Melisa Tokmak is a General Manager at Scale AI after serving as a Chief of Staff to the CEO and the company. She also spent time as a Product Manager at both Facebook and Instagram.

In this episode, we learn Melisa’s tips for scaling culture - notably her recommendation to find and hire “people who give a shit.” We also ask her “what’s a Chief of Staff, really?” and chat about how Scale is building the data infrastructure layer for AI.

Melisa is one of those rare souls who is both intelligent and wise. Glad to have had this conversation with her.

Sunil Rajamaran is the VP of B2B Marketing at GoodRx. He has also spent time as CMO at Metromile, Head of Marketing at Radiance Labs, and as SVP of Marketing at Replicon, among other roles.

In this episode, Sunil shares guidance on how to navigate online vs. offline marketing, how to market to a community, and the biggest mistakes that most marketers make.

Whether you’re a marketing savant or just getting started in the field, this episode will be riddled with gems and a high number of insights per minute.

Katie Stanton is founder and general partner of Moxxie Ventures after an illustrious career ranging from politics to genetics. She has held leading operating roles as a VP at Twitter, Chief Marketing Officer at Color Genomics, and Principal at Google. She has also held positions at the Obama White House and Clinton State Department.

In this episode, Katie shares playbooks for understanding market development, creating content flywheels, and how to think about career choices.

Katie was a 10/10 guest and we hope to have her back soon.

Morgan Brown is Vice President of Growth at Shopify. Prior to working at Shopify, he was Director of Product Management at Facebook and Chief Operating Officer of Inman News.

In today’s episode, Morgan walks through different phases of his career. He emphasizes how to be comfortable with change, what he learned from Facebook’s product development framework, and how to nail performance marketing. He even gave us some advice on how to launch this podcast.

Morgan’s intelligence is rivaled only by his empathy. We’re grateful to have had the chance to chat with him. Adam Gelman, On Deck’s SVP of Revenue, joined me in this episode as a guest co-host. We hope you enjoy.

Annie Lin is the incoming Chief People Officer at Swiftly after a successful stint as VP of People at Lever. Prior to working at Lever, Annie spent time at Apple, Uber, General Assembly, HotelTonight and the Wikimedia foundation.

In this episode, Annie shares her thoughts on how the People function has evolved. She provides tips on how to align HR and recruiting so that they operate as one team, how to make sure employees feel a sense of purpose, and how to pull the secret Levers of the lever product to attract top percentile employees.

Aarthi Ramamurthy is Head of International at Clubhouse and the co-host of the popular Good Times Show.

Prior to working at Clubhouse, Aarthi had roles at Microsoft, Netflix, Facebook, and started a YC backed company.

She draws on her deep tech experience and international background to share how International Growth is really just normal growth, but with different lenses of marketing and branding. She also shares thoughts on the value of internal hackathons, brownbags, and how to hire for product teams.

Babak Siavoshy is Vice President & General Counsel at Anduril Industries. His legal background combined with his deep operating experience in tech is a rare & precious combination.

In this episode, we discuss how to build legal teams from scratch, how to grow data protection teams, and much more at the intersection of legal and ops.

Babak’s team at Anduril is bringing a new era of tech to the military - check them out at anduril.com

Emil Michael was the Chief Business Officer at Uber during their hyperscale period from 2013 - 2017.

In this episode, Emil shares crucial lessons from Uber. He details how and why to develop an ambitious blitzscaling mentality from day one, imparts specific tactics learned from launching Uber in China, and advises patience when it comes to hiring Execs.

Cristina Cordova was the 28th employee at Stripe and grew their partnerships arm from the ground up. Most recently, she led platform & partnerships at Notion, which included starting the Growth Product Team.

In this episode, we discuss how to build a partnerships team, what to look for in BD hires, and the ins and outs of successful deal-making.

Cristina is an active angel and advisor. You can hear more from her by following @cjc on Twitter.

Richard Ni is the current Head of People at Scale AI after being the first recruiting hire at Cruise Automation, where he helped bring the team from 10 to 700 in three years.

Prior to leading people teams, Richard was a Software Engineer at Venmo and a Computer Science major at MIT. We discuss the unique perspective that his technical background gives him in recruiting, how to solicit genuine feedback from employees, and build a leveling system.

Quick note: This episode was recorded in December 2021 - keep that in mind as you're listening to Richard's thoughts on the state of the market.

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Execs is a show for founders, operators, and pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. To engage further:

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Hosted by: @eriktorenberg Produced by: @jacksonsteger Brought to you by: @beondeck