CapitalGeek

Richard Earnest is a six-time CEO, leadership expert, and author of the new book - Leading with Ethics and Humanity - Do you have the guts? We speak with Richard about his new book, what it was like as a first-time book author, and how the lessons he learned leading in the US Navy and as a CEO and board member shaped his perspective on ethical leadership. Richard is one of my favorite people to talk to and I can't wait to get started.

Austin Trees is the Senior Vice President at Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) and an industry expert on everything office space. On this episode of Capital Geek Austin shares best practice and what to look out for when leasing an office space.   

This week's guest was Bo Blackburn and Jeff Daily, co-founders at Sellers Shield. Sellers Shield is revolutionizing the way that seller's disclosures are handled during real estate transactions and helping to radically evolve the way that real estate transactions are handled through their next-generation cloud platform.

That was Jonathan Sass, vice president of product and marketing at Vyopta. Vyopta is helping customers get the most out of technologies like Zoom, Slack, and MS Teams while integrating in-person participation for folks returning to the office. There's never been a better time to explore how platforms like Vyopta's digital collaboration experience management platform can help and I'm anxious to dig in. Welcome to this week's episode of Capital GEEK.

Joe Schreiber is CEO and founder at AppNovi. Joe and his co-founder Ethan Smart have spent the last 20 years in various cybersecurity roles. They founded AppNovi to solve a gap in the marketplace that they kept running up against as while doing incident response, cybersecurity risk analysis, and threat hunting. I love working with founders who are authentically solving problems that they themselves have experienced as practitioners and Joe is doing exactly that at AppNovi. If you work in cybersecurity or as a part of an IT team this is an episode you won't want to miss.

As CEO, Denny LeCompte is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations and strategic direction at Portnox. Denny brings over 20 years of experience in IT infrastructure and cyber security. Prior to joining Portnox, Denny held executive leadership roles at leading IT management and security firms, including SolarWinds and AlienVault. Denny holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Rice University.

Debbie is an award winning serial technology entrepreneur, CEO, founder, board member, thought leader, author and advisor with a 26 year track record of scaling profitable technology startups.She is currently the founder and chairwoman of Stride Consulting, an agile software development firm. She has been CEO of 3 technology startups, 2 of which she founded. She has scaled 4 high performing technology companies through 2 global downturns, and has landed on Inc 500 twice (with a total of 9 out of 9 eligible years on Inc 5000).

Andrew has a strong track record of growing and leading early and mid-stage companies into stable organizations. He co-founded CREDANT Technologies in 2001 (data encryption software) and was acquired by Dell in December 2012 and he is a former Chairman of the Graduate School Alumni Board at the University of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business. Andrew is now the CEO of Backbox, a market leader in network automation, security, and management solutions. 

Shelley Perry has 25 years of experience as a software executive, including with NTT, HP, and TicketMaster. She also spent four years as a Venture and Operating Partner with Insight Partners, and today works with Nexa Equity Partners and with us at Elsewhere Partners as an Independent Advisor. She recently held the Executive Chair role at Airbrake, an Elsewhere Partners investment, supporting the company's growth leading to its successful acquisition by LogicMonitor and also serves on the board of Chargebee, Bynder, AutoReturn, and Foresite.

Jack Naglieri is a professional with a passion for information security, cloud infrastructure, and security software.His exposure to information security began as an incident responder for Verisign. After graduation from George Mason University, he moved to the San Francisco Bay area and spent two years at Yahoo as an incident responder. He later transitioned into a security engineering role, with the challenge of deploying security monitoring tools at a massive scale. In 2016, he joined Airbnb, and open sourced a framework that enables real-time data analysis and alerting at scale called StreamAlert. He then managed a team of engineers further developing detection and response infrastructure at Airbnb.Now, he has formed his venture-backed startup, Panther Labs, to help companies detect and prevent security breaches in the cloud-first world.

Peter Kirby is a long-time entrepreneur and early pioneer in the blockchain space. He co-founded a Bitcoin hardware company in 2013 and a blockchain technology company in 2014. Peter also executed one of the earliest ICOs in 2015 as CEO of Factom, Inc. He has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Financial Times, and Forbes. He has been a featured speaker at The World Bank, Money 20/20, The US State Department, and The US Department of Homeland Security. Peter has a BS in Biochemistry from Lehigh University, an MBA from the Acton School of Business, AND is a certified laughter yoga instructor!

Amanda developed her business acumen by repeatedly scaling metrics and creating value for a number of VC-backed startups and established technology companies like Rackspace, Dell, SolarWinds, NetQoS (bought by CA), PeopleAdmin (a Vista Equity Portfolio Co), and Pervasive Software. She has taken 4 companies through exits and is a longtime startup mentor at Capital Factory and Tech Stars Austin. Amanda is an accomplished speaker, board member, and advisor who believes in integrity, the value of community, and the power of connection. She has lived and volunteered in Austin for nearly 30 years.

Ramon Chen, Chief Product Officer, oversees ActivTrak's product strategy with a passion for all things data. He's dedicated to helping organizations and their employees #workwiser through ActivTrak's workforce analytics platform; ensuring a win-win that improves productivity, while fostering individual well-being. He brings more than 30+ years of leadership experience in product marketing and management to ActivTrak with expertise in data management, analytics, and machine learning. Prior to joining ActivTrak, he served as Chief Product Officer for Reltio, a data management disruptor and held senior leadership positions at Veeva Systems, RainStor, Siperian and GoldenGate Software.

That was Kevin Gervais, founder and CTO at Touchless. This week we catch up with Kevin and discuss his passion for enabling user experience for neuro diverse users and how Touchless is changing the game for people with Autism. This is a subject that is very close to my heart and I can't wait to dig in. Welcome to this week's episode of Captial GEEK.

Ron is currently the founder and CEO of xtype, a Value Stream and DevOps platform for ServiceNow. Ron has over 25 years of experience in enterprise tech and a proven track record of taking innovative solutions to market. Ron started at test automation company Mercury interactive, spent ten years in the application performance management space, and has been a driving force in enterprise DevOps technologies since 2010. Ron lives in Tel Aviv with his wife and three daughters. He is also an avid marathoner and loves playing chess.

Dr. Mik Kersten is the CEO of Tasktop and best-selling author of Project To Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework. Mik started his career as a Research Scientist at Xerox PARC where he built the first aspect-oriented development environment. He then pioneered the integration of development environments with Agile and DevOps tools while working on his Computer Science PhD at the University of British Columbia. Founding Tasktop out of that research, Mik has written over one million lines of open-source code that are still in use today and has brought seven successful open-source and commercial products to market. Mik's experiences working with some of the largest digital transformations in the world has led him to identify the critical gap between business leaders and technologists, resulting in his creation of the Flow Framework® to connect strategy to delivery.

This week on Capital GEEK we host a panel discussion with industry experts Heidi Farris, Dan Schoenbaum, and Wes Bush on the evolution of Product-led growth.  This event was recorded in partnership with Elsewhere Partners, and we had a great panel discussion and several awesome questions from the audience.  I'm excited to share this with you, so let's get to it.

Lisa Xu serves as Chief Executive Officer where she is responsible for overseeing the overall strategic and operational functions for NopSec. Lisa has a passion for connecting business with technology and thrives in transforming disruptive technology into leading solutions. Over the past two decades, Lisa has advised Fortune 500 enterprises on data security, privacy and technology risk management, and led many diverse teams at Ally Financial (GMAC), KPMG, and Blue Cross Blue Shield. Lisa holds a B.A. in Economics and a Master's in Finance from Boston College.

Ronen Yehoshua, co-founder and CEO of Morphisec, has over 20 year of technology management and venture capital experience. Prior to Morphisec, Ronen was a partner at Cedar Fund, an international venture capital firm with over $325M under management. In this strategic, hands-on role, he led investments and resided on the boards of several companies in seed and growth stage. Before that, Ronen held key leadership positions in managing, investing, and collaborating with start-up companies and cutting-edge innovations in software and telecom, such as business and technology consultant to the Hutchison Whampoa group, Investment Director at Partner FutureCom, Director of Business Development and Project Manager at ECI Telecom.

Kevin Fishner is the Chief of Staff at HashiCorp, where he treats the company as a product. He joined the cloud infrastructure automation company in 2014 as the first business hire, going on to spin up the sales, solutions engineering, account management, and marketing teams. Afterwards, he spent 3 years building the product management and education groups as VP of Product. Kevin graduated from Duke and studied Philosophy.

Chris Anthony is the Founder and CEO of TeamWorx Security, a Maryland-based DEFENSE technology company creating technology to inspire the  average IT enterprise. Mr. Anthony has an extensive background in technical and intelligence operations within the Department of Defense,  Inter-agencies, Military Special Operations, and the Intelligence Community. He has domain expertise integrating advanced technologies into mission-critical operations and also serves as a technical advisor to NSRI, a University Affiliated Research Center that advanced technology research on behalf of the Department of Defense.

Heidi is the Head of Operations at Activtrak, a workforce analytics platform that improves team productivity. Heidi has responsibility across several functions, including HR, BI & Analytics, and Go-to-Market Operations. Previously, she served as CMO at Idera, Inc. and later as the company's General Manager for the Database Tools business where she helped acquire and integrate nearly a dozen companies.

Wes Bush is the founder and CEO of ProductLed. He is the bestselling author of Product-Led Growth: How To Build a Product That Sells Itself and is one of the most sought-after product experts in the world. After working for some of the world’s fastest growing companies in the world, today he trains teams around the globe how to turn their product into a powerful growth engine.Follow Wes: https://productled.com/

Mike is an engineer, former private equity fund founder and manager turned serial tech entrepreneur. His life-long passion of using creativity, innovation, and perspective shifts to solve hard problems with elegant solutions is what has defined his career across multiple industries. He believes nothing is out of reach if you're willing to convert thoughts into action and stay laser-focused on the belief that a new reality is constrained only by a bit of time. For more information on today's episode, visit https://capitalgeek.io/Connect with us:Josh's LinkedIn Josh's TwitterJosh's FacebookMike's LinkedInLeave Some Feedback: Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Links Mentioned In Today's Episode: https://www.evosecurity.com/https://elsewhere.partners/   

Artem Golubev had been in the software business for more than 20 years and a co-founder and CEO of testRigor. testRigor uses AI to solve test maintenance and speed of test creation problems for its customers by allowing them to execute tests from end-user's perspective and autonomously generating tests based on end-user-usage analytics.Follow Artem: https://www.linkedin.com/in/agolubev/ 

Chris co-founded Itential in 2014 to simplify and accelerate the adoption of network automation and to transform network operations practices. Using a model-based approach, Chris leads the innovation and development of the company’s flagship portfolio of network automation products.Twitter: https://twitter.com/itentialLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/itential/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-wade-9100136/ 

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. Graduated from US Naval Academy in 1964 with BS in Engineering. Played football there with Roger Staubach on the 1963 team that played for the national championship (we lost) 10 years in the Navy as a carrier based fighter pilot, 320 combat missions in Vietnam, test pilot at McDonnell Douglas and obtained a Master’s degree in Management while serving in the Navy. 30 years in the computer software business, serving as CEO of six different companies including two public companies. Served as City Councilman and Mayor of Del Mar from 1996 to 2010. A serial entrepreneur dedicated to finding ways to clean up our environment and make money at the same time. Happily married for 26 years, two great kids and one marvelous grandson. Love biking, reading, travel and golf (still searching for the perfect swing). Intense interest in helping veterans find their place in the civilian world after giving there all to our country.

Nikki Jennings is an energetic, executive-level professional with over 20 years of progressive experience in global sales leadership, corporate and business development and global product management/marketing roles in the technology sector. Her high-level capabilities as a transformational leader are demonstrated in many successes developing and restructuring high-performing sales teams, pioneering revenue-driving product launches and driving complex M&A activity from due diligence to post-acquisition integration. Nikki joined Veeam in April of 2019 heading up the Sales Engineering and the Professional Services organizations for the Americas. Responsible for overseeing a team of 170 employees that provides pre-sales support to Veeam’s field and inside sellers, and channel partners, while also leading the professional services organization dedicated to supporting Veeam’s Accredited Services Partner program. Prior to joining Veeam, Nikki held a successful 11-year journey with SolarWinds as leader of two distinct business functions as Group Vice President of Global Sales Engineering, as well as Group Vice President of North American Sales for dedicated Strategic Accounts. She oversaw a team of over 150 employees that consisted of dedicated sales and pre-sales support to the SolarWinds Core IT Customer Install Base. Nikki also held leadership roles in product marketing and management and corporate development.

Ernest has a degree in electrical engineering from Rice University has been working in technology and technology management for more than 25 years, ranging from enterprises like FedEx, National Instruments, and AT&T cybersecurity to startups like Bazaarvoice, CopperEgg, Precision Autonomy, and Verica. He's been a web developer, operations engineer, product manager, engineering director, and more. He advocates for using Agile, Lean, DevOps, and smart management processes to solve business problems in a fast-moving world. Ernest is noted leader in the DevOps movement and the Austin technical community. He helps organize the CloudAustin user group and the DevOpsDays Austin and All Day DevOps conferences. He blogs with a cadre of like-thinking professionals at theagileadmin.com. Currently, Ernest resides in Round Rock, Texas. His engineering team at Verica develops a product that performs chaos engineering experiments for Kubernetes, to help enterprises use continuous verification to ensure the resilience of their systems.

Vijay is Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer at Techforce.ai and serves on the company’s executive team. He is responsible for fostering a company-wide customer-centric culture. He is known for steadily introducing eclectic strategies aimed towards creating value across verticals – marketing, sales, customer support, product development, operations. Vijay comes with a vast experience across technology positions in multinational companies including Deloitte and Oracle. He has also served as the member of NASSCOM’s Regional Council and been on the Steering Committee of NASSCOM’s startup initiative. A graduate in Bachelor of Technology, Vijay is passionate about giving back to the startup ecosystem and is a volunteer for various not for profit organizations.

In Austin since 1998, Mark has worked in Austin’s startup community, where he’s helped to build technology teams at several venture-backed startups, including Trilogy Software and SolarWinds. Most recently, Mark has been a long-time part of AlienVault (a cybersecurity company), which was acquired by AT&T in 2018. At AT&T, Mark was an Associate Vice President in their Cybersecurity business. Outside of work, Mark has been a long-time supporter and volunteer at many Austin organizations, including Generation Serve, Habitat for Humanity, Austin Parks Foundation. He is currently serving on the Board at Seedling, and Austin-based mentoring program for children of incarcerated parents.

Charlie Cuddy currently works at OpsCompass, a cloud security posture management leader, as a cloud solution engineer with an emphasis on customer success. Prior to working at OpsCompass, Charlie spent nearly a decade as a public high school math and computer science teacher as well as a head cross country and track coach. He is passionate about learning, relationship building, and helping others successfully recognize and reach their full potential.

John Grange is a seasoned entrepreneur and is co-founder and CTO at OpsCompass, a leading SaaS product for managing compliance and security in clouds like Azure, AWS, and GCP. He has 15 years of experience building products and companies including co-founding a top 5 global Microsoft ASP.net hosting provider and creating SaaS products in areas as diverse as healthcare and marketing tech. John's passion is identifying those mega-trends that truly impact how technology is consumed and then building the tools necessary to help real customers leverage new technology and create value.

Patrick is CEO and a co-founder of Jorsek Inc, makers of easyDITA. Since beginning with Jorsek in 2005 Patrick, has worked on a wide range of projects all focused on improving authoring, production, and distribution of content. Most recently, his primary focus has been empowering the users of easyDITA and generally advancing the knowledge management and product documentation industry.

Dan Balcauski is an experienced product leader and principal customer churn consultant for Product Tranquility based in Austin, TX. He focuses on helping growth-stage B2B SaaS leaders who are struggling with churn. Over his career, he has worked in both consumer and B2B companies, across consumer internet, mobile, IT software, and test and measurement hardware and software in addition to company sizes ranging from startups to publicly traded multi-national enterprises.  

Nate is the founder & CEO of Appsembler, a B2B SaaS company that he founded in 2011, and is now a 100% distributed team hailing from 8 countries. Appsembler helps companies like Redis Labs, Chef Software and Dremio deliver online hands-on technical training at scale. Nate has been heavily involved with several open source communities in his 25+ year tech career, and loves tinkering around with emerging technologies and playing jazz saxophone in his spare time.

As the leader of the TrustRadius marketing team, Russ Somers balances a data-driven approach and an interest in growth hacks with narrative instincts honed by years as a songwriter and performer. He has led marketing teams for high-growth startups including TrendKite (acquired by Cision), Invodo (acquired by Industrial Color Studios), and sonarDesign. Russ started his marketing career with Fortune 500 companies including Dun & Bradstree, Dell, and Sabre Holdings. He spends his spare time with his family, as well as collecting and restoring vintage guitars.

Christopher Holmes, CEO of Grey Matter has a strong background in management, vision, and large-scale industrial enterprise resource planning and middleware technology - specializing in hybrid cloud techniques, IT to Business measurement and data security. He is an accomplished senior information technology professional and leader offering over 25+ years of demonstrated career success developing and executing operational strategies to promote organizational growth and optimal utilization of emerging technologies. He is a decisive leader with broad experience handling operational initiatives within many organizations of varying size and scope.

Dan is a seasoned executive, entrepreneur and growth expert with proven operational and strategic leadership. He has participated in $5B in successful exits, IPO experience and many buy-side acquisitions with successful outcomes. Dan currently is a Managing Partner with High Tide Advisors, a boutique consulting firm created to help investors and software companies create and execute high-growth GTM strategies and is also an operating advisor for Vector Capital, a San Francisco-based Private Equity Fund. Previously, Dan held executive roles with several high-growth technology companies, including President & COO of RiskIQ, CEO of Cooladata (acquired by Medallia), CEO of Redbooth (acquired by AeroFS), and COO of Tripwire. Follow Dan: https://twitter.com/djschoen  

Michael Massad is a software investor at Elsewhere Partners where he co-leads sourcing efforts and conducts operational / financial due diligence. Previously, Michael was a product marketing manager at Microsoft and an investor at Stonelake Capital Partners. Michael strives to connect capital and operational expertise with growing software companies across industries – most recently in infrastructure and cybersecurity – that are located outside of traditional VC hubs.

Brian Reale is the CEO & Co-founder of ProcessMaker, a leading workflow and business process management software company. Brian is a serial entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience managing high tech companies. Prior to founding ProcessMaker in 2000, Brian was the General Manager of Unete Telecomunicaciones, a long distance voice and data carrier in South America that he founded in 1997 and sold to a publicly traded US Telecom company in 2000. Brian also co-founded Spotless LLC, an entertainment technology company and the developer of the Spotlesslight live digital lighting technology. Brian graduated magna cum laude from Duke University in 1993 and was a Fulbright scholar in linguistics in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador in 1994.

With more than 25 years of experience across all aspects of Product, Corporate, and Digital Marketing, John Pasquarette helped scale National Instruments from a small private company to a billion-dollar public enterprise. As leader of NI’s software business, he helped establish NI’s platforms as an industry standard for test and measurement – launching multiple product platforms and functionality, leading and driving industry consortia, and shifting to a recurring service revenue model. As leader of ni.com, he built a $100M ecommerce engine, introduced a vibrant technical community, and drove digital demand generation. When not thinking about software or web technologies, Pasquarette spends his time supporting and inspiring the next generation of engineers through the founding of the Texas A&M Engineering Excellence Endowed Scholarship program, acting on the board of Viper Nation Education Foundation, and leading a FIRST Robotics team. He enjoys family time with his two Aggie engineering-student children, all diligently cheering for the upcoming A&M National Championship (next year is almost here)!Connect with John: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnpasquarette/

A retired Infantry Marine, Justin Endres has almost 25 years of experience, developing and executing efficient and profitable sales models and growth strategies. At ActivTrak, his expertise will be pivotal in accelerating growth across the remote workforce management space, driving motions to extend the company’s market leadership position. During his career, Justin has held Executive positions with small venture-backed companies and public companies. His ability to create a coaching culture of high-performance and flexibility, capable of sustaining success in rapidly changing environments, makes him an invaluable asset to those organizations he’s worked with. Prior to ActivTrak he served as VP of Sales, at Mist System, a company who brought to market the first AI-driven Wireless LAN (WLAN) which was acquired by Juniper Networks, SVP of WW Sales at AlienVault which was acquired by AT&T. From 2006 through 2010, he was VP of Sales for SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI), a leader in the IT management software industry that went public in May 2009. At SolarWinds, Justin served as a member of the executive team that built the company’s disruptive model for high volume and velocity sales to IT professionals in mid-market enterprises. Follow Justin:https://twitter.com/justinendres  

Alfredo Ramirez is a seasoned entrepreneur with direct experience in building early-stage software technology companies, which is why he proudly serves Vyopta as CEO and Co-Founder. A nod to his passion for pushing the button of innovation, Alfredo previously co-founded Vitalz, a venture backed enterprise software company acquired by Oracle, and Daman Consulting. He holds a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and writes about topics such as technology, employee engagement, and innovation from the CEO perspective. Follow Alfredo:https://www.vyopta.com/blog/author/alfredo-ramirez/

Andrew Kahl has over 20+ years in customer facing roles and was an early proponent of the Customer Success model that has become popular today. He has spent his career slightly obsessed with how companies engage and retain customers.  He is the former Chief Customer Officer for SailPoint and has held senior executive leadership roles with leading global customer delivery teams for NetApp and Juniper Networks.   Andrew co-founded and led CREDANT Technologies for 12 years before it was successfully acquired by Dell.  Andrew is a proud alumnus of the University of Notre Dame and has been a frequent guest lecturer at the Mendoza College of Business at Notre Dame speaking on the topics of Entrepreneurship and Customer Centricity.  He's also a lifelong fan of the Chicago Cubs and considers Wrigley Field the ultimate customer experience.Follow Andrew:https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewkahl/https://twitter.com/andrewkahl

Chief Technology Officer at Kasasa, Pradeep Ittycheria is an experienced technology executive and entrepreneur with 17 years of experience managing software product engineering teams across a range of industries. Pradeep co-founded Oink, a payments company that targets the under 18 demographic. Oink has over 1.3 million users with an online wallet and a prepaid product in collaboration with Discover Financial. Pradeep has successfully led new product development initiatives using global engineering teams.Follow Pradeep:https://twitter.com/pradeepihttps://www.kasasa.com/kasasa-leadership 

Kevin Gervais has had an entrepreneurial spirit since childhood. He is now the Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer for Statflo, and a Partner at Bruce. From 2012-2018 he served as founder and CEO at Statflo to enable compliant one-to-one relationships between retailers and customers. Since 2015, they scaled the team from 2 to 40+, surpassed $5M ARR, raised $21M, hired a CEO in Jan 2019 and oversaw back-to-back years of 100% ARR growth.Follow Kevin:https://twitter.com/startupkevinhttps://kevingervais.com/

Welcome to CapitalGeek a podcast dedicated to the founders and operators that create the products we love and turn them into fabulous companies with meaningful exits.