ExecuTalks

You'll want to listen in to this to hear how a girl who grew up in a household with 5 older brothers in Southern California went from not knowing what she was going to be when she grew up, to volunteering to work at a company that had a terribly negative culture, to writing a very convincing letter to the CEO of then a small company called Tableau Software, to scaling Tableau from being a $5 million company to a $1 billion company as the Chief Marketing Officer.

Today’s guest is Jim Lico, the CEO of Fortive Corporation, it’s the Fortune 500 company based in Washington that you probably haven’t heard of before, well, until now of course!  Fortive has 18 subsidiaries including notable brands like Fluke and Tektronix. You’ll want to stick around for the entire episode to get a peek into what Jim’s childhood was like growing up in Detroit when General Motors was the biggest company in the world, you will hear Jim share some valuable experiences early in his career that he hadn’t shared before, and Jim shares with us that we should know if we aspire to be business leaders. 

In 2016, while Jim was working at Danaher, the executives at Danaher made a strategic decision to spin off Fortive as a separate company, and the reasoning behind it was that Danaher’s business was focused on life sciences and innovation in the medical space, while Fortive’s business was focused on technologies for industrial applications.  Since they had two distinct end consumers, they decided it was best to separate the entities.  Now, when that happened, Jim was asked to be the CEO of Fortive, and he would now be running a billion-dollar publicly traded business with 25,000 employees, something he admits, he wasn’t necessarily prepared for.  Today, Fortive has a market cap of almost 24 billion dollars!

You’ll want to listen to the entire episode to hear how Sarah went from being a pregnant 16-year-old, to graduating law school and becoming an unintentionally great negotiator, to quitting her job at a law firm based on, literally, a dream, to successfully scaling the number one SEO marketing software on the planet. 

Today’s guest is Gautam Gupta, Founder and former CEO of Naturebox, and current Partner at M13, a venture capital firm based in Santa Monica.  You’ll want to be sure to stick around, because Gautam shares a story about how he landed his first internship – and it has nothing to do with resumes or cover letters, he shares the story behind a company taking a chance on him to start a branch, and he shares the struggles of starting a business if you’re thinking about making a leap and taking the risk!

Christy grew up on the San Juan Island, a very small community of people in a town that actually had no street lights!

After college, Christy got her first job at the wall street journal in advertising.  She knew she eventually wanted to go to graduate school, so she chose a company that would support that in the future.  During her time at the wall street journal, one male executive at the company discouraged her from attending graduate school.  Feeling unsure, Christy turned to her mentors and colleagues at work who were women.  That’s when she learned the importance of having peers at work who are eager to help you.

A few years into her career, Christy went on to work for Claritas, a marketing company that helps businesses make data-driven business decisions.  She was looking for a job, and heard about the company through one of her friends who referred her and invited her to interview.  She was there for 8 years and one of the biggest learning lessons she describes was a time she realized she didn’t' need to rely on anyone for validation.

After finishing her MBA in 1997, Christy when on to work for a several companies in marketing, then eventually landed at SAP Concur in 2013.  She would work her way up to becoming the Chief Marketing Officer there.

Today, Christy is the Chief Marketing Officer of Pantheon Platform, a website operations platform for Drupal and WordPress, backed by a $100 million venture investment.

Dr. Dawn Graham holds a PhD in counseling psychology and is currently the Director of Career Management at the Wharton School of Business, the world's #1 business school in the world.

She authored the book "Switchers" - How smart professionals change careers and seize success.

If you are currently frustrated with the current methods of job-searching and looking for a new approach, visit our website at www.executalks.com and get in touch with us!

You’ll want to be sure to stick around for the entire episode, because Kelly dives deep into important career skills like storytelling, listening to other people’s stories, and how to strategically think about your next career move. 

Kelly Wright is the former Tableau Executive Vice President of Sales, and was actually the first sales person at Tableau.

You’ll want to be sure to stick around for the entire episode to hear how a kid that grew up in Morocco ended up in Gig Harbor selling coffee out of a van, then going broke and foreclosing on his home while he had a family, to accidentally starting a photo booth company that generates over $3 million in annual revenue and got placed on the Inc. 500 list, and how they were able to survive through the pandemic, being an events-based business.

Almost a year ago, our country and our world completely changed with the pandemic changing our lives.  Sam’s livelihood relied on in-person events.  If there were no in-person events, how was he going to make a living? On March 11th 2020, Sam stayed up all night generating ideas of how he could somehow make money to keep his employees employed and how he was going to survive.  Within days, he launched “keep your city smiling,” a company that creates corporate gift boxes and care packages to support small businesses, something completely different from Snapbar, but something that would generate some kind of cashflow to keep Snapbar afloat.  It gave Snapbar just enough time to develop a virtual photo-booth software that they now use to make money and keep their employees employed.

Adam was born & raised in Marysville, WA, a town one hour north of Seattle.   His father was an entrepreneur and football coach, and his mother was a principal at a local high school.

Adam always had an interest for math & science, so he pursued a degree in computer science from Portland State University, and after college, he landed a job working for a company that helped manufacturing facilities upgrade their electronics & software to help them be more effective.  He started to make observations about technology and it’s advancements. New technology in general like smartphones are constantly being innovated and updated.  Think about it, you probably get a smartphone upgrade every 2-3 years.  He realized that this was not the case in manufacturing.  There were (and still are) places he would visit where the technology hadn’t been updated for over a decade.  He realized there was a real opportunity to start advancing the technology in the manufacturing industry. 

Customers began asking Adam and his company if they could somehow relay information from the new machines they were installing back to their computers through the internet.  Adam and one of the business owners at his company went on a quest to validate the market.  So, they began interviewing potential customers all over the country asking them if this is something they also wanted.  Eventually, they decided to spin this “idea” out as a separate business, called Elevat IOT.  Elevat IOT helps manufacturing facilities connect their devices through the internet and makes sure information is being relayed in real time so that all employees in the facility understand what’s happening. 

Today’s guest is Vinay Bhagat, Founder & CEO of Trust Radius.  You’ll want to be sure to listen to this episode to hear how Vinay’s experience with racism growing up shaped him to be more empathetic, how Vinay addressed racial bias issues in the workplace, and ultimately, how being fired from a job was the best thing that ever happened to him.

Vinay was born & raised in London and was the child of immigrants.  His mother was a teacher and his father was a car designer, and his parents loved to travel and camp at lots of different places.  Back when Vinay was growing up in London, there was still a great deal of racism, and he remembers being verbally abused and physically bullied very often in school.  He attended the University of Cambridge, and wanted to work for a big consulting firm after college.  Due to the ongoing racism during the time, Vinay couldn’t even land a first-round interview even though he was near the top of his class.  Since he did so well in school, he was able to get into Standford to pursue a master’s degree in engineering economic systems.  During his time at Stanford, he was approached by the same consulting firms to interview with them, the same ones that he couldn’t get a first-round interview with after graduating in London.  Vinay would not take this lightly – after he was hired on at Bain & Company, he worked hard to demonstrate how there was a racial bias in their recruiting process. 

After  Vinay got his MBA from the Harvard School of Business, he ended up at a computer software company in Austin, TX, as their director of e-commerce.  Before finishing his first year, Vinay openly disagreed with the CEO, and was fired because of it.  That would be the turning point for Vinay.  He says that was the best thing that could’ve happened to him, because he was now able to finally satisfy the entrepreneurial bug that had always been itching inside of him.  The first company he started was an online fundraising solution for nonprofits, making it easier for nonprofits to raise money.