Max Levchin is a serial entrepreneur with a long list of credits to his name, including being co-founder of PayPal, chairman of Yelp, board member of  Yahoo, and is currently involved in two exciting companies, Affirm, where he serves as CEO, and Glow, where he serves as chairman.

In this podcast, Max talks about hiring the right people, on true passion for an area of business, on the difficulty of building a network effects businesses, and the happiest day of an entrepreneur’s life.

Having passion for the problem: Ep 8 with Max Levchin

The importance of letting go as a leader: Ep 9 with Dheeraj Pandey

Jake Winebaum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Winebaum), founder & CEO of Brighter (www.brighter.com), a Saas-enabled dental marketplace, has been a serial entrepreneur for 35 years and throughout his career has been responsible for many successful companies. Along the way, there have been many pivots and adventures.

On this first episode of Season 2 of Chat with Champions, Jake takes us on a journey from his first startup in college to his big idea to disrupt the healthcare industry as Brighter delivers on its mission to provide transparent access to dental benefits for consumers. Brighter’s investors include Navin Chaddha/ Mayfield, Bill Gurley/Benchmark, Stewart Gollmer/Tenaya and Gabe Ling/General Catalyst.  Jake is a self-proclaimed accidental entrepreneur who co-founded LA-based incubator ecompanies, which resulted in successful startups such as Jamdat, Boingo Wireless, and Business.com, where he served as CEO.  In this podcast, Jake shares his key learnings, how hiring the right people is critical and why it’s necessary to have three careers.

The Accidental Entrepreneur: S2 Ep1 with Jake Winebaum

Manish Chandra is founder and CEO of Poshmark. As a serial entrepreneur, he also founded Kaboodle in 2005, one of the industry's first social shopping sites, that was acquired by Hearst, and prior to that, he served in executive roles at several foundational technology companies.

On this episode of Chat with Champions, Navin Chaddha welcomes Manish to discuss his journey from IT in India to Founder and CEO of Poshmark. He credits his summers with his grandfather in his wholesale shop in the bazaars of India for his entrepreneurial tendencies. Along the way, he went through two IPO’s of Enterprise software companies and helped a small software company get acquired. Manish talks about his biggest learnings, why culture is key and how critical authentic engagement is for consumer platforms.

The Kitchen Sink Cabinet: Season 2 Ep 2 Manish Chandra

Making Sense of Digital Media: Season 2 Ep 4 Jonah Goodhart

Rehan Jalil came to the US to attend graduate school and then took a job at Sun Microsystems, accidentally ending up in Silicon Valley that would be the base for the rest of his career. Recognizing that he wanted to make a positive impact on the world, he started his entrepreneurial journey by founding WiChorus, which focused on enabling 4G technologies. After it was acquired by Tellabs, Jalil went on to look for new problems to solve. Elastica was formed to innovate cloud application security. It was acquired by Blue Coat in 2015, which recently was purchased by Symantec.

In this interview, Jalil emphasizes passion and perseverance in building a company. He relates the story of how, after raising Series A funding for Elastica, a large customer told him that they would not buy what they were building. This caused Jalil to pause the company's plans while he reassessed the idea and tested it against what he felt in his gut. Out of that pause, Jalil grew strong convictions about his team, about the problem space, and about how to design a better product.

Passion cannot be Short Term: Season 2 Ep 3 Rehan Jalil

James Currier focuses on building businesses with network effects, but he builds those businesses by choosing the right people first. Currier started as a schoolboy entrepreneur, selling worms to fishermen at six and later selling boxer shorts in college. After getting started in venture capital, Currier founded a series of companies and incubators that took advantage of network effects to grow and create defensible value.

Season 2 Ep 5 James Currier

Ron Gutman began his entrepreneurial journey leading a multi-dimensional group of graduate students and faculty focusing on personalized medicine. As a result, Gutman found his passion for health care and helping people. He also recognized the need to not only engage people in their own health care but also to measurably prolong the life expectancy of humankind. 


Season 2 Ep 7: Ron Gutman

Jason Kilar’s interest in customer service was sparked by a visit to Disney World when he was 10 years old. The wonder he felt as he walked underneath the train station and out onto Main Street stays with his to this day. It was a pivot point for him, even at that young age. Eventually, Kilar would intern at Disney World and walk those same steps each night after his shift ended. “It really influenced who I was an as early manager,” Kilar shared.

Season 2 Ep 6 Jason Kilar

Amazon is hard to beat on price, selection, and convenience. So what ecommerce opportunities are left for startups? This is a question Mayfield looks at very carefully, since they've been focused on high-potential ecommerce plays. Tim Chang, Managing Director of Mayfield Fund, gives a few takeaways from their playbook.

How ecommerce startups can win against Amazon

Chat with Champions, a podcast from Mayfield. Host Navin Chaddha explores the worlds of startups and entrepreneurs as he interviews startup champions from Silicon Valley and beyond.

Chat with Champions

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