Pandora Founder and former-CEO, Tim Westergren, joins Founder Real Talk to reminisce on how his experiences playing in a band prepared him for running a company. From the first moment of product-market fit, to the right partnership that doubled growth rates, Tim shares the ups and downs of his 18-year journey with the company. 

Tim started the popular personalized radio service in 2000 with the Music Genome Project. In addition to Pandora, he is an award-winning composer and accomplished musician with 20 years of experience in the music industry – spanning production, audio engineering, film scoring and live performance. Presently, he works extensively with technology partners, distribution partners, advertisers and investors to help shape the future of Pandora and personalized radio.

Highlights from the episode:
1:57 How did being in a band prepare you for starting and running a company?
3:02 How did you motivate the team in a challenging fundraising environment?
5:40 How did you find conviction in the product before it was proven in the market?
8:39 How did you switch business models?
11:44 How did you deal with skeptics and disbelievers inside the company?
14:13 How did you deal with the regulatory challenges of creating a new technology?
17:28 How did you leverage the power of a grassroots community to grow the business?
19:20 What led you to the decision of bringing on an outside CEO? What characteristics do you look for?
21:46 How did you make the decision to support a new platform as a method of growth?
24:25 How did you manage the internal morale after a high fluctuation IPO?
26:21 How did you think about competition and what would you have done differently?
28:36 What is your favorite book or piece of content that you recommend to founders?
30:32 What’s one thing you believe that most others don’t?
30:51 What’s your favorite channel or favorite song to seed a channel on Pandora?

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Serial entrepreneur and Color founder Elad Gil joins Founder Real Talk to share insights and his experiences in starting and building high growth start-ups. We talk about how a founder’s role changes over time, how to build a team that scales, and what conditions need to be in place for “high growth” to happen. His recent book “High Growth Handbook” is a must-read for any startup founder starting to scale up or hoping to get to that point one day. The book is also highly relevant for executives at high growth startups.

Elad Gil is an entrepreneur, operating executive, and investor or advisor to private companies such as Airbnb, Coinbase, Checkr, Gusto, Instacart, OpenDoor, Pinterest, Square, Stripe, Wish, and others. He co-founded and is the Chairman of Color Genomics, and was its CEO until December 2016. Before that, he was the VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter, where he also ran various product (Geo, Search) and other operational teams (M&A and corporate development). Elad joined Twitter via the acquisition of Mixer Labs, a company where he was co-founder and CEO. Mixer Labs ran GeoAPI, one of the early developer-centric platform infrastructure products. Elad spent many years at Google, where he started the mobile team and was involved in all aspects of getting that team up and running. He was involved with three acquisitions (including the Android team) and was the original Product Manager for Google Mobile Maps and other key mobile products. Elad received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has degrees in Mathematics and Biology from the University of California, San Diego.

Highlights from the episode:
3:18 What is your definition of “high growth” and what does it look like when a company is in that stage?
5:32 What conditions must be met before a company reaches “high growth?”
7:06 What is the role of a founder/CEO in a high growth situation? How do CEO priorities change as the company scales?
9:03 How should a founder/CEO of a high growth company define “winning?”
10:36 What types of skills does a leader need to develop as the company scales?
12:14 Any tips for time management?
14:20 Is it important to have a chief of staff? What should someone look for in that role?
17:31 Do you think CEO coaches are helpful? Do you think mentors are helpful?
18:28 How do you know when to add a specific executive? Which executives should be priority hires?
19:19 What is the best way to ensure you’re hiring the right person?
22:45 How do you think about the tradeoff between functional expertise and culture fit in hiring for an executive position?
25:03 What is the role of an independent board member? What traits should you be looking for in this role?
27:23 How should a founder think about the process of looking for a CEO?
29:44 When thinking about financings, do you recommend founders accept capital before they reach defined milestones? What are the pros and cons?
32:11 What’s a favorite book or blog you recommend for founders?
32:44 Name a growth stage company you admire and why?
33:42 What piece of advice were you given as an entrepreneur that served you well?

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Will gives an inside look at Stripe, one of the most valuable venture-backed startups in the U.S. In this episode, he talks about Stripe’s developer-first ethos, how the company is expanding into international markets, and how to run a great board meeting.

Will is the CFO at Stripe, where he leads Stripe’s financial operations, including economic strategy, business forecasting, financial planning and analysis, and treasury duties. Prior to Stripe, Will was a general partner at Thrive Capital, where he worked closely with internet businesses across all stages and geographies, particularly within software and e-commerce. He's also worked as a software developer and company founder.  Will holds degrees in mathematics from Harvard University and law from Yale.

1:10 Tell us about your background and what led you to join Stripe as CFO4:35 What made Stripe an interesting company to join and where do you think the company is headed?7:33 What was it like to join a team with two well-known founders?9:45 How does the API business model drive value for the company?12:17 How has the team built the business to focus on the developer and make sure the developer feels well served?14:13 Do you have any stories where something in the developer community didn’t go quite as planned? How do you get ahead of issues so they don’t become bigger issues down the line?16:12 What are some tactics to drive loyalty with developers?17:02 How do you balance working with customers of all sizes, ranging from startups to big companies? What challenges does that create?20:50 How does the company think about capturing the global market?21:58 What tactics does the company use to spur international growth?27:27 What are concerns for a CFO of a company that has achieved high valuations? How do you manage investor expectations?30:50 What book do you recommend to founders and executives of high growth companies?32:19 What makes for a really great board meeting?34:30 Who is a mentor that has helped you in your career and how might others think about how they can recruit a mentor?

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Michelle created a movement to empower women from the first piece of clothing they put on in the morning. She shares the secrets of how she built a culture-driven business that has inspired more than 40,000 brand ambassadors, the role of customer feedback in her product strategy, and how she took a direct-to-consumer brand to multiple offline retail locations.

Michelle created a movement to empower women from the first piece of clothing they put on in the morning. She shares the secrets of how she built a culture-driven business that has inspired more than 40,000 brand ambassadors, the role of customer feedback in her product strategy, and how she took a direct-to-consumer brand to multiple offline retail locations.

Michelle Cordeiro Grant, Founder & CEO of LIVELY, has spent her career creating brands and product for some of the world's largest retailers including Federated, VF Corporation, Limited Brands/ Victoria's Secret and Thrillist Media Group. Grant realized that her passion was in supporting, creating and developing amazing brands and products and instantly fell in love with the entire process from concept to customer. While working with Victoria's Secret, she learned that the $13B lingerie category, in the US alone, was dominated by a single brand, with a single point of view, so Grant was inspired to create a completely new experience for the category — one she calls Leisurée — and LIVELY was born.

2:45 What prompted you to start the company and this movement4:42 What are your company’s values and how did it affect how you built the company?6:25 How did you grow the brand-ambassador community to 40,000 strong?8:31 How does the brand leverage Instagram?9:13 Talk about your company's social media strategy. What kind of metrics do you think about, how do you staff your team to optimize for social media?10:27 Beyond Instagram, what other social platforms are relevant as a direct-to-consumer brand?11:25 How do you think about competition?12:09 What’s an example of your company implementing a customer-driven strategy?13:48 What are the challenges of being both a digital brand and selling a physical good?15:09 What’s an example of a time where you tried something and it didn’t go as planned?16:23 As a digital-first, direct-to-consumer brand, why go offline? What are the benefits and what is the long-term strategy?17:41 What are some learnings from opening your own shop compared to launching within a known retailer?19:48 On your most recent trip to China, what made it an eye-opening experience? How did it change your perspective or influence your strategy?23:28 Tell us more about the choice to expand into other categories. Why did you make this choice and how did it go?25:23 How have you built your team?30:19 What is a book or piece of content you’d recommend to entrepreneurs and founders?30:52 Who are some mentors that helped you along the way?31:28 Tell us about an entrepreneur you really admire and why?31:51 If LIVELY was a person, what would you tell her?

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Mitchell Hashimoto turned his hobby into a business that now serves 100 of the Fortune 500 companies. In this episode, he talks about how he grew the HashiCorp open source community, monetized an open-source product, and decided to bring on a CEO.

Mitchell turned his hobby into a business that now serves 100 of the Fortune 500 companies. In this episode, he talks about how he grew the HashiCorp open source community, monetized an open-source product, and decided to bring on a CEO.

Mitchell Hashimoto is best known as the creator of Vagrant, Packer, Terraform and Consul. Mitchell is the co-founder of HashiCorp, a company that builds powerful and elegant DevOps tools. He is also an O’Reilly author. He is one of the top GitHub users by followers, activity, and contributions. “Automation obsessed,” Mitchell solves problems with as much computer automation as possible.

Highlights from the episode:3:31 How did you get to where you are now?5:30 How did you know when your hobby should be a company?6:55 How did you find your co-founder? Why did you think a co-founder made sense? What are the positives and negatives of being best friends with your co-founder?9:07 When you left your job, what was your vision for the company and how has it changed to your vision today?10:05 How did you nurture and grow the HashiCorp API community?12:08 How did you transition from an open source project to a commercialized one? How does it change your job as a founder?14:06 Within your open source customer base, how do you identify which customers to monetize?17:08 How did you and your co-founder decide to bring on a CEO?21:01 How do you run a distributed business? What are some of the challenges and how have you dealt with that? What are some tools you use to overcome the lack of proximity for people?24:21 Tell us about your user conference. Why did you decide to do an annual conference so early in the life of the company and what benefits have you seen from doing it?26:08 As your company has scaled from 5 to 300 people, how has it changed your relationship with your customers and what burden do you feel?28:15 What is your product philosophy and how do you share that with the product and engineering teams?30:35 Favorite book, blog, or piece of content?31:04 What do you believe that not many others believe?31:39 What is your hobby? How do you recharge?

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Jen Holmstrom shares her experience working with start-ups as a talent and search specialist and answers all your most pressing questions. This episode is the first of many salon episodes where we feature an expert from the field who has worked extensively with founders, from early to growth stage.

Jen shares her experience working with start-ups as a talent and search specialist and answers all your most pressing questions. This episode is the first of many salon episodes where we feature an expert from the field who has worked extensively with founders, from early to growth stage.

Jen Holmstrom joined GGV Capital in 2016 and leads the firm’s talent and recruiting efforts. To support founders as their companies scale, she created Founders+Leaders, a leadership development platform that provides training, mentorship, network and more. Prior to joining GGV, Jen was a Talent Partner at Highland Capital Partners and a leader on the executive search team at Facebook. Jen’s career has been focused on team building in fast growing companies. Before Facebook, Jen was a Director at San Francisco-based Riviera Partners, an executive search firm focused on recruiting engineering and product leadership for fast growing venture-backed technology companies, and also worked with SPMB, a technology focused talent search firm. Jen received an MBA from UC Berkeley Haas School of Business and BS from Boston College.

Highlights from the episode:3:13 What’s the biggest pain-point you hear from founders? 4:28 What are some things that people should be looking for in cofounders or first couple of employees if they want to scale? 5:14 How important is it to define culture early on? Does it help with hiring later on? 6:24 What happens after I’ve exhausted all the people in my network? What do I do about hiring? 7:07 When is the right time to bring a recruiting function in-house? 8:46 Have you seen any companies doing unique things on candidate experience that help them standout from the crowd? 10:33 What are some best-in-class practices for recruiting? 13:37 What is a head of people and why is it becoming a prominent role in startup land? What makes someone good at that job? 17:59 How do you think about employee engagement? How do you hold people accountable in an organization but also ensure that they have high satisfaction? What types of tools help with this? 19:51 How do distributed teams work? How do you maintain culture in a distributed team? What tools do you recommend for helping distributed teams? 24:11 How does a start-up compete against large companies like Facebook and Google when you can’t pay as much as the competition? 27:05 How do you have hard conversations? What are tricks to help make these conversations go better as opposed to being terrible? 29:08 How do you become a more successful manager? What are some tips to managing teams? 30:20 What book or article do you recommend? 30:56 What’s your favorite interview question? 

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Jay Kaplan started his career at the NSA and brought his love of uncovering cyber vulnerabilities to the private sector through Synack. In this interview, Jay gives his perspective on how to find product-market fit in cyber security, how early customers shape the product, and how to balance the sales and leadership responsibilities of being a CEO.