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Founder Real Talk

Author: GGV Capital

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This is Founder Real Talk, where we get real about the challenges that founders and startup executives face, and how they've grown from tough experiences. Hosted by Managing Partner Glenn Solomon.
80 Episodes
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Adam Bain is a co-founder and managing partner at 01 Advisors, a venture and advisory firm helping founders go from building a product to building a company. In this episode, Adam highlights the similarities between his storytelling roots as a journalist and how he now backs founders as an investor. Drawing on lessons learned as Twitter’s Chief Operating Officer pre- and post-IPO, Adam also shares how those key traits—intellectual curiosity, hustle, and resilience—shape the way he supports startup founders today.
Arie Zilberstein is the CEO and co-founder of Gem, a startup that’s building a Cloud Detection and Response platform for security operations teams. In this episode, Arie recalls how his experience in the Israel Defense Forces not only shaped his outlook but also introduced him to his future co-founders: CTO Ron Konigsberg and VP of Product Ofir Brukner. Together, they’re changing the way that organizations identify and stop attacks in the cloud. Tune in for Arie’s thoughts on the technology (and psychology) of managing incident response, how Gem is leveraging generative artificial intelligence, why he believes in distributed teams, and more. This episode is co-hosted by Oren Yunger, Managing Partner at GGV Capital.
CEO Tony Holdstock-Brown and CTO Dan Farrelly are the co-founders of Inngest, a startup that’s building a serverless, event-driven workflow platform to help developers create better apps with simpler, more intuitive tools. The duo reflects on the engineering career paths that ultimately led them to meeting in a co-working space in New York City, plus hear what shifts in technology are setting the stage for Inngest, what surprising customer feedback is shaping the platform, and what opportunities lie ahead. This episode is co-hosted by GGV investor Dan Cahana.
Nicole Perlroth is an advisor to the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the bestselling author of the 2021 book This is How They Tell Me The World Ends, a groundbreaking in-depth exploration of the global cyber arms race. Prior to that, she spent a decade as the lead cybersecurity, digital espionage and sabotage reporter at the New York Times. She’s now building her new early-stage venture fund, Silver Buckshot Ventures, which she describes as “a mission fund backing next-generation cybersecurity startups that, together, take out every tool in an attacker’s arsenal.” Fighting cyber crime requires collaboration and multiple approaches. Nicole shares stories of how she fell into the cybersecurity beat, her advisory work with the DOJ, some of the challenges with cybersecurity work, and her thoughts about how Silver Buckshot Ventures can help.
Dani Grant is the co-founder and CEO of Jam.dev, a developer tool that allows for faster communication between product and engineering about bugs and fixes. While working at Cloudflare as a product manager, Dani and her eventual co-founder Mohd Irtefa dealt with frustrating debugging experiences first-hand, and came up with a product solution to help developers, engineers, designers and product managers can capture screenshots and development blocks in one click. Today, Jam has captured the hearts of huge clients like Unilever, Staples, T-Mobile, and Dell. Dani shares the importance of tracking user retention, iterating your way to total product market fit, and more.
Idan Tendler is the Senior Vice President of Application Security at Palo Alto Networks, as well as the chairman and co-founder of Place-IL, a nonprofit tech initiative. Idan discusses his previous cybersecurity analytics startup, Fortscale (later acquired by RSA Security), and some key lessons he learned from his experience building the company. Before Fortscale, Idan founded Bridgecrew, a company that helps developers better secure their cloud environment. With the goal of to making developers love security—a seemingly impossible task—Bridgecrew built an open-source product called Checkov, which allowed the company to get millions of developers to use their product. Today, Idan is also busy building Place-IL, a non-profit initiative that helps connect immigrants to Israel with job opportunities in the country's tech industry.
Rich Waldron is the CEO and co-founder of Tray.io, a company he founded with his two best friends. This is the second time we're talking to Rich on Founder Real Talk, make sure to check out his episode from 2019! Software has been around for a long time, and in many different forms. On the waves of cloud adoption and digital transformation, it's more important than ever for companies to make technology accessible to their employees. Tray.io users in any department can use its automation platform to transform fragmented processes into powerful business outcomes. Rich talks about Tray's latest $40 million Series C extension, product and growth plans, and more.
Kishore Gopalakrishna, co-founder and CEO of StarTree, created a solution to a database problem with his co-worker and eventual co-founder Xiang Fu while working at LinkedIn. At the time, LinkedIn was debuting its now-popular feature called Who's Viewed Your Profile, which required the ability to slice and dice massive amounts of data in real time. Kishore and Xiang developed what they called Apache Pinot, a real-time distributed analytical processing data store used to deliver scalable real-time analytics with very low latency. The pair went on to found their open source company, StarTree, in 2019 to build a commercial version of Apache Pinot. The analytics provided by its technology are increasingly essential for all kinds of business decision makers, and the company's quickly emerged as a leader in serving up real-time user-facing analytics at very low latency—for millions. In this episode, Kishore talks about the solutions StarTree provides, its key relationship with the developer community and the roadmap for the company, which just announced a $47 million series B led by GGV, with participation from investor existing investors, Bain and CRV as well as new investor Sapphire Ventures.
Sid Sijbrandij is the CEO of GitLab Inc., the one DevOps platform that allows teams to collaborate, create, and deliver software in a single application. Before founding GitLab Inc. in 2012, he worked on recreational submarines and taught himself to code, going on to work at the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, where he did version control software around lawmaking. GitLab Inc. was founded on Sid’s love of programming and a desire to create an open-core company. Fully remote from day one, GitLab Inc. is one of the largest companies to operate this way, with more than 1,700 employees across 65 countries. In this episode, Sid talks about open source, his community, and company transparency, along with the GitLab Inc.’s recent IPO—and what it means for the future.
Nikita Shamgunov is the CEO of Neon, a new company building the next generation serverless Postgres database. Nikita got his PhD in St. Petersburg and worked as an engineer at Microsoft and Facebook before going on to co-found SingleStore, an analytical database company. At SingleStore, Nikita realized the massive size of the transaction databases market and the ubiquity of Postgres, the popular open-source database, all of which led him to found Neon. Neon separates the storage and compute functions to create a truly affordable and compelling cloud native Postgres. In this episode, Nikita talks to us about working with his co-founders Stas and Heikki, incubating Neon at Khosla Ventures (where Nikita is a partner), and the implications of separating compute and storage.
Ryan Johson is the co-founder and CEO of Culdesac, which is working to build the first car-free city in the United States. After turning down M.I.T. and dropping out of Harvard, he chose to learn from the executives at Opendoor before co-founding Culdesac in 2018. Ryan has traveled to over 60 countries, but after visiting pedestrian and cyclist-friendly cities like Budapest and Amsterdam, Ryan was inspired to create a new city from scratch. Culdesac's first neighborhood, Culdesac Tempe, is currently being built in Arizona. The neighborhood opens later this year and will have 1000 residents on 17 acres. Residents receive a suite of mobility benefits, including free access to light rail, street cars, and buses. In this episode, Ryan talks to us about building infrastructure from the ground up and how Culdesac provides people with life at their front door.
Bruce Felt is the CFO of Domo and a long-time friend of GGV Capital with a history that predates SaaS since he founded Renaissance Software in the late 1980s. With a well-rounded experience in finance, Bruce became the CFO for six companies, taking them through IPOs or M&As before bringing his expertise to the Domo team in 2014. Bruce faced his biggest challenge during his time as the CFO of SuccessFactors in 2007 during the financial crisis, and the company’s non-stop growth came to a grinding halt, share prices dropped, and cuts were made at the highest levels. Although SaaS was still new, Bruce convinced investors and analysts that SuccessFactors was poised to grow exponentially whenever the market was ready. He was right, and the company saw 10X growth over the next few quarters. Since joining Domo, Bruce has been able to pull from his playbook to successfully navigate the recent financial crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and is well-prepared for whatever may come next. Check out the chart on what a world-class financial organization should look like: https://bit.ly/3xYCvPe
Steve Harvey is the CEO of BitSight, the cyber security platform used by nearly a quarter of the Fortune 500 companies and multiple government agencies around the world. With a background in risk assessment, Steve spent 13 years at the Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and became the CEO of BitSight in 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic. Because so many businesses were forced to go digital and adopt the work-from-home model, cyber-attacks became more prevalent than ever. Steve certainly had his work cut out for him, but in two short years made multiple acquisitions and received a $250M investment from Moody’s. With over 2,400 customers, BitSight has quickly become the most widely used security ratings service in the world and is showing no signs of slowing down. GGV is an incredibly proud investor in BitSight, with our own Glenn Solomon sitting on the board since 2016. In this episode, Steve talks about removing disruption at the highest level and entering a well-established company at its tipping point.
Zeev Farbman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lightricks, which puts high-quality video and editing apps into the hands of average mobile phone users. Zeev immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union at the age of 12 and would go on to meet his future co-founders during his military service. He pursued a degree in computer science at the Hebrew University with the plan of becoming a tenured professor, but that quickly changed when Zeev and his new friends created their first app, Facetune, and founded Lightricks in 2013. While they set an initial goal of generating just $100,000 with their new app, Lightricks now has a $1.8B valuation. Facetune was released the same year the word “selfie” was added to the dictionary and became one of the most downloaded mobile apps almost overnight. Since then, Lightricks has pivoted to the content creator economy, building multiple app suites and toolkits, and recently found an equity partner in Tik Tok’s D’Amelio family. In this episode, Zeev walks us through his real-time decision-making and why we should all take “the shower test”.
Guillermo Rauch is the Founder and CEO of Vercel, a cloud platform provider used to develop, preview, and ship frontend websites and applications using their Next.js open-source framework. Originally from Argentina, Guillermo taught himself JavaScript at just eleven years old and has developed multiple open-source libraries since then. He would go on to co-found LearnBoost and Cloudup, both of which were acquired by Automattic in 2013. Since the founding of Vercel in 2015, the company has already achieved Unicorn status, with GGV being a proud investor and having led a very successful $150M Series D round. Vercel now services more than 25,000 customers worldwide, including major companies like Uber and Facebook. In this episode, Guillermo talks about using open-source software to build communities and the importance of maintaining a developer-oriented approach. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Investor, Oren Yunger.
Matan Bar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Melio, the B2B online payment service that allows small businesses to manage payments and receivables digitally. While consumers have been using peer-to-peer payment services for years, many small businesses were still sending checks in the mail, waiting days or even weeks for payments to go through. Now, Melio helps save precious time while increasing cash flow. The need for Melio exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the company raised $144M in just one year. Before founding Melio, Matan worked with PayPal and co-founded The Gifts Project, which was quickly acquired by eBay in 2011. Melio may be Matan’s first venture as a CEO, but the company was already given a $4B valuation after just three years and now has offices in Tel Aviv, New York, and Denver. With an incredibly promising future ahead of him, Matan continues to build both a winning service and a winning team.
Tomer Weingarten is the Co-Founder and CEO of SentinelOne, an autonomous endpoint security platform with over 6,000 customers worldwide. SentinelOne prevents cyberattacks in real-time using AI and machine automation and helps companies adopt new technologies while staying protected. Before founding SentinelOne, Tomer worked as a software developer and founded multiple companies. SentinelOne now has over 1000 employees with offices in the U.S., Tel Aviv, and Tokyo and is recognized as one of the best and most diverse places to work. In June 2021 SentinelOne executed the biggest cybersecurity IPO to date, raising over $1B in a market cap of over $11B. In this episode, Tomer shares how he and his team plan to reshape the cybersecurity industry. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Investor, Oren Yunger.
In this 15 minute salon episode, Sarika Garg, Co-founder & CEO of Cacheflow, shares why she and her Co-founder, Brian Zotter, decided to tackle the traditional SaaS buying experience with buy-now-pay-later. Cacheflow’s innovative approach has the potential to impact the way software is bought and sold across the global enterprise SaaS market, which is set to reach $400 billion in annual sales worldwide by 2025. Sarika was previously Chief Strategy Officer at procurement financing unicorn Tradeshift, where she helped build an invoice factoring business for suppliers and an AP automation platform for buyers. She spent the previous 13 years working at SAP, most recently running SAP Ariba, where she drove over $200M in sell-side revenue for Ariba cloud.
Adam Markowitz is the Co-founder and CEO of Drata, the San Diego-based startup that provides companies with fast and efficient automated security compliance, a once painstakingly long and arduous process. A former rocket scientist, Adam founded his first startup, Portfolium, in 2013 and created a network of over 5M students, connecting them to mentors and future employers. Six years later he sold the company for $43M when he was just 32 years old. The first line of Drata’s code was written in July 2020 and the company has skyrocketed. GGV led Drata’s $25M Series A round earlier this year. Drata just announced a $100M Series B financing making the company a “unicorn” in an incredibly fast period. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Investor, Oren Yunger.
Dan Adika is the CEO and Co-founder of WalkMe, a cloud-based platform that simplifies the digital adoption process for employees and customers while increasing company productivity. Before co-founding WalkMe in 2011, Dan was a software engineer at HP and served in the Israeli Defense Force for over five years as a programmer and team lead. WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform is used in over 43 countries across all industries and platforms for onboarding and training. WalkMe was listed in the Top 100 Customer Success Strategies in Tech and has been on the Forbes Cloud 100 list for five years running. WalkMe has over 2,000 customers from over 42 countries, including 31% of Fortune 500 companies, and recently saw a very successful IPO with a greater than $2B valuation. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Younger.
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Comments (4)

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Jan 15th
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Milad Jahandideh

Excellent Interview 🙋‍♂️

Apr 9th
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Austin Peek

If you're looking for other real talk with Founders... Here's another sweet podcast for ya 😚: Entrepreneur Stories 4️⃣ Inspiration 👌...

Dec 5th
Reply (1)
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