Grit

Guest: Bill Magnuson, CEO and co-founder of Braze

The deployment of smartphones around the world was more impactful than any other technology to date, says Braze CEO Bill Magnuson — and that has big implications for emerging fields like generative AI. “If we get to the point where they [LLMs] really can be useful, human-like companions ... they will be usable by everyone that has smartphone technology.” In other words, the question is not business opportunity or scale: It’s capability.

In this episode, Bill and Joubin discuss earnings days, Aaron Levie, MIT, customer churn, shower thoughts, technical co-founders, lacking context, AGI, “hands on keyboard,” the T-Mobile G1, app marketing, the 2008 financial crisis, Bob Iger, World War II, Peter Reinhardt, Watershed, and international offices.

Chapters:

• (00:51) - Morning people

Links:

Connect with Bill

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Connect with Joubin

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Learn more about Kleiner Perkins

This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI

In 2020, Clara Shih quit Hearsay, the company she founded and ran for 11 years; in hindsight, she says “I probably should have quit a little bit sooner.” But at the time, she cared a lot — too much — about what everyone else thought. “There's a lot of guilt around leaving initially and feeling bad for feeling bad,” Clara says. But her worries subsided when her replacement and former COO, Mike Boese, guided the company with “class and grace” to an exit: A $125 million+ acquisition just this week by Yext.

In this episode, Clara meets Joubin on the top level of Salesforce Tower to discuss Sarah Friar, AI “frenemies,” practice and discipline, quantifying hard work, burnout, turning off, Intercom, elite operators, “Serviceforce,” ChatGPT, hiring for hunger, kids and achivement, Thomas “TK” Kurian, Slack, David Schmeier, Juan Perez, Nvidia GPUs, Silvio Savarese and Frontier AI, Starbucks, and Sheryl Sandberg.

Chapters:

• (01:04) - Apple’s OpenAI partnership

Links:

• Connect with Clara
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• Connect with Joubin
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  • Email: [email protected] 
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Marissa Mayer, CEO and Founder of Sunshine and former CEO of Yahoo

When Marissa Mayer was first hired as the CEO of Yahoo, the company had lost nearly a quarter of its workforce in the preceding six months. Early on, she was chatting with employees in the cafeteria and one of them got her attention by smacking her tray. “Is it go time?” he asked. He was asking if the board and C-suite were ready to lead the company forward, but Marissa thought he had one foot out the door. “I had just come out of this meeting where they were like, ‘Everyone’s leaving!’” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Oh no, please don’t go, I’ve only been here for four days!’”

In this episode, Marissa and Joubin discuss the number 12, contacts and photo sharing, fear of AI, soccer moms, maternity as a “disability,” mothers’ rooms, Jim Citrin, Project Cardinal, HTML5 vs. native apps, Ross Levinsohn, Lori Puccinelli Stern, Joe Montana, David Karp, Mark Zuckerberg, Taylor Swift, hiring at Google, Amit Patel, Hamilton, John Doerr, and the Google APM program.

Chapters:

• (00:52) - Reading your own press

Links:

• Connect with Marissa
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• Connect with Joubin
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  • Email: [email protected] 
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Sarah Friar, former CEO of Nextdoor

Sarah Friar has worked with some of the top leaders in Silicon Valley, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, Block CEO Jack Dorsey, and most recently Nextdoor founder Nirav Tolia, who just replaced her as CEO in May. And one of the things that sets top performers apart from the rest, she argues, is their compassion and their responsiveness. When her former EA’s husband was diagnosed with cancer, Sarah texted Benioff — who she had just left behind to work at Square — for help. Within seconds, she recalls, he arranged an appointment at UCSF. “That is an amazing moment of compassion,” she says, “where he did not need to take that time.” 

In this episode, Sarah and Joubin discuss public markets vs. VC, George Floyd, working with the board, singular focus, Goldman Sachs, being in “flow,” the freedom of not getting the thing you want, Walmart, Steph Curry, Graham Smith, Charlie Rose and Donald Trump, ugly babies, Elon Musk, Ladies Who Lunch, CNBC, commuting from home, white noise, “frequent Friars,” @TechEmails on Twitter, and the “zone of gratefulness.”

Chapters:

• (02:04) - Why Sarah left Nextdoor

Links:

• Connect with Sarah
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• Connect with Joubin
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  • Email: [email protected] 
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Stanislav Vishnevskiy, CTO and co-founder of Discord

For many years, the conventional wisdom was the gaming was not social because it was something you usually did at home. “But people who play games are often the most social,” says Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy. “They’re spending 10, 20 hours with other people online, hanging out.” As a teenager, Stanislav logged more than 1,000 days playing his favorite video game and socializing with friends around the world, but with 200 million monthly active users, the social platform is appealing to a lot more than hardcore gamers. “People online who need to get together and collaborate ... [want] tp have control and create a place,” he says. “That’s not just a gaming need, right? That’s pretty much any community.”

In this episode, Stanislav and Joubin discuss “Discord moments,” hanging out online, IRC and AIM, Fates Forever, good and bad stress, leadership coaches, Claire Hughes Johnson, socializing online, heart surgery, Slack, Jason Citron, in-browser voice chat, Reddit, authentic CX, hiring slowly, Mitch Lasky, “playing moneyball,” React, content moderation, deprecation plans, and collaborative projects.

Chapters:

• (02:09) - Discord’s scale and importance

Links:

• Connect with Stanislav
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• Connect with Joubin
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  • Email: [email protected] 
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Eoghan McCabe, CEO, Chairman, and Co-Founder of Intercom

“We are not ready for the degree to which our world is going to change,” says Intercom CEO Eoghan McCabe, “in insane and incredible ways.” When he co-founded the company in 2011, the Irish-born entrepreneur was making it easier for companies to offer human customer service to their customers. But Eoghan believes “every single type of knowledge work” will soon be done by AI, and Intercom is well on its way to that destination: 45 percent of all tickets are being answered by bots now, and he expects that number to climb to 70 percent by 2026. “The agents no longer have to do the repetitive, painful, boring work,” Eoghan says. “They can focus on the more human, creative, interesting work that requires their empathy and creativity.”

In this episode, Eoghan and Joubin discuss fitting in, Archana Agrawal, authentic comms, taking risks, returning to the company you founded, politics at work, celebrating innovation, therapy for founders, and Ram Dass.

Chapters:

• (01:04) - Insecurity and success

Links:

• Connect with Eoghan
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• Connect with Joubin
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  • Email: [email protected] 
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Mark Cuban, co-founder of Cost Plus Drugs and costar, Shark Tank

“I just love to compete,” says Mark Cuban. “And the day I stop is the day I’m dead.” Previously the co-founder of MicroSolutions and Broadcast.com, Cuban is probably best known to the public today for competing with the likes of Daymond John and Barbara Corcoran on the reality TV show Shark Tank. But his real focus — and his real enemy — these days is the pharmaceutical industry. His latest company, Cost Plus Drugs, aims to be far more transparent than established PBMs, or Pharmacy Benefit Managers, and Mark clearly relishes eating their margin. “Everybody talks about disrupting healthcare,” he says. “This is the easiest motherf**king industry I've ever tried to disrupt because it is so opaque, and everybody is so captured by the scale of these big companies.”

In this episode, Mark and Joubin discuss Luka Dončić, Synthesia, the Sony hack, the American Dream, TikTok propaganda, MicroSolutions, throwing away watches, keeping kids grounded, Black Mirror, keeping up, Ali Ghodsi, the NBA, MGM, gambling in Dallas, the Adelson family, CES, transparency, and Alex Oshmyansky.

Chapters:

• (00:55) - Game day and superstitions

Links:

• Connect with Mark
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• Connect with Joubin
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  • Email: [email protected] 
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Taylor Francis, co-founder of Watershed

One day when he was 13, Taylor Francis walked out of the movie theater, and he was pissed off. He had just seen Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth and internalized a “generational call to arms, that my parents had screwed our generation” by causing the climate crisis, he says. 14 years later, he was working at Stripe and felt another call to arms: The 2020s would be a crucial decade for slashing carbon emissions and combating global warming. So, he and his co-founders Avi Itskovich and Christian Anderson all left Stripe to start Watershed, which helps companies measure and reduce their emissions.

In this episode, Taylor and Joubin discuss Patrick Collison, Dan Miller-Smith, hiring challenges, Jonathan Neman, “golden age syndrome,” John Doerr and Mike Moritz, the Climate Reality Project, steady partnerships, DRI cultures, shared context, social distancing, information sprawl, and the founders’ “woe is me” narrative.

Chapters:

• (01:02) - Magnetic missions

Links:

• Connect with Taylor
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• Connect with Joubin
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  • Email: [email protected] 
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guests: Victor Riparbelli, CEO and co-founder of Synthesia; and Josh Coyne, partner at Kleiner Perkins

When Victor Riparbelli wants to learn something, he’ll start with a YouTube video or a podcast: “I maybe buy the book on Amazon as like the fifth step,” the Synthesia CEO says. His company is trying to change the text-first (or text-only) way information is conveyed at work, making AI avatar-narrated videos to replace documents like customer profiles and HR manuals. Victor says that as the technology improves over many years, it could replace text entirely. “I think for most people, if they had a choice, they would probably prefer to watch video and listen to audio.”

In this episode, Victor, Josh, and Joubin discuss Seedcamp, Annie Case, Rubik’s Cubes, AI video dubbing, Instagram filters, emotive avatars, Ilya Fushman, Atlassian, Grammarly, the Gutenberg Parenthesis, European startups, email responsiveness, acqui-hires, and being “lonely at the top.”

Chapters:

• (01:33) - Loose screws

• Connect with Victor
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• Connect with Josh
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• Connect with Joubin
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  • Email: [email protected] 
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Guest: Kat Cole, COO of Athletic Greens

You can’t make smart decisions if you don’t know the truth — the “true truth,” as Athletic Greens COO Kat Cole puts it. “As you get bigger and you have success, innovator’s dilemma, you end up talking to yourself instead of really being rooted in what’s going on.” That’s why she has embraced the anxiety of the unknown, channeling what she doesn’t know about the market into productive questions for her team and her customers. Anxiety can be harmful, she concedes, but “there’s a healthy version of believing you never really know what’s going on, and you never really know the true truth, because things change so quickly.”

In this episode, Kat and Joubin discuss Huberman Lab, ultra-endurance athletes, Chris Ashenden, founder-owned businesses, “fancy jobs,” international trips, unplanned succession, private equity, the Atkins diet, inheriting a bad situation, omni-channel marketing, working with franchisees, fully remote companies, “if not for...,” and why Athletic Greens has only one SKU.

Chapters:

• (01:04) - Podcast superfans

• Connect with Kat
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• Connect with Joubin
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  • Email: [email protected] 
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm