B2BaCEO (with Ashu Garg)

On this episode, Ashu is coming to you from London, where he’s spending the summer. His guest is Christian Owens, founder and CEO of Paddle, a B2B payments infrastructure platform. Christian is a fascinating fellow. He dropped out of high school at 16 to run his first software company, which he scaled to $5 million in revenue — not a bad lemonade stand! He started his second company, Paddle, when he was 18 and, in the ten years since, he’s scaled it to a unicorn with over $55M in revenue. In this wide-ranging conversation, recorded in person at Paddle’s offices, Ashu and Christian cover everything from Christian’s brief and wondrous career, to how to scale an enterprise company when you’re starting as a complete novice, to what the current economic environment means for “growth at all costs.”

On this episode, it’s Ashu Garg vs. Ashu Garg. Our guest is his good friend Ashu Garg, who also goes by Ashutosh. Ashutosh is the founder and CEO of Eightfold, an AI-powered talent-acquisition and -management platform, where our Ashu is a board member and early investor in the company. In this conversation, the two Ashus trace Eightfold’s not-always-easy path from altruistic mission to Silicon Valley unicorn. They spend much of their time discussing how to hire the best people. And CEO Ashu shares everything he wished he knew at the beginning of his startup journey.

On this episode, Ashu’s guest is Yamini Rangan, the CEO of HubSpot. The tagline of the B2BaCEO podcast is “from engineer to CEO,” and that’s exactly the path that Yamini took. She started out as an engineer, then moved to sales, and then eventually to running go-to-market operations as an executive. Less than a year ago, Yamini became the CEO of HubSpot, under unexpected and trying circumstances, which she details in the conversation. Ashu and Yamini spend most of their time discussing how to make the transition from engineering to sales and how to build a customer-focused organization.

Nikesh Arora began his career at Fidelity Technologies, where he served as VP Finance. He then went onto T-Mobile, where he was CMO and then in 2004 joined Google, initially running Europe and was ultimately the Chief Business Officer of the company before he left in 2014. He was then president and COO of Softbank Corp before becoming CEO of Palo Alto Networks in 2018. Nikesh has held so many different functional leadership roles that it’s small wonder we’ve dubbed him the “One Man C-Suite.” On this episode, Ashu and Nikesh explore the importance of culture, and how it separates the great companies from the also-rans. Nikesh explains how he went about defining the culture at Palo Alto Networks and then translated that aspiration into reality, including how he approaches hiring.

On this episode, Ashu interviews Josh Reeves, founder and CEO of Gusto, which is reimagining payroll, benefits, and HR for modern companies. Josh joins Ashu to celebrate Gusto’s 10th anniversary. Josh explains Gusto’s atypical focus on building for “durability and accountability,” as against the usual Silicon Valley dogma of grow fast or die. He walks listeners through how he scaled the company in stages and the new muscles he had to build at each stage. Ashu delves into how Josh successfully made the transition from founder to CEO, how Josh’s leadership style evolved over time, and how has this translated to Gusto's culture.

DataBricks CEO and cofounder, Ali Ghodsi, is back on the podcast for a third time, making him the most frequent guest we’ve had on the show. On this episode, courtesy of our recent enterprise conference, FC BUILD 2021, Ali shares the founding story of Spark and DataBricks, and his own story of going from an academic to a CEO. Ali breaks down the evolution of DataBricks’ business model and the company’s go-forward vision as a broader platform for data scientists and ML engineers. And he offers advice for founders trying to build a company out of an open-source project. Ali also gets the best way for startups to engage with DataBricks. And he shares what he’s learned, from the ground up, about getting go-to-market right and converting that know-how into a $10+B company.DataBricks CEO and cofounder, Ali Ghodsi, is back on the podcast for a third time, making him the most frequent guest we’ve had on the show. On this episode, courtesy of our recent enterprise conference, FC BUILD 2021, Ali shares the founding story of Spark and DataBricks, and his own story of going from an academic to a CEO. Ali breaks down the evolution of DataBricks’ business model and the company’s go-forward vision as a broader platform for data scientists and ML engineers. And he offers advice for founders trying to build a company out of an open-source project. Ali also gets the best way for startups to engage with DataBricks. And he shares what he’s learned, from the ground up, about getting go-to-market right and converting that know-how into a $10+B company.

Dan Springer is a three-time Silicon Valley CEO. He’s currently the CEO of DocuSign, which he took public and subsequently scaled to more than $2 billion in run-rate revenue and $50+ billion in market cap. Any losers out there will want to stop listening now, because this episode is all about how to win: how to win as a CEO, how to win at go-to-market, and how to win the war for talent.

Rob Bernshteyn’s definition of product-market-fit is having “the least lines of code with the maximum amount of value and the highest willingness to pay for that value.” Rob is the CEO of Coupa, the leading business-spend management platform. He’s a product-led and metrics-driven CEO. So, naturally, this conversation is all about product and SaaS metrics. In this episode, Rob unpacks his definition of product-market fit and talks about his formula for scaling a SaaS company to a billion dollars.

This is a special bonus episode of B2BaCEO featuring one of Foundation Capital’s own CEOs, Max Simkoff. In 2016, Max founded Doma, a real estate transactions startup, out of our San Francisco office and Foundation led his Series A. Just last week, less than five years later, Doma started trading on the New York Stock Exchange.You can watch the full story of how Doma went from proof-of-concept to public company in our new video series, “Diary of a Startup."But this episode of the podcast focusses on what Max learned it takes for a FOUNDER-CEO to build a great company. Max walks us through all the critical first steps, even the seemingly trivial ones, for starting a business. He gets into the minds of VC investors and what founders need to do to really impress them. And he lays out, in no uncertain terms, who exactly is and isn’t a real entrepreneur.