In this discussion from our recent enterprise conference FC BUILD, Ashu interviews Databricks founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi. A rather unconventional company, Databricks began as an open-source project at UC Berkeley that moved into the commercial space after the team realized its impact. Ali and Ashu discuss commercializing an open-source project, identifying product-market fit, and optimizing go-to-market.

How to Commercialize Open Source (Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder & CEO of Databricks)

In this session from our FC BUILD conference, Ashu interviews two billion-dollar founders. When it comes to scaling management, engineering culture, and anticipating future markets, Cloudflare COO Michelle Zatlyn and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are the ones to ask. Each shares a bit about their respective company’s journeys — plus, George explains how a company is like a race car!

How to Go From Idea to IPO (George Kurtz & Michelle Zatlyn)

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.

How to Scale Product-Market Fit (Rob Bernshteyn, CEO & Chairman, Coupa Software)

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.

How to Build a Decacorn (Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder & CEO of DataBricks)

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.

How to Be a One-Man C-Suite (Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks)

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.”

How to Be a SaaS Wunderkind (Christian Owens, Founder and CEO of Paddle)

Alex Bouaziz is the guest for this edition of the show. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Deel, a global payroll solution that helps businesses hire anyone, anywhere. Founded in 2019, Alex and his team have grown the company into a unicorn with almost a thousand employees in just three short years! 
 
In this conversation, he opens up about the thrills and perils of scaling Deel so rapidly: from the things he got right, like how to hire and how to foster a culture of excellence; to where he got it dead wrong, including titles and product development. Alex and Ashu hit every angle of what it takes to build an organization.

How to Build an Organization (Alex Bouaziz, Co-Founder & CEO of Deel)

Jonathan Siddharth is cofounder and CEO of Turing, the platform that helps companies source, vet, match, and manage the world's best software developers remotely. Jonathan started Turing in Foundation Capital’s offices four years ago and he’s since grown it into a $4B company.
 
On this episode of B2BaCEO, Ashu gets him to talk about how he did it: from best practices for hiring execs and communicating with investors, to the unique fundraising machine that Turing’s built, to navigating through choppy economic waters.
 
Jonathan is one of the most methodical, forward-thinking entrepreneurs active today. For four wild years, he’s been living the startup life, and fighting the founder’s fight, and embodying this show’s ideal of growing from engineer to CEO.

How to Build a Hundred-Billion-Dollar Company (Jonathan Siddharth, Co-Founder & CEO of Turing)

Beerud Sheth is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gupshup, a leading platform for cloud messaging. Prior to that he was the cofounder of what is now Upwork, a pioneer of online freelancing and remote work. Beerud took the slow and steady pace to winning the race, building two unicorns over 25 years.
 
On the show, he and Ashu draw from Beerud’s depth of experience and break down how a company can achieve capital-efficient growth in the current economic environment. They also lay out the case for why India might be the Silicon Valley of the future.

How to Grow in a Bear Market (Beerud Sheth, Co-Founder & CEO of Gupshup)

As everyone listening to this podcast knows, the release of ChatGPT last November ushered in a new age of AI and catalyzed a wave of AI startups. For this episode of B2BaCEO, Ashu goes deep on AI with Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, former serial entrepreneur and investor, and current Chief Strategy Officer at Microsoft.
 
Ashu picks Bobby’s brain on what sectors and problem spaces he thinks are ripe for innovation with AI and what the opportunities for startups are. They then dissect the four layers of the AI stack, from applications to platforms to infrastructure to models. Lastly, they talk about flavors of artificial intelligence beyond large language models.
 
If you’re a founder or executive who wants to understand the AI moment and all the opportunities it holds for enterprises and society — listen to this conversation.

How to Capture the AI Moment (Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, Chief Strategy Officer at Microsoft)

If you’re not hardcore about AI, then stop the podcast now — because this episode for real technology nerds. Ashu’s guest is Matei Zaharia, CTO and cofounder of Databricks, and a professor of computer science at Stanford University. 
 
Ashu and Matei cover a lot of ground — most of it technical, all of it very relevant for anyone who’s serious about building with artificial intelligence. They start with a discussion of Databricks’ early days: how the startup established a foothold in a market dominated by entrenched incumbents and some of the challenges Matei and his cofounders faced. 
 
The rest of the conversation is all about AI. Matei breaks down the most common challenges that enterprises run into when attempting to adopt AI. He shares tips for how startups can best deploy foundation models. And he speculates on what the game-changing new use cases for AI will be over the next two years.
 
Matei also pulls back the kimono on some of the cutting-edge machine-learning research he and his team at Stanford are working on. Finally, listen to the end for a fascinating exchange about artificial intelligence beyond large language models.

How to Deploy AI in Your Company (Matei Zaharia, CTO & Co-Founder of Databricks)

My guest this month is Tracy Young, the co-founder and former CEO of PlanGrid, a productivity tool for construction companies. From going through YC and losing a co-founder to cancer, to being acquired by Autodesk for $875 million, Tracy has picked up many valuable lessons that other founders and CEOs can learn from.

Our conversation unpacks these lessons, including finding (and keeping!) product-market fit, navigating startup growing pains, showing up effectively to board meetings, and managing the emotional toll of fundraising. We also speak about Tracy’s new venture, TigerEye, and what she’s doing differently the second time around.

After having countless conversations with founders over the years, I thought I’d heard it all. Tracy proved me wrong. Her story serves as an inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs in any industry.

How to Build, Scale, and Sell a Startup (Tracy Young, Co-Founder of TigerEye & PlanGrid)

In this episode of B2BaCEO, I speak with Robert Nishihara, co-founder and CEO of Anyscale. Anyscale’s aspiration is to build the fastest, most cost-efficient infrastructure for running LLMs and AI workloads. When it is successful, Anyscale will be to the AI era what Microsoft was for the PC era: the underlying operating system on which all AI applications are developed and run.

Anyscale is built on Ray, an open-source compute framework that Robert and his co-founders developed as PhD students at UC Berkeley. Under the guidance of Professor Ion Stoica, who also co-founded Conviva and Databricks, the team sought to make distributed computing broadly accessible. Anyscale was then launched as a fully managed platform for Ray, making even the toughest problems in distributed computing easy for developers to tackle. Today, Anyscale is a billion-dollar business powering mission-critical AI use cases at companies like Amazon, Cohere, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Visa.

If you’ve been a PhD student at UC Berkeley, created a popular open-source framework, and built a billion-dollar business on top of it, you’ve likely learned a thing or two along the way. Robert’s story offers valuable lessons for fellow founders and builders at all stages of the startup journey.

How to Power the AI Boom (Robert Nishihara, Co-Founder & CEO of Anyscale)

My guest this month is Naveen Rao, the co-founder of MosaicML and current head of Generative AI at Databricks.

Naveen's journey is unique, as it echoes the evolution of AI itself. He’s best known for founding and selling two successful companies. The first, Nervana, an AI-focused chip company, was acquired by Intel for $400 million in 2016. The second, MosaicML, was acquired by Databricks in June for $1.3 billion.

In our conversation, we unpack the insights and frameworks that led Naveen to make these bets in the first place. We begin by exploring his long history in AI research and startups, from his early days at Qualcomm, his founding of Nervana, and the genesis of MosaicML.

We then turn to the complexities of the ever-changing AI landscape and go behind the scenes of MosaicML’s acquisition by Databricks. We close with Naveen’s takes on the most urgent questions in AI, including the recent tumult at OpenAI, the road to AGI, the role of regulation, and where he thinks generative AI will go next.

What struck me most is Naveen’s remarkable ability to not only anticipate the future but also actively pave the path toward it. For founders looking to navigate our current AI moment, this episode is full of valuable lessons.

How to Shape the Future of AI (Naveen Rao, VP of Generative AI at Databricks)

My guest today is Doug Winter, the founder and CEO of Seismic, a leading enterprise sales enablement platform. Today, Seismic has a team of 1,500 people and nearly $400 million in recurring revenue.

We start the conversation with Doug explaining what sales enablement actually means. From there, we turn to the early days of Seismic and unpack Doug’s approach to finding product-market fit, positioning, and targeting enterprise customers from day one. He speaks candidly about the challenges of scaling and closes with actionable advice for founders in 2024.
Fewer than 1% of B2B software companies reach Seismic’s scale. Doug’s story offers a valuable blueprint for founders with similarly audacious ambitions.

I hope you find this conversation as inspiring as I did. Let’s dive in!

(00:00) Cold open
(2:21) Doug explains what sales enablement is
(3:39) Genesis of the idea for Seismic
(7:08) Seismic's scrappy early days
(13:10) Lessons from fundraising
(18:23) Targeting large enterprises from day one
(22:32) Scaling a GTM engine
(28:23) Making proactive leadership changes
(37:12) Running great board meetings
(40:59) Impact of AI on Seismic's business
(44:42) Advice for founders starting in 2024

How to Win Your First Enterprise Customer (Doug Winter, Founder and CEO at Seismic)

My guest today is Sanjit Biswas, the co-founder and CEO of Samsara, a platform that helps companies digitize their physical operations. In 2023, Samsara reached $1 billion in ARR, making it one of the fastest startups in history to hit this milestone.

But this wasn't Sanjit's first major success. Before starting Samsara, he co-founded Meraki, a cloud networking company that Cisco acquired for $1.2 billion.

In this episode, Sanjit shares his journey from grad school research to bootstrapping Meraki in the early days. He reflects on the lessons he learned from Meraki's pivot to the enterprise, the decision to sell to Cisco, and the insights that led him to start Samsara.

We then turn to how Samsara found product-market fit, Sanjit's philosophy on allocating capital, and the areas where he believes generative AI will have the biggest impact.

It was a really fun and insightful conversation that I think you'll enjoy!

(00:00) Intro
(00:16) Sanjit's background and the genesis of Meraki
(06:25) Meraki's pivot to the enterprise and rapid growth
(09:45) Lessons from building Meraki's enterprise sales motion
(16:15) The decision to sell Meraki to Cisco
(20:05) Founding Samsara and its mission
(27:11) Samsara's organic product strategy based on customer feedback
(31:00) Samsara's unique journey to $1B in revenue
(39:16) Sanjit’s "70/20/10” framework for allocating capital
(43:13) The importance of board alignment and company culture
(50:58) Sanjit's thoughts on AI and hype cycles
(54:22) Sanjit's advice for aspiring entrepreneurs

How to Grow from Ph.D. to Two-Time Startup CEO (Sanjit Biswas, Co-Founder & CEO of Samsara)

Rodolfo Gonzalez, Partner at Foundation Capital, interviews Catheryne Nicholson, CEO and cofounder of BlockCypher, a blockchain Web services company. 

What's a "blockchain Web services company?" you ask. Turns out, it's not as boring as it sounds. In fact, it's really interesting, Brave New World technology. Think: Bitcoin and the future of fiat currency. And in this podcast Catheryne explains. 

She also tells BlockCypher's founding story, and walks us through the evolution of blockchain. Then, she and Rodolfo get big picture and discuss the potential of crypto-currencies to upend the status quo and make the world a more equitable place. 

Plus, what secret message did the universe send Catheryne to become an aerospace engineer? Listen to find out.

********

BOOKMARKS:
What the heck is a blockchain Web services company?  (00:00-02:00)
BlockCypher's founding story (02:00-07:30)
The evolution of blockchain(07:30-13:00)
The universe to Catheryne: "Major in aero" (13:00-16:00)
Cryto-currencies and a New World Order (16:00-22:00)


The world doesn’t care about Bitcoin

Jessie Woolley-Wilson, President and CEO of DreamBox, an adaptive learning company, remembers her favorite teacher:
 
"Her name was Sister Saint. Kevin. I will never forget how to diagram a sentence. And I will never forget her message. She said to me, 'I’m going to tell you something that’s very important for you to hear. People might take things away from you. They might take away friends or opportunities. But the one thing no one will ever take away from you is your education. You can distinguish yourself with your education.' That was very empowering for me."

No one will ever take your education away from you

The Way to Design - Chapter 1

The Way to Design - Chapter 2

The Way to Design - Chapter 3

The Way to Design - Chapter 4

The Way to Design - Chapter 5

The Way to Design by Steve Vassallo

The Way to Design - Prologue

Co-founder and CEO of Nutanix Dheeraj Pandey took his company from an idea to a unicorn in just five years. He tells me how he still feels like an underdog and why simple, reliable products make successful companies.
___
Nutanix is a unicorn
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2014/01/14/nutanix-101m-round-unicorn/#429b0793582a

Nutanix goes public
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/business/dealbook/ipo-values-cloud-company-nutanix-at-2-18-billion.html

Red ocean vs. blue ocean
https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/tools/red-ocean-vs-blue-ocean-strategy/

Dheeraj’s “focus, listen, respect” and “less is more” parenting advice
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-important-lessons-youve-learned-from-founding-that-youre-teaching-your-kids

How to B2B a CEO (with Ashu Garg): Dheeraj Pandey

How to Go from Underdog to Top Dog (Dheeraj Pandey, Co-Founder/CEO of Nutanix)

Co-Founder and Co-CEO of FreeWheel Doug Knopper tells me how he uses his considerable Silicon Valley experience to train the next generation of talent with his new project, CEOhacker.

___
DoubleClick acquired
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/technology/14DoubleClick.html

FreeWheel acquired
https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/01/comcast-freewheel/

Silicon Valley’s diversity problem
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/20/silicon-valleys-diversity-problem-is-its-achilles-heel.html

FreeWheel’s commitment to diversity
http://freewheel.tv/freewheel-views/engineers-week-thriving-through-diversity/

CEOhacker
https://www.ceohacker.com/

How to Nurture Executive Talent (Doug Knopper, Co-Founder/Co-CEO of FreeWheel)

Joanne Chen, Partner at Foundation Capital, and Laura Bilazarian, CEO at Teamable CEO, briefly discuss the news that Simppler, which Foundation Capital invested in at its earliest stage, is being acquired by Teamable. Foundation is also investing in Teamable's latest round. The vision of both companies is fundamentally the same: that a crowd-sourced, social networking-driven recruiting solution is a better, more precise way to find talent. Joining Simppler’s data and machine learning prowess with Teamable’s excellence in product and go-to-market execution creates a new company that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

Teamable Acquires Simppler, Joins Foundation Capital Family

Kevin Johnson led two companies in very different stages of growth. Here’s how he did it and what he looks for in new hires.

___
Ratuken buys Ebates
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ebates-m-a-rakuten/rakuten-says-to-buy-u-s-rebate-site-operator-ebates-for-1-billion-idUSKBN0H40JM20140909

Kevin Johnson becomes CEO of Udemy
https://about.udemy.com/press-releases/udemy-board-appoints-kevin-h-johnson-as-new-ceo/

Managing through influence
https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/how-to-lead-with-influence-instead-of-authority

How to Manage Through Influence (Kevin Johnson, CEO of Udemy)

Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty, puts people and relationships at the forefront of her business strategy. In this episode of the podcast, she tells me what she’s learned as a two-time CEO and how important it is to create a good company culture with diverse talent.

___
Jennifer Tejada joins PagerDuty
https://www.pagerduty.com/newsroom/pagerduty-appoints-saas-industry-veteran-jennifer-tejada-as-ceo/

PagerDuty’s IPO
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2019/04/11/pagerdutys-ipo-values-it-at-18-billion--heres-why-it-had-doubters-early-on/#492fc12632b3

Jennifer rings the NYSE opening bell
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtRKFLOHXuU

Inclusivity as good business strategy
https://www.inc.com/ryan-jenkins/here-are-benefits-of-inclusion-how-to-create-an-inclusive-culture.html

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/delivering-through-diversity

How to Create a Mission-Driven Culture (Jennifer Tejada, CEO of PagerDuty)

On this episode, we have Ali Ghodsi, cofounder and CEO of Databricks, a cloud platform for massive scale data engineering and collaborative data science.

For the first third of the podcast, Ali tells us the story of how a research project at the AMP Lab at UC Berkeley grew into Databricks. This will be of particular interest to anyone who wants to know how to commercialize open source.

After that, Ali gives listeners a crash course on how to build an early stage go-to-market machine—from how and who to hire, to how to coordinate sales and marketing, to how to execute. It's a fantastic bootcamp for startup CEOs.

How to Go to Market (Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder & CEO of Databricks)

B2B a CEO is the show about how to scale your enterprise startup and how to grow from founder to CEO. Hosted by Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital.

Popular tracks by Foundation Capital