The War Room

This experiment has been fun - I'm wrapping up season 1 while trying to figure out the logistics of recording this podcast while running a growth stage company!Check us out at https://www.trueaccord.com, BTW 

Jake Gibson is a father, a Founding Partner of Better Tomorrow Ventures, and a startup veteran. In 2013, however, he was a struggling founder of NerdWallet and expectant father who was facing a major fork in the road -- his ambitions, his own performance at his company, and his plans for himself all clashed in a big oh-shit moment. This is his story.

Eli Portnoy is SVP at Medallia after it acquired his company. Sense 360. Sense 360 was working with restaurants and doing great, and then COVID-19 happened. This is the story of how they found out the world has changed, how they reacted, and everything in the middle.

Bill Clerico founded, headed, and sold WePay to JP Morgan. After wrapping up 12 eventful years with a successful exit, he joins us to talk about executive and talent management, dealing with turnover, managing crisis, and relying on your co-founder when times are rough.

Oded Zehavi, CEO of Mesh Payments, talks about the week when everything stopped for COVID-19, fight or flight responses, leaning on your network and building the plane on his way off a cliff.

Matthew Goldman is the CEO of Vertical Finance. His previous company, Wallaby Financial, was acquired by Bankrate in 2014. Just months before that, negotiating the purchase and way beyond the point of no return, Matthew got a phone call... and then everything screeched to a halt.

18 months into building their product, with almost 200K users in their waiting list, the team at Simple, the OG neobank, was a month out from finally launching. Everyone wrote them off, but they were ready. Then, they got an unexpected phone call... 

You may know Matt Harris (no, not that one, the other one) and Bloom Credit, the fast-growing credit infrastructure company he co-founded. Bloom is on a tear with its latest product iteration, but things were not always so rosy and fast-moving. In this episode Matt talks about the moment he realized he needed a drastic change and how someone doing exactly what he asked them not to do let to a priceless epiphany.

Truebill is a fast-growing consumer finance startup that just announced a major round of financing. A few years ago, though, it was on the brink of going out of business with a month of runway left. Then co-founder and then-CEO Yahya Mokhtarzada agreed to do the one thing he'd been resisting all along.

A brief introduction to The War Room - a new experiment