Revenue Execution: Defining the Standard for Revenue Excellence

In this week’s episode, we’re changing things up a bit. Accord co-founder & CPO Ryan Rich interviews our host (and his brother) Ross about the key takeaways, lessons, and advice from our guests throughout Season One: Founder’s Journey. Get the full roundup of founder advice on our blog: https://inaccord.com/from-vendorship-to-partnership/season-1-founders-journey-episode-13-season-recap

In the final founder interview of Season 1, Ross talks to Joe Garafalo, COO & Co-Founder of Mosaic! Listen for insights on Joe's founding story about building Mosaic, and his advice to his past self. About Joe: Joe is Co-Founder and COO of Mosaic, a software startup building the first Strategic Finance Platform. He began his career in the Big 4 with KPMG and went on to hold multiple leadership positions in finance at Palantir, Axoni, and Barkbox before founding Mosaic. Outside of work, Joe enjoys traveling, learning about capital markets and cryptocurrency, playing poker, and spending time with family and his dog, Coconut.

In this week’s episode of Founder’s Journey, Ross talks to Lauren Dai, COO & Co-Founder of Cocoon!  After spending 4+ years building the growth organization at Stripe, Lauren started Cocoon to help simplify the complicated financial problem of managing employee leave: from compliance & guidance to claims & payroll.  Learn about Lauren’s journey building Cocoon, including defining the problem to solve, winning their first 10 customers, and her relationship with co-founders Amber Feng & Mahima Chawla.  About Lauren:  Lauren is the COO & co-founder of Cocoon, the platform that makes managing employee leave instant, simple, and big-hearted for HR teams and employees alike. With Cocoon, employees can design their leave plan in private, notify HR when they’re ready, and rest easy knowing that all their paperwork will be submitted for them. Employers don’t have to lift a finger when it comes to compliance, claims, or payroll calculations. Prior to starting Cocoon, Lauren was integral to building the growth organization at Stripe.

In this week’s episode of the From Vendorship to Partnership podcast, Ross talks to Tyler Gaffney, CEO of ZenHub. Tyler has spent more than a decade in and around startups, including running a consultancy to help early stage businesses figure out how to go to market. One of his clients was Axiom Zen, which had started ZenHub as an internal tool initially, but it ended up gaining a lot of organic traction and became its own business. Tyler was drawn to ZenHub’s exciting growth and leadership team, and was invited to join full-time as CEO about three years ago. Listen to the full episode to hear about Tyler’s learnings from leading ZenHub and his advice to other founders, including paying attention to product-market fit over time, not falling into the trap of what you know best, and being willing to ask the tough questions. About Tyler and ZenHub: Tyler Gaffney is the CEO of ZenHub, Founder of Entrepid Partners, and former VP of Sales at WePay. ZenHub enables software teams at startups and scaleups to build better code, faster by providing a developer-friendly productivity management platform. ZenHub is the leading team productivity management suite in GitHub and is trusted by teams at over 6,900 companies and open source projects to help them work together to ship great code.

In this week’s episode of Founder’s Journey, Ross talks to Bar Geron, co-founder of Balance, the B2B eCommerce checkout platform. Bar met his now co-founder, Yoni Shuster, when they were both working at PayPal. Since he wanted to learn how to build things, Bar began (and ended) a couple of startups before he and Yoni landed on the concept that would become Balance – with the goal of turning the online B2B payment experience from painful to delightful. Listen to the full episode to hear about Bar’s insights and advice, including the importance of relationships between your founding team, getting it right before you scale & add new channels, and feeling comfortable with thinking long-term. About Bar:  Bar Geron is co-founder & CEO at Balance, YCombinator alum, and a proud Israeli. 🇮🇱 Balance was built to make B2B payment awesome for the B2B eCom space. Prior to Balance, Bar founded Q.AI, a data infrastructure company to solve bottlenecks to see a physician, and spent 4+ years in fintech including PayPal and high-growth startups.

In this week’s episode of From Vendorship to Partnership, Ross talks to Lisa Wallace, co-founder of Assemble. Assemble is a compensation management platform that enables companies to make strategic, equitable compensation decisions. Lisa started her career at a couple early-stage cybersecurity startups, where she and her now co-founder, Enrique Esclusa, were struck by how difficult it was to manage compensation even at a small company, and to ensure that everyone was being compensated fairly. That led them down the path to starting Assemble together. Listen to the full episode to hear about Lisa’s journey with Assemble. About Lisa: Lisa Wallace is a Co-Founder of Assemble. Assemble is a compensation management platform that helps companies make systematic compensation decisions to attract, motivate, and retain employees while eliminating inequitable pay. Prior to founding Assemble, Lisa served on the executive team of Abnormal Security where she was the first business leadership hire. She started her career as the first business hire at Expanse (acquired by Palo Alto Networks) and holds a B.S. from Stanford University.

In this week’s episode of From Vendorship to Partnership, Ross talks to Job van der Voort, CEO and co-founder of Remote. A neuroscientist in his past life, Job eventually landed as VP of Product at GitLab, which was ahead of the game in working fully remotely. He experienced firsthand the challenges that come with hiring employees around the world, and that led to him launching Remote as a solution. Listen to the full episode to hear about Remote’s fast growth and Job’s learnings along the way.

In this week’s episode of From Vendorship to Partnership, Ross talks to Kris Rudeegraap, CEO & co-founder of Sendoso. During his time as a salesperson at Talkdesk, Kris wanted to differentiate himself when building rapport with prospects and customers. He’d send handwritten notes and quirky gifts from Amazon, and his prospects loved it – but it wasn’t scalable. So he set about building a solution himself. Sendoso is now the leading sending platform and integrates with dozens of marketing, sales, and operations tools. Listen to learn about Kris’ journey building and scaling Sendoso, including: Validating the MVP How he got his first “real” customers The importance of recruiting early

In this week’s episode of From Vendorship to Partnership, Ross talks to Gil Allouche, the founder of Metadata! As a software engineer turned data-driven B2B marketer, Gil’s technical background fueled his idea of using AI and data to laser-target marketing. After sharing the concept with a group of CMOs who then all wanted to work with him, Gil knew he was onto something. He officially changed his LinkedIn title to “Founder” and Metadata was born! Watch the full episode to learn: The importance of building & selling in tandem Why founders should sell Metadata’s growth & what comes next

In this episode of From Vendorship to Partnership podcast, Ross interviews Pete Kazanjy, Founder of Atrium, a data-driven sales management platform that empowers sales managers to improve team performance. After Pete’s previous startup was acquired he assumed going to a larger company that they’d have sales and GTM processes fine-tuned and instrumented, but realized that wasn’t the case. After many conversations he realized the problem was widespread: there wasn’t an easy way to use data to build a scalable GTM process. There was too much math and manual setup required, and sales leaders were relying on sales ops or other departments to collect that data. With passion for early stage GTM, he started Atrium. In this episode Pete and Ross chat about: How to win your first 10 customers and the importance of customer interviews Tips and resources for great customer discovery and building a customer advisory board The problem with NPS and looking at product usage to help provide a more holistic view of customer experience