BUILD with Blake Bartlett

pCaroline Tsay wanted to be a neurosurgeon when she grew up. Plans changed! Caroline has held leadership positions at Yahoo and HPE and is currently the CEO of Compute Software. She also sits on the board of Coca-Cola, Rosetta Stone and Morningstar. So how did this all come to be? In 2013, her boss introduced her to an executive coach that pushed her to build her own brand and explore board opportunities. In this episode, Caroline gives key insights on leveraging your network to find board seats, how board positions can make you a better leader and advice for executives looking to join their first board./p

pAnita Sands has spent much of her career in the financial services industry including leadership roles at UBS, Citigroup and RBC. She currently resides on the boards of Symantec, ServiceNow and Pure Storage as well as advisory positions at Accompany, Thrive Global and DocuSign. Anita has helped many businesses reach new levels with her strategic insight. Learn how to not only get on your first board, but navigate the position as a new board member. Also listen as Anita explains the importance of selecting the right board members and using them as a strategic asset for your company./p

pSteve Collins and Bill Conroy both sit on Instructures (NYSE: INST) board among many others including Shopify, MuleSoft, etc. Steve has had a successful career as CFO (ExactTarget) and Bill with a focus in sales earlier on and CEO (Initiate Systems, acquired by IBM) later in his operator career. With distinctive skill sets, they naturally had different paths to the board room, but their messages around finding the stage of growth that is best suited for you are quite similar. Listen as they give advice on when its the right time to join a board and how to play on your strengths as an effective Director./p

pJenny Cheng led product program management at Salesforce during their explosive growth period from 2002 to 2011. Today she is an executive at PayPal focused on the intersection between the customer and the product. Learn what she did when she decided to get serious about joining boards, why she chose to be on the board of a smaller startup vs. a large public company and how to balance a board seat with your day job./p

pIts imperative to determine that you will have a good working relationship and share the same values with a CEO, well before you take a board seat. Karen Appleton Page was employee number seven at Box and her role evolved with the booming business over her nine-year tenure. When she began seriously exploring board opportunities this year, she realized that having the right chemistry with the CEO, much like she had with Aaron Levie at Box, would be key in finding the right fit. In this episode, learn how Karen broke boundaries as the first GTM leader at Box and about her recent journey to Deputys board./p

pWelcome to Season 4 of BUILD! This season is all about the journey to the boardroom. We will be interviewing top leaders to highlight the steps that many successful executives have taken to get a seat at the table. This week, we have Blair Christie, former CMO of Cisco and current Board Member of MINDBODY. Learn about her transition from operator to board member, how mentorship played a role in getting on a board, how to get yourself heard at the table and much more./p

pAs we conclude Season 3, it is only appropriate to do so at SaaStock. We sat down with Morten Primdahl, Co-founder of Zendesk, and Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Segment, to discuss their perspectives on what it takes to not only start a product led growth business, but grow it to massive scale./p

pSlack is known for their unprecedented growth in the SaaS community. They now have over 8 million daily active users! So, how did they do it? Fareed Mosavat, Lifecycle Product Manager, takes you behind the scenes into how Slack leveraged freemium and a bottoms up approach to achieve this scale./p

pTypeform leaders knew it was important to invest in customer success during the early stages of the business. David Apple, VP of CS, breaks down the team structure that has helped scale the business to over 3M users. Learn where to draw the line when it comes to segmenting customers who warrant a dedicated CS resource vs. purely self-service experience and the leading indicators associated with the success of the team. For more content like this, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter at openviewpartners.com/newsletter./p

pBalancing fast growth while building for scale is no easy task. Wayfairs story started with hundreds of individual microsites and eventually turned into one of North America’s largest online retailers. Wayfairs VP of Marketing, Bob Sherwin, has been with the business through its explosive growth and has assisted in developing a best in class efficient marketing engine. Learn what happened behind the scenes as the business scaled, including how they expanded into the B2B market./p