Podcast appearances and mentions of josh mcfarland

Wisetack provides a financing platform for in-person services like home or auto repair businesses, enabling them to offer customers the option to buy now and pay later. Greylock general partner and Wisetack board member Josh McFarland spoke with Wisetack co-founders Bobby Tzekin and Liz O'Donnell when the company announced its Series A.

On the day of their public market debut, Sonder CEO and founder Francis Davidson talks with Greylock general partner Josh McFarland about the hospitality company's wild journey from a side gig started during college to a modern, tech-enabled, design-forward accommodation platform serving travelers in 35 countries around the world. Davidson recounts the company's swift traction of the first few years, the dark days of early 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic struck and upended travel overnight, and how the company pivoted and redirected its focus in order to emerge stronger than ever. You can read a transcript of this interview here: https://greylock.com/portfolio-news/congrats-sonder/

A re-broadcast of our episode featuring fintech startup Wisetack. The company, which was incubated at Greylock and launched in 2019, recently raised a $45 million Series B round. Wisetack provides financing platform for in-person services like home or auto repair businesses, enabling them to offer customers the option to buy now and pay later. Greylock general partner and Wisetack board member Josh McFarland spoke with Wisetack co-founders Bobby Tzekin and Liz O'Donnell in February, when the company announced its Series A. You can read the blog post and transcript to this episode here: https://greylock.com/greymatter/wisetack-fintech-for-the-real-world/

Consumers now expect the option to buy now and pay later for countless products they purchase on ecommerce platforms. But paying for in-person services like home and auto repair has remained stuck in the past of credit cards and high-interest loans. Until Wisetack came along. The company developed a suite of APIs for software used by in-person service businesses, allowing them to offer consumer-friendly financings options. Greylock general partner and Wisetack board member Josh McFarland talks with company co-founders Bobby Tzekin and Liz O'Donnell.

In episode three of Superpowers, Bill and Chris share the mic with a Silicon Valley veteran turned venture capitalist. From founding startups to holding leadership positions at giants like Google and Twitter, Josh McFarland has navigated the full gamut of the tech sector’s fast-paced product development ecosystem. Through it all, Josh has consistently managed to steer his way toward success thanks to his ability to maintain product discipline. He can identify what products and services are effective and useful, and has approached his career with discipline and decisiveness that has always served him well. Now a Partner at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, Josh shared his winding journey with Bill and Chris, starting with his upbringing in a small Wyoming town and his college experience at Stanford University, followed by the intensity of a career developing products in Silicon Valley and how it led him to his current position. “I was so burned out on operating, like PTSD level,” Josh said of his time co-founding and running TellApart. That’s when he decided to make the jump to Greylock. For the past two years, Josh has leveraged his exceptional attention to detail and innate ability to identify game-changing companies while overseeing a $1 billion fund. He shared some of the keys to his success with Bill and Chris. “The best venture capitalists have one thing in common: Luck,” said Josh. “The more open you can be to be holding your arms wide open and seeing what the universe is handing to you, [the better]. If you’re just putting together your spreadsheet and dumping your numbers in, you’re going to miss those rare, awesome opportunities.”

Greylock’s Reid Hoffman and Josh McFarland on the basic principles for successful blitzscaling. Blitzscaling is a set of practices for igniting rapid growth to accelerate to the stage in a startup’s life cycle where the most value is created. Bitzscaling prioritizes speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty, and it allows a company to go from “startup” to “scaleup” at a furious pace to capture the market. In this episode of Greymatter, Greylock partner Josh McFarland moderates a discussion with Reid Hoffman at Recode’s 2019 Code Conference. McFarland and Hoffman outline the rationale for the Blitzscaling set of practices and the counterintuitive rules necessary to scale up super fast.

The lessons of blitzscaling to achieve market dominance are counterintuitive. The strategy requires a shift from the traditional thinking of growth to a prioritization of speed over anything else. Greylock Partner Josh McFarland founded and scaled TellApart (which was acquired by Twitter in 2015), and he will be the first to tell you the risks and rewards of blitzscaling. In this discussion with Blitzscaling co-author Chris Yeh, Josh encourages founders to throw out the conventional approach of decision making and embrace the art of fast decision making and willingness to experiment.

How do you know when it's time to start a company? Or when to begin fundraising, and how much? And, as you grow, how do you recruit the best executives and build a culture centered on employees? Venture capitalist Josh McFarland of the firm Greylock Partners answers these questions and more through his experiences as founder and CEO of tech startup TellApart, which Twitter acquired for nearly half a billion dollars.

How do you know when it’s time to start a company? Or when to begin fundraising, and how much? And, as you grow, how do you recruit the best executives and build a culture centered on employees? Venture capitalist Josh McFarland of the firm Greylock Partners answers these questions and more through his experiences as founder and CEO of tech startup TellApart, which Twitter acquired for nearly half a billion dollars.

How do you know when it’s time to start a company? Or when to begin fundraising, and how much? And, as you grow, how do you recruit the best executives and build a culture centered on employees? Venture capitalist Josh McFarland of the firm Greylock Partners answers these questions and more through his experiences as founder and CEO of tech startup TellApart, which Twitter acquired for nearly half a billion dollars.

This episode of Greymatter comes from Stanford University's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series podcast. Greylock Partner Josh McFarland shared with students his presentation The First Derivative of Startup Life. In this lecture at Stanford, Josh charts the ups and downs of entrepreneurship through his personal story with TellApart. He opens up about the lessons he learned as a founder and CEO, offers fundraising advice for startups, and shares the untold story of TellApart's acquisition by Twitter, which was the largest acquisition in Twitter history. Greymatter is produced by Greylock Partners and offers perspectives and lessons from some of the world's top technology entrepreneurs and business leaders.

In the latest Greymatter episode, we welcome back Twitter’s former Head of Revenue Engineering, now Greylock Executive In Residence, Wade Chambers. He sits down with Greylock partner Josh McFarland to discuss what characteristics make a great engineering leader and the best environment to foster leadership. Wade helped scale product and build out TellApart’s engineering, product, and services team at a time when the company was on track to almost triple revenue to over $50M. The two startup veterans share lessons learned from building TellApart, how founders can create a culture built on honest conversations, and advice for coaching up great engineering leaders.   To hear more from Wade, listen to his previous Greymatter podcasts on Increasing Your Team’s Capacity to Win and the follow-up discussion on the Art of Hiring 10x Engineers.