Founder Real Talk

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 engagement 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.

Ariel Cohen is the Co-founder and CEO of TripActions, the cloud-based platform that uses real-time data to make corporate travel and spending easier for everyone while cutting down on company costs. Founded in 2015, TripActions saw exponential growth and a $4 billion valuation before the travel industry came to a grinding halt during the onset of COVID-19. After making key pivots, TripActions quickly recovered with the release of TripActions Liquid, their spending management solution, and recently had a successful Series E upround, raising $155 million at a $5B valuation. In this episode, Ariel talks about creating win-win situations and bringing his company back from the unthinkable. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.

Tomer Bar-Zeev is the Co-Founder and CEO of Tel Aviv-based ironSource, a software company that helps content creators turn their app into a successful and scalable business through distribution and monetization. Originally from Israel, Tomer studied computer science before becoming VP of Business Development at AtlasCT and Payoneer. He co-founded Foxtab before co-founding ironSource in 2010 with seven co-founders. IronSource launched a successful IPO in 2021 after a successful SPAC merger with a valuation of over $11 billion. In this episode, Tomer talks about building ironSource out of necessity, rejecting a $18 million offer to sell the company in the first few months of its existence, acting as chief enabler in his position as CEO and more. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.

Eynat Guez is the Co-founder and CEO of Papaya Global, a cloud-based solution modernizing the way companies approach payroll, payments, and workforce management. Before Papaya Global, Eynat was the CEO of two different relocation service companies based out of Israel and China. Since its inception in 2016, Papaya Global has raised $190M in funding and is used in over 140 countries. When she's not running her $1.2B company, Eynat is also a volunteer Mentor at Cracking the Glass Ceiling: Promoting Young Women to Science Education, which gives young women the tools they need to secure a bright and ambitious future. In this episode, Eynat talks about the importance of a revenue-driven approach and meeting the needs of your target market before scaling. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Dan Cahana.

Shay Banon is the Co-founder and CEO of Elastic, a search company that makes data usable in real time and at scale for enterprise search, observability, and security. The foundation for what became Elastic was laid in 2004 while Shay was building a recipe app for his wife. Shay built Elastic Search the product in 2009 and open sourced it in 2010. He co-founded the company Elastic Search with Steven Schuurman, Uri Boness, and Simon Willnauer in 2012 and the company quickly rose through the ranks, raising over $160M in funding before its successful IPO in 2018. In this episode, Shay dives into the 17 year evolution of the company and how the open source community and model has helped shape Elastic into what it is today.

Guy Podjarny is the Co-Founder, President, Chairman of the Board, and former CEO of Snyk, the leader in developer-first “cloud native” application security. Before co-founding Snyk in 2015, Guy helped develop AppScan and co-founded Blaze.io (acquired by Akamai in 2012). In 2020, Snyk won four Best Places to Work awards and was named a CNBC Disruptor in 2021. In this episode, Guy shares how he's encouraged developers to embrace security, successfully built a company with a bottoms-up strategy, and the benefits of focusing on a community of builders. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.

Zvi Schreiber is the Founder and CEO of Freightos, the company on a mission to completely optimize and modernize the world of international freight shipping. Before founding Freightos in 2012, Zvi has had an extensive background as Founder and CEO of multiple companies including Unicorn Solutions, which was acquired by IBM in 2006. Founded in 2012 in Israel, Freightos has become a global company with offices around the world. In this episode, Zvi talks about why he took on the challenge of modernizing the complex and traditional industry of international freight shipping. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.

Ali Ghodsi is the CEO and Co-Founder of Databricks, an AI-enabled, open source data analytics platform company, valued today at more than $28 billion. Over 5,000 companies use the company’s open source-driven lakehouse architecture to process, engineer, and analyze their unstructured and semi-structured data. In this episode, Ali shares how an open source project he helped start as a researcher at UC Berkeley—where he still serves as an adjunct professor in the computer science department— turned into a multibillion-dollar company and lessons entrepreneurs can learn from his journey.

Amit Bendov is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gong, a revenue intelligence platform that analyzes the data of sales calls, emails, texts, and social media to create insights to optimize company sales. Founded in Tel Aviv in 2015, Gong is valued at over $2B today. With more people working from home, Gong has been able to establish itself as one of the top sales data providers on the market. In this episode, Amit talks about the importance of creating a compelling product and giving your team enough room to grow. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.

Thierry Schellenbach is the Co-founder and CEO of Stream, a scalable API platform that’s growing rapidly. After the acquisition of his previous company, Fashiolista, Thierry set out to help create a scalable API for chat and activity feeds that can keep up with company growth. Thierry founded Stream in 2014 in his home country of the Netherlands, but he’s now based in Boulder, Colorado. Stream gained attention in the US after participating in Techstars NYC in 2015. Thierry describes what it was like raising a round of funding remotely, managing a global team, and how he and his team are navigating the ever-changing landscape of APIs. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Investor, Tiffany Luck.

Dev Ittycheria is the President and CEO of MongoDB, the maker of the world’s most popular general purpose database. Built on open source, MongoDB has had an enviable run since its 2017 IPO. Dev joined MongoDB in 2014 and has steered the company through some of its highest-growth years. Before taking the helm of MongoDB, Dev founded and IPOed two companies—Breakaway Solutions, which went public in 1999 and was acquired by Verizon in 2001, and BladeLogic, which had one of the most successful IPOs of 2007 and was later acquired by BMC Software for $900 million. He has also invested in and served on the boards of many successful software companies including AppDynamics, Athenahealth, and Datadog. In this episode, Dev explains how he learned to be vulnerable as a CEO and galvanize the workforce to reset company goals and ultimately create the community-driven database that MongoDB is today.

Daniel Schreiber is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lemonade, the AI-powered insurance company with a commitment to making a positive social impact, that has risen to the top of the industry in less than five years. Founded in 2015, Daniel and his Co-founder, Shai Wininger set out to change the way we use insurance and instead present it as a 100% digital community resource meant to help those in their hour of need. With its Giveback program, successful 2020 IPO, and more than one million active users, Lemonade is paving the way for the future of insurance on a global scale. In this episode, Daniel talks about what makes a great founder and CEO, the importance of resilience in the tech industry, and more. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.

This is a crossover episode between Founder Real Talk and Evolving for the Next Billion and is co-hosted by GGV Managing Partners, Glenn Solomon and Hans Tung. Josh Silverman has been the CEO of Etsy since 2017. Etsy is an innovative online marketplace that connects millions of creative sellers and buyers around the world. Etsy’s mission is to“keep commerce human” and it’s become the global destination for unique and creative goods. The company has 3.1 million active sellers and 60.3 million active buyers from nearly every country. In 2019, 40% of Etsy sellers were located outside the US, 83% of sellers were women. Josh has two decades of leadership experience including growing consumer technology companies and scaling global marketplaces. Before Etsy, he served as president of consumer products and services at AMEX, CEO of Skype, and CEO of Shopping.com. He has also held various executive roles at eBay. Earlier in his career, Josh co-founded Evite, where he also served as the company's first CEO until its sale to IAC.

The Founder Real Talk Israeli Entrepreneur Series is back with a fifth episode. These episodes are dedicated to getting to know Israeli founders and their companies. Known as Startup Nation, Israel creates more companies per capita than any other country, with one startup for every 1,400 people. Read more about GGV’s commitment to funding and supporting the next generation of Israeli entrepreneurs: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/next-tech-wave-israel-global-company-creation-glenn-solomon/. This series is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger. Oren Kaniel is the Co-founder & CEO of AppsFlyer, the global attribution leader, trusted by more than 12,000 brands including Coca Cola, HBO, Walmart, Ebay and the list goes on. Oren founded AppsFlyer in 2011 to solve one of the major problems in the mobile apps market – mobile campaign analytics and attribution. Oren talks about his journey and what he is focused on as AppsFlyer has become one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies today.

Susan St. Ledger is the President of Worldwide Field Operations at Splunk, where she built a SaaS, multi-product go-to-market organization and helped grow the business from nearly $700 million in revenue to almost $2.5 billion today. Susan recently announced her departure from Splunk and shared the exciting news that she will join Okta as President of Worldwide Field Operations shortly. In this episode, Susan shares her insights on making career pivots, the importance of mentorship and sponsorship, and adopting a growth mindset in any career.

This is the fourth episode in our early stage series, a group of episodes that highlights younger companies to examine the issues and challenges these businesses uniquely face. Avi Shua is Co-founder and CEO of Orca Security, the cloud security company from Tel Aviv known for its proprietary SideScanning™ technology. After spending eight years in the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces), Avi worked at Check Point for over a decade before co-founding Orca in 2018. This episode covers Avi’s story, Orca’s meteoric rise and what sets them apart in the world of cloud security. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Investor, Oren Yunger.

Karthik Rau co-founded and served as CEO of SignalFX from inception in 2013 all the way through the company’s $1.05 billion acquisition by Splunk in 2019. Karthik is presently Vice President of Observability at Splunk and oversees the cross-functional strategy and execution of Splunk's application management, monitoring and observability efforts. SignalFx was founded to help operators of modern distributed applications perform real-time cloud monitoring and observability. Given Karthik’s position at SignalFX and now Splunk, this episode covers the transition to cloud, devops, modern application development and more.

This is the third episode in our early stage series, a group of episodes that highlights younger companies to examine the issues and challenges these businesses uniquely face. Barr Moses is the Co-founder & CEO of Monte Carlo, a company on a mission to accelerate the world’s adoption of data by improving data reliability and reducing data downtime. Prior to founding Monte Carlo, Barr built the customer data and analytics team at Gainsight, where she helped grow the company 10x in revenue. From a silent retreat to building a robust community of data leaders, Barr is setting an impressive example for aspiring founders. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.

This is the second episode in our early stage series, a group of episodes that highlights younger companies to examine the issues and challenges these businesses uniquely face. Streamlit is an open source product that has become extremely popular with data science teams growing to over 10,000 GitHub stars since launch in late 2019. Streamlit’s founders, Adrien, Amanda and Thiago, previously worked together at Google X. One thing led to another and now they’re back together empowering data scientists and machine learning engineers to create beautiful, performant apps quickly and easily. Streamlit is gaining traction fast and this conversation is a testament to the passion of the people behind it.

This episode kicks off our early stage series, a group of episodes that highlights younger companies to examine the issues and challenges these businesses uniquely face. Mike Fitzsimmons is the Co-founder and CEO of Crosschq, a SaaS company that has pioneered a new category for talent acquisition called “Human intelligence hiring.” Seeing as 40% of hires don’t make it through a year in their new job, Crosschq is solving a critical mis-hire problem by helping companies’ better source, match, and retain the best talent. In this episode, Mike discusses the importance of building a great product, the challenges of creating a brand new category, how to acquire early customers, and what to consider when fundraising.

Kris Beevers is the Co-founder and CEO of NS1, the leader in modern application and access networking. Kris is a recognized authority on global application delivery and DNS. He joins the show from his new, aptly named boat, Social Distance. Early on, when he was in the process of choosing his co-founders, Kris sought out people who he had a strong and respectful personal relationship with. As the business has grown, the roles of the leadership team have morphed, changed, and become better defined. Now as CEO, Kris considers his job to be hiring great people and letting them run. One thing he wishes he knew during his series A fundraise was that most investors are more interested in investing in the team rather than the product. They want to know you have a great team that will hustle for success. Glenn and Kris also discuss the important impact hiring a COO had on the business and Kris recommends hyper-communication and swift decision making as tools for success during these times.

Mitchell Hashimoto is the Co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, the leader in multi-cloud infrastructure automation software. In this episode, which was recorded during a GGV live webinar, we learn how Mitchell and his cofounder, Armon Dadgar, built HashiCorp into a 1000-person company valued at over $5B—all with a very distributed team since day one. For companies suddenly managing remote workforces, or for startups just beginning the journey toward growth, how can you scale and succeed far into the future with a fully distributed team? HashiCorp’s experiences scaling into a global enterprise software powerhouse without opening the usual array of offices are especially valuable today, now that so many companies have gone remote almost overnight.

Armon Dadgar is the Co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, a commercial open source company that provides the fundamental building blocks around infrastructure and automation that developers need to create scalable, secure, high-performance applications hosted in the cloud. Valued at over $5 billion and now with over 1,000 employees worldwide, HashiCorp started out life in 2010 as an open source project and since grown into the defacto standard for modern cloud-computing development. In this episode, which was recorded live at GGV’s annual Evolving Enterprise conference, we learn how Armon and his Co-founder, Mitchell Hashimoto, initially met, what it took to sell to the enterprise and how to hire the right people as a distributed company.

This is the fourth episode in the Founder Real Talk Israeli Entrepreneur Series, a group of episodes dedicated to getting to know Israeli founders and their companies. Known as Startup Nation, Israel creates more companies per capita than any other country, with one startup for every 1,400 people. Read more about GGV’s commitment to funding and supporting the next generation of Israeli entrepreneurs. This series is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger. Netanel (Nati) Davidi and Uri Alter are two of the Co-founders of VDOO, the only automated device security solution that is integrated across the entire product lifecycle, and a GGV portfolio company. Nati and Uri have had quite the journey together. They first met in the Israeli military service in 1999 and went on to co-found Cyvera, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2014. Their mission didn’t stop there. In 2017, with co-founder Asaf Karas, they started VDOO, a company born out of one of the biggest shortfalls of IOT. In this episode, we learn how Nati and Uri’s journey lead them to pioneer a way to scale security for connected devices.

This is the third episode in the Founder Real Talk Israeli Entrepreneur Series, a group of episodes dedicated to getting to know Israeli founders and their companies. Known as Startup Nation, Israel creates more companies per capita than any other country, with one startup for every 1,400 people. Read more about GGV’s commitment to funding and supporting the next generation of Israeli entrepreneurs. This series is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger. Shlomi Ben Haim is Co-Founder and CEO of JFrog, provider of the world’s first universal artifact management platform that ushered in a completely new era in DevOps. Founded in 2008, JFrog has become the “database of DevOps” used by over 6000 customers worldwide including Amazon, Cisco, and Netflix. In this episode, we learn how Shlomi’s 12 years in the Israeli Air Force influenced his startup mentality, how the JFrog team has scaled an open source company, and what it takes to expand globally.

This is the third episode in the Founder Real Talk Israeli Entrepreneur Series, a group of episodes dedicated to getting to know Israeli founders and their companies. Known as Startup Nation, Israel creates more companies per capita than any other country, with one startup for every 1,400 people. Read more about GGV’s commitment to funding and supporting the next generation of Israeli entrepreneurs. This series is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger. Shlomi Ben Haim is Co-Founder and CEO of JFrog, provider of the world’s first universal artifact management platform that ushered in a completely new era in DevOps. Founded in 2008, JFrog has become the “database of DevOps” used by over 6000 customers worldwide including Amazon, Cisco, and Netflix. In this episode, we learn how Shlomi’s 12 years in the Israeli Air Force influenced his startup mentality, how the JFrog team has scaled an open source company, and what it takes to expand globally.

This is the second episode in the Founder Real Talk Israeli Entrepreneur Series, a group of episodes dedicated to getting to know Israeli founders and their companies. Known as Startup Nation, Israel creates more companies per capita than any other country, with one startup for every 1,400 people. Read more about GGV’s commitment to funding and supporting the next generation of Israeli entrepreneurs. This series is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger. Slavik Markovich is the Co-founder and CEO of Demisto, a leading Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platform that helps security teams accelerate incident response, standardize and scale processes, and learn from each incident while working together. Slavik sold Demisto to Palo Alto Networks in Feb 2019, less than four years after its founding, for over $560 million. Starting from his early days in the Israeli military, Slavik shares his thought process while walking us through his impressive journey. From founding his first company, Sentrigo, in 2006 to moving from Israel to the Bay Area in 2008, to building Demisto and ultimately getting acquired by Palo Alto Networks, Slavik’s story is noteworthy and full of lessons for current and future founders.

This is the second episode in the Founder Real Talk Israeli Entrepreneur Series, a group of episodes dedicated to getting to know Israeli founders and their companies. Known as Startup Nation, Israel creates more companies per capita than any other country, with one startup for every 1,400 people. Read more about GGV’s commitment to funding and supporting the next generation of Israeli entrepreneurs. This series is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger. Slavik Markovich is the Co-founder and CEO of Demisto, a leading Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platform that helps security teams accelerate incident response, standardize and scale processes, and learn from each incident while working together. Slavik sold Demisto to Palo Alto Networks in Feb 2019, less than four years after its founding, for over $560 million. Starting from his early days in the Israeli military, Slavik shares his thought process while walking us through his impressive journey. From founding his first company, Sentrigo, in 2006 to moving from Israel to the Bay Area in 2008, to building Demisto and ultimately getting acquired by Palo Alto Networks, Slavik’s story is noteworthy and full of lessons for current and future founders.

This episode kicks off our Israeli Entrepreneur Series, four episodes dedicated to getting to know Israeli founders and their companies. Known as Startup Nation, Israel creates more companies per capita than any other country, with one startup for every 1,400 people. Read more about GGV’s commitment to funding and supporting the next generation of Israeli entrepreneurs. This series is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger. Roy Mann is the CEO and Co-Founder of monday.com – one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the world, connecting people to processes while creating an environment of transparency in business. Before monday.com, he was part of Wix’s senior management team. Prior to that, he founded the online social game Save an Alien. Roy obtained a Bachelor of Science focused in Computer Science from the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC). In this episode, we learn how Roy and his Co-founder, Eran Zinman are scaling the fastest growing company in Israel. With over 100K customers, users in over 160 countries, Monday.com is helping shape the future of work globally. Learn why the company’s name changed to Monday.com, what it’s like to maintain the same company culture in Israel and NYC offices, and why transparency is fundamental to Monday.com's success. 

This episode kicks off our Israeli Entrepreneur Series, four episodes dedicated to getting to know Israeli founders and their companies. Known as Startup Nation, Israel creates more companies per capita than any other country, with one startup for every 1,400 people. Read more about GGV’s commitment to funding and supporting the next generation of Israeli entrepreneurs. This series is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger. Roy Mann is the CEO and Co-Founder of monday.com – one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the world, connecting people to processes while creating an environment of transparency in business. Before monday.com, he was part of Wix’s senior management team. Prior to that, he founded the online social game Save an Alien. Roy obtained a Bachelor of Science focused in Computer Science from the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC). In this episode, we learn how Roy and his Co-founder, Eran Zinman are scaling the fastest growing company in Israel. With over 100K customers, users in over 160 countries, Monday.com is helping shape the future of work globally. Learn why the company’s name changed to Monday.com, what it’s like to maintain the same company culture in Israel and NYC offices, and why transparency is fundamental to Monday.com's success. 

Sarah Nahm is the Founder and CEO of Lever, a recruiting software company that is tackling the most strategic challenge that companies face: how to grow their teams. Prior to Lever, Sarah worked at Google as speechwriter for Marissa Mayer and later joined the product team that launched Google Chrome, helping it become the world’s top web browser. A self-taught programmer, Sarah received her BS in engineering and product design from Stanford University, where she occasionally returns to coach design students at Stanford’s d.school. In this episode, we learn how Sarah’s inclination to pick the uncertain path over the logical path eventually lead her to Lever. Having grown up in Birmingham Alabama where she was one of two nonwhite people in a high school of 800, Sarah’s commitment to diversity and inclusion runs deep. The Lever team has been a 50/50 gender ratio since 2016 and inclusion is ingrained in the company culture Sarah has built. Her message to operators who are hiring: “If you're not building a database of talent the same way that you're investing in your sales and your marketing database, you're throwing away the opportunity to have cumulative value over time and you're always going to be hiring.”

Sarah Nahm is the Founder and CEO of Lever, a recruiting software company that is tackling the most strategic challenge that companies face: how to grow their teams. Prior to Lever, Sarah worked at Google as speechwriter for Marissa Mayer and later joined the product team that launched Google Chrome, helping it become the world’s top web browser. A self-taught programmer, Sarah received her BS in engineering and product design from Stanford University, where she occasionally returns to coach design students at Stanford’s d.school. In this episode, we learn how Sarah’s inclination to pick the uncertain path over the logical path eventually lead her to Lever. Having grown up in Birmingham Alabama where she was one of two nonwhite people in a high school of 800, Sarah’s commitment to diversity and inclusion runs deep. The Lever team has been a 50/50 gender ratio since 2016 and inclusion is ingrained in the company culture Sarah has built. Her message to operators who are hiring: “If you're not building a database of talent the same way that you're investing in your sales and your marketing database, you're throwing away the opportunity to have cumulative value over time and you're always going to be hiring.”