fun until it wasn’t”
(21:09) - Food vs. tech in San Francisco
(23:15) - The coffee shop experience
(29:18) - Dissatisfaction and bad management
(33:42) - Exhaustion
(36:22) - Exit
(37:39) - Anxiety and falling apart
(40:31) - Paying the bills vs. the high life
(44:08) - Visiting Blue Bottle today
(46:53) - The decision to sell
(51:35) - Could he have stayed?
(54:01) - The next coffee shop(s)
(57:35) - Returning to the ring
(01:01:39) - What if it works out?
(01:03:30) - What “grit” means to James

Links:

Connect with James

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#203 CEO Niantic, John Hanke: Buried Ships

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 its first seven months. “I had a huge amount of anxiety that this is just too good to be true,” John recalls. “When are the wheels going to come off? What’s going to go wrong?”

In this episode, John and Joubin discuss San Francisco’s history, Noam Bardin, Google Street View, David Lawee, AR glasses, Field Trip and Ingress, Tsunekazu Ishihara, gaming outside, Gilman Louie, Frank Slootman, mellowing out, Thomas Kurian, Jay Chaudhry, commute burnout, daily yoga, Xerox PARC, Mark Zuckerberg, Apple Vision Pro, the history of gaming, and talking to computers.

Chapters:

(02:17) - Waze and Google Maps
(05:39) - John’s childhood heroes
(07:38) - Pokémon Go’s first week
(10:13) - Maps as a platform
(13:56) - Spinning Niantic off of Google
(17:36) - Hyperscaling
(19:05) - Finding Niantic’s mission
(22:45) - Startups and families
(24:15) - Adrenaline and gas
(30:17) - Drive without desperation
(34:42) - Negotiating with the Pokémon Company
(38:25) - Zero to a million
(41:28) - Relief and responsibility
(43:44) - Sustaining engagement
(47:18) - Enjoying the ride more
(50:57) - Rules for balance
(55:42) - Augmented reality and wearables
(01:01:38) - Social games
(01:04:14) - LLMs and the voice UI
(01:06:52) - Who Niantic is hiring

Links:

Connect with John

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#202 Chairman of Qualcomm, Mark McLaughlin: The Right Pitch

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 found success in his new career, serving as CEO of Palo Alto Networks and now chairman of the board at Qualcomm. “In hindsight,” he says, “I would tell you the worst thing that ever happened in my life was the best thing that ever happened in my life.”

In this episode, Mark and Joubin discuss semi-retirement, Palo Alto Networks, identity crises, West Point, homeschooling, self-awareness, working on the plane, Walter Reed Hospital, Nikesh Arora, Cristiano Amon, non-founder CEOs, Paul Jacobs, Verisign, reference interviews, rising to the occasion, and fortitude.

Chapters:

(00:57) - Mark’s reputation and family
(09:40) - “What am I doing?”
(14:58) - Deciding to step away
(16:55) - Overcoming work addiction
(22:15) - Mandatory sacrifice
(24:25) - Carl Eschenbach
(27:12) - The people who matter
(32:11) - Energy vs. adrenaline
(37:31) - The helicopter crash
(44:02) - Leaving Palo Alto Networks
(50:05) - Bungled CEO transitions
(54:24) - “Detox” time off
(57:32) - Waiting for the right pitch
(01:04:48) - The at-home interview
(01:08:59) - Work in perspective
(01:12:10) - What “grit” means to Mark

Links:

Connect with Mark

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#201 CEO Lyft, David Risher: The Ride

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 that turning Lyft around during one of its most difficult eras was also a call worth answering.

In this episode, David and Joubin discuss reliable exercise, pickleball, Sean Aggarwal, John Zimmer and Logan Green, return to office, Women+ Connect, reference checks, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Adam Bosworth, interracial marriages, children of divorce, powdered wigs, Barnes & Noble, the University of Washington, Barcelona, the Galapagos Islands, Amazon’s Kindle, Steve Kessel, expat talent, Bucky Moore, rideshare insurance, robo-taxis, Elon Musk, and data science.

Chapters:

(00:45) - Biking to work — and across the US
(03:44) - Lyft Bikes
(07:35) - How David became CEO
(12:18) - 14 months later...
(15:28) - Customer obsession
(17:40) - Jeff Bezos
(21:00) - Leaving Microsoft
(24:28) - Drive + empathy
(27:39) - David’s parents
(30:38) - Being straightforward
(36:20) - Loving the Work
(38:42) - Amazon’s early days
(40:49) - Bezos’ farewell easter egg
(43:44) - “What else is out there?”
(48:36) - Ariel Cohen
(49:56) - Living overseas
(53:06) - Starting Worldreader
(58:15) - The lifelong journey
(01:00:40) - Growing profitably
(01:04:09) - Waymo and driverless cars
(01:10:45) - Physical businesses at scale
(01:14:03) - Who Lyft is hiring
(01:15:19) - What “grit” means to David

Links:

Connect with David

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#200 CEO & Co-Founder Together AI, Vipul Ved Prakash w/ Bucky Moore: Super Cycle

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 you look at the next 10 years or the next 20 years, we are doing maybe 0.1 percent of [the] AI that we’ll be doing 10 years from now.”

In this episode, Vipul, Bucky, and Joubin discuss startup table stakes, Tri Dao, tentpole features, open-source AI, non-financial investors, Meta Llama, deep learning researchers, WeWork, “Attention is All You Need,” create vs. capture, Databricks, Docker, scaling laws, Ilya Sutskever, IRC, and Jordan Ritter and Napster.

Chapters:

(00:53) - Executive hiring
(04:40) - How Vipul and Bucky met
(06:54) - Six years at Apple
(08:19) - Together and the AI landscape
(12:47) - Apple’s deal with OpenAI
(14:27) - Open vs. closed AI
(17:32) - Nvidia GPUs and capital expenditures
(22:48) - Fame and reputation
(24:17) - Planning for an uncertain future
(27:00) - Stress and attention
(30:18) - AI research
(34:58) - Challenges for AI businesses
(39:02) - Frequent disagreements
(43:05) - Vipul’s first startups, Cloudmark and Topsy
(47:55) - Taking time off
(50:09) - The crypto-AI connection
(53:20) - Who Together AI is hiring
(54:37) - What “grit” means to Vipul

Links:

Connect with Vipul

Connect with Bucky

Connect with Joubin

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#199 CEO & Co-Founder Klaviyo, Andrew Bialecki: High Slope

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 explains. “You know, ‘I'm not a good writer’ or ‘I'm not good with numbers.’ And it's like, well, OK, but anybody can learn anything.”

In this episode, Andrew and Joubin discuss WeCrashed, Paul Graham, vertical integration, automating sales, Ed Hallen, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, child prodigies, interview questions, public speaking and decompression, taking ownership, hiring engineers, burnout, and productivity habits.

Chapters:

(00:51) - Klaviyo's office
(02:36) - Attention to detail
(06:32) - Big decisions
(12:23) - What Klaviyo does
(14:50) - Its 2023 IPO
(20:35) - The founding story
(25:06) - Nature or nurture?
(28:47) - Science and hockey
(31:02) - Hiring for slope
(33:57) - Extroversion
(37:00) - Culture as product
(39:53) - Owning your success
(46:24) - “The algorithms of humanity”
(50:55) - Why Andrew runs
(52:35) - Sports psychology for startups
(55:34) - Richard Feynman
(58:27) - Who Klaviyo is hiring
(59:20) - What “grit” means to Andrew

Links:

Connect with Andrew

Connect with Joubin

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#198 CEO & Co-Founder Wayfair, Niraj Shah: Homeward

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 to pursue something more traditional.” But the “if you enjoy that” bit really matters: Whenever he’s counseling younger people, Niraj tells them to pursue something they’re genuinely excited about. Otherwise, “it’s going to be very hard for you to do your best work.”

In this episode, Niraj and Joubin discuss shopping malls, employee discounts, working in Boston, family time, Jay Chaudhry, Cornell University, pursuing what you enjoy, fostering trust, family vacations, over-hiring corporate staff, taking market share, the power of ecommerce, ownership mentality, setting priorities, and rapid hiring.

Chapters:

(00:51) - Wayfair’s first retail stores
(05:35) - Buying from other stores
(08:59) - Immigrant entrepreneurship and Niraj’s dad
(12:57) - Building the flywheel
(15:32) - Structuring your calendar
(17:59) - Success and attention
(21:47) - Niraj’s first business
(25:54) - His co-founder, Steve Conine
(29:58) - Wayfair’s operations and the COVID surge
(33:52) - The home goods market
(37:50) - Optimizing SKUs
(41:21) - Specializing, focusing, and problem-solving
(44:42) - Sustainable work ethic
(48:05) - AI and personalization
(52:42) - Who Wayfair is hiring
(53:56) - What “grit” means to Niraj

Links:

Connect with Niraj

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This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#197 CEO, Chairman & Founder Zscaler, Jay Chaudhry: No Attachment

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 was no feeling of ‘I must buy this, buy this.’ ... And it hasn’t changed a bit.” Perhaps surprisingly, he says not caring about money is one of the big reasons for his financial success: With no attachment to money, “I could take risks.”

In this episode, Jay and Joubin discuss startup “gambling,” Jay’s wife Jyoti, scarcity and risk, wasting time, “bonding walks,” family vacations, self-confidence and self-criticism, gardening, seven-minute aerobics, Marc Andreessen and Netscape, and IBM.

Chapters:

(01:54) - Selling SecureIT to Verisign
(06:49) - Jay’s humble beginnings
(09:12) - The worst way to describe him
(11:42) - Working harder than ever
(14:15) - Authenticity and selflessness
(16:36) - Family time
(18:53) - Happy childhood
(21:33) - Setting an example
(24:48) - Customer meetings
(27:30) - Conviction and execution
(31:07) - Do your best
(33:16) - Turning off your brain
(38:23) - Getting experience
(40:17) - Who Zscaler is hiring
(41:12) - What “grit” means to Jay

Links:

Connect with Jay

Connect with Joubin

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

#196 CEO & Co-Founder Braze, Bill Magnuson: Principles of Change

Kleiner Perkins — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:30:00 -0700

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 technology.” In other words, the question is not business opportunity or scale: It’s capability.

In this episode, Bill and Joubin discuss earnings days, Aaron Levie, MIT, customer churn, shower thoughts, technical co-founders, lacking context, AGI, “hands on keyboard,” the T-Mobile G1, app marketing, the 2008 financial crisis, Bob Iger, World War II, Peter Reinhardt, Watershed, and international offices.

Chapters:

(00:51) - Morning people
(05:09) - What Braze does
(06:59) - From CTO to CEO
(08:17) - Waking up and commuting
(10:49) - Leading vs. engineering
(12:35) - Cognizant of believability
(19:52) - LLMs and the human brain
(25:46) - The AI ceiling
(28:43) - The historic deployment of smartphones
(37:58) - The benefits of youth
(40:18) - Taking the leap
(43:35) - Read more sci-fi
(46:38) - Survivor bias
(48:55) - Big risks at scale
(52:30) - Who Braze is hiring around the world
(55:32) - What “grit” means to Bill

Links:

Connect with Bill

Connect with Joubin