In this episode, Lauren Ipsen hosts Laura Burkhauser, CEO of Descript, to discuss the intricacies of video content creation and distribution. Laura shares her journey from working at Twitter to discovering her passion for content creation, recently becoming the new CEO of Descript, a comprehensive video editing solution. They chat about the pressures of content creation in the digital age, the role of AI in video tools, and strategies for founders to maintain consistent and authentic content. Laura emphasizes the significance of understanding your audience, focusing on long-term engagement over going viral, and leveraging multiple distribution channels for maximum reach. The discussion also covers practical tips like using AI for content ideation and various workflow strategies for busy professionals.

00:00 Welcome and Introduction
01:21 Laura’s Journey to CEO of Descript
05:02 The Evolution of Media and Content Creation
07:41 Finding Your Authentic Content Lane
13:00 Effective Content Creation Strategies
15:56 The Importance of Authenticity in Content
20:12 The AI Content Creation Debate
21:48 Finding Your Creative Lane
23:05 Creating Authentic Content
24:30 The Importance of Consistency
28:57 Choosing the Right Distribution Channels
33:47 Final Thoughts and Advice

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Transcript

Lauren Ipsen: What’s up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Never Too Early, a YouTube series focused on unconventional talent insights for founders. I’m Lauren Ipsen, Talent Partner at Decibel, and this is my Founder Therapy series.

In this series, we will cover early learnings, misconceptions, mistakes, and a whole lot more with folks that have recently taken the lead to start their own venture-backed tech companies or take a step into the CEO seat for the first time.

So, with that being said, I am beyond stoked to welcome my guest today, Laura Burkhauser. Laura was formerly running product at X and Rent the Runway before coming over to Descript, where she ultimately just took the step into a CEO seat for the very first time. Okay, Laura, welcome to the show.

Laura Burkhauser: Thanks so much, Lauren. I’m excited to be here.

Lauren Ipsen: I am really excited to have you. I can’t think of anyone better to discuss this topic in particular, so super excited to jump in. I personally love your content. And kind of fun that I’m gonna be editing all of this on the Descript. So there’s so much that goes hand in hand, and I’m excited to just chat with you about it.

Laura Burkhauser: Yeah, absolutely. I am also excited to share this on LinkedIn and our other channels.

Lauren Ipsen: Yeah, I know. I love it. Okay, cool.

So, I guess, to get started, first and foremost, I would love to just kind of give the viewers an overview on who you are, where you came from, and then if you could just talk to us a little bit about the recent role that you just took on.

Laura Burkhauser: Yeah, absolutely. Well, let’s see. I am the CEO of Descript, which is a video editing solution that makes every kind of video. So we do podcasts, we do—when, you know, you turn your podcast into clips. We do YouTube videos, educational videos. You can edit and publish webinars—all of the different videos that so many of us are feeling incredible pressure to create, whether we’re a marketing team or a founder. And we’ll talk about that.

And I found Descript. I was a customer, actually, before I worked here. So my background is, I was at—I was—before this, I was at Twitter. And that was kind of my first exposure to, you know, seeing the different use cases that people have for social media and, really, how people are using social media to craft and tell their story and to tell the story of what’s happening kind of beyond their role.

And then, when I left Twitter, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do next. You know, it was actually, an interesting lull in tech. It was right before ChatGPT came out and was a consumer product. And so, when I left Twitter, I was like, I don’t really know what I wanna do next. Like, is anything exciting even happening in tech anymore? Isn’t it all just about, you know, trying to pump engagement on the various feeds that we’ve created? Maybe I don’t wanna do this.

And when you’re having that kind of an identity crisis in the Bay Area, you know that you are legally required to start a podcast, which I did. And as I was editing that podcast, I found Descript. And the first time that I deleted my filler words, deleted text, and it changed the video, I had this experience that I think a lot of us have had when we find that magical product where I was like, oh, this is why I got into product management. Like, this is why I got into tech. It was to create magical solutions like this.

And not just, you know, the experience of using the product, but also that, you know, great products, they don’t just do a job for you. They kind of transform the way that you see yourself.

And for me, someone who is, like, much more comfortable in docs and decks, to suddenly be editing video media and publishing it, I was just like, oh my gosh, I’m a creative person. And having that transformative experience made me then knock on the door of Descript. They did not have a job description up. And I said, “Hey, are you hiring product people? I do product stuff.” Like, do you wanna hire me? Yeah.

Lauren Ipsen: And now look at you.

Laura Burkhauser: I’m the CEO. So this is why you’ve always got to shoot your shot, you know?

Lauren Ipsen: A hundred percent. I think that applies to every aspect of life, and I love it. Very, very, very cool. I just think that that context is really helpful for the listeners to get a better understanding of kind of how you stumbled your way into Descript and also. why, you know you’ve found this kind of passion in creating content and amplifying it. So I love it. Super helpful.

You talked a little bit about the pressure that so many people feel in the Bay Area and just more generally around creating content now and feeling like they have to be visible and have a voice. Talk to me about where that stems from, if you have any idea. And also just more generally, as a modern-day CEO, why you feel it’s so important to be having your voice out there?

Laura Burkhauser: Yeah. I mean, it’s the same thing that’s happening in media in—in every kind of media, right? Where 40 years ago, there were just a few distribution channels, and there were a lot of gatekeepers to those distribution channels. And so, if you wanted to kind of, create the narrative of what’s happening in the world, you needed to have access to a gatekeeper, or you needed to ingratiate yourself into the people that own those distribution channels.

Now, over the last 40 years, those distribution channels have multiplied, and they’ve become a lot more democratized. And social media obviously has pushed that, you know, as far as it can go, when—you know.

And so, because of that, you see things like maybe in the old days, 20 years ago, you would try to craft the story about your product and try to own the narrative by hiring a PR firm and saying, “Can you go out and just try to get a lot of articles written about how this is happening right now, and try to get people to interview me? And give—and I’m gonna give this quote about why my company is the solution to this problem that’s been happening.”

And you try to, like, create these news stories in official outlets. And now, anyone can create a news story and publish it. But so, it’s less about, like, do you have access to the storytellers, and more like, do you have the juice, right? Do you have the charisma? Do you have what it takes to get out there and craft the story?

Because if you’re a founder, there’s probably, like, this pitch that you’ve given to a million funders and that you try to give on your website that’s like, here is the problem space. Here is the burning platform. Here’s why my product solves that. Right?

Lauren Ipsen: Yeah, right.

Laura Burkhauser: And it’s kind of amazing that you have that opportunity. Technically, you have the opportunity to go out and make that pitch to every person in the world right now. And the question is, do you have what it takes to break through? And do you have the stick-to-it-iveness to, like, keep up the momentum and keep pushing that message?

Lauren Ipsen: Yeah. That’s the hard part, I think, for a lot of people. Like, a lot of people will get started. I mean, I’m guilty of this, right? I came out of the gates with this podcast. I dropped a bunch of episodes. And then it’s life gets crazy, you know? And you’re just like, oh, shoot. I have a lot that I want to put out there, but you also have a day job for you. You’re pushing product. You know, there’s lots of other things that are happening.

So talk to me a little bit about how you continue to stay on it, push out content, and do it in an authentic way, where it doesn’t feel like you’re just doing it for the sake of doing it.

Laura Burkhauser: What you need to do as a founder is sort of , think about yourself, and think about your problem space, and think about your product. And out of those three things, you need to figure out, like, okay, what is my content? What is my channel? And what is my practice gonna be? And, like, a helpful kind of two-by-two. You can think about—sorry, I, like, live, breathe, and will die in a two-by-two one day. And, like, the two-by-two on my mind is the content charisma matrix.

Lauren Ipsen: Perfect.

Laura Burkhauser: So some people who are listening are like, I have a lot of kind of expert content, right, that I can think about. Sometimes this is technical content, so you may be working on a really interesting model. And what you have is, like, technical content about how, you know, to do research in the field today, right?

That’s one kind of content. I’ll say that my best performing LinkedIn video was a different kind of content expertise, and it was how to prepare for an interview. And it was, like, the first video that I did. But I just had been doing hundreds of interviews and was like, okay, I just have three things that I think everyone needs to make sure that they do if they’re gonna be interviewed by me.

Lauren Ipsen: Wow.

Laura Burkhauser: And I think just because everyone interviews for jobs and is hungry for that content, having someone who is an expert, even though “expert” just means, like, I’ve done a lot of interviews. I’m not a professional interviewer. That’s just part of my job.

Lauren Ipsen: Right. Totally.

Laura Burkhauser: But that was really valuable content. So think about, am I someone who—maybe I don’t think my content is valuable, but, actually, I’ve had a 20-year career. There probably are a lot of people who think that I have valuable content. And what could that be? Right?

And then I think—then there’s charisma, which is just, like, am I the kind of person that can be in front of a camera and shine? Right? Do people lean in—

Lauren Ipsen: Do you have rizz?

Laura Burkhauser: That could make up for a multitude of sins, Lauren.

But if you are, high content and high charisma, right? You can be a thought leader—someone who’s going out and guesting on podcasts and creating content where you’re in the camera—that’s great. And probably, if you know that that’s you already, you’ve already gotten started, right? Your life is on the easier side.

What do you do if you only have one of those things? And I think if you have a lot of charisma, but you’re wondering about content, I actually think podcasting is the perfect—is the perfect thing for you to do. Because, yes, Lauren, your job is to be professionally delightful and to just have people on the pod. I mean, you’re very—

Lauren Ipsen: My job is to have friends.

Laura Burkhauser: In this one part of your job, that is your second job. It’s—you have this very hard other job that you do.

Lauren Ipsen: This is true, but that job also involves just having friends, really, at its core. Yeah. Best job ever.

Laura Burkhauser: And that’s like—yeah, so you can be a podcaster. If you’re someone who has a lot of content and you’re lacking in charisma or, you know, you’re less comfortable in front of the camera, I think educational video is really where you wanna play. That’s where you see a lot of this on LinkedIn, and it gets great engagement.

That’s more like screen-sharing to teach a concrete skill. And people are very hungry for that. That gets great engagement; can turn into MQLs really easily. I think, like, Jacob Bank, who’s the Relay app CEO, has a huge following on LinkedIn right now. And he has this—like, his product, Relay is an agent builder. And he just demos for you. Like, “Hey, I made this Reddit agent. Hey, I made this LinkedIn to email agent.”

And he’s really just showing you his workflow, which is screen-sharing of him, using his product. And that’s so great. Like, what a fantastic kind of lead channel for him now to just teach people how to use this stuff.

And a lot of us who are building AI products—you know, a lot of the education you need to do and the content you need to create is, like, hey, this is the use case. Some of you, like, you know, haven’t even figured out that this exists yet. Like, let me explain what the problem is and why this solves it. And if you can weekly have content where you’re just sharing that educationally, that’s huge.

Lauren Ipsen: So I think it’s something we often consult our founders to do a lot of, and they often come back to us. And it’s exactly what you were just speaking about, where it’s like, where do I start? Maybe I don’t want to be in front of the camera. And there’s been a million Substacks that have been done, or whatever it might be. Or, you know, how do I continue to think about things that come up?

So, I guess, talk to me a little bit about how you find an authentic lane and also how you continue to find time each week. Is it as simple as putting something on the calendar? Is it as simple as recording it all at once or writing it all at once and then kind of boosting it out into the ether when times make sense?

I think these are, kind of the tactical questions that people struggle with, hence the lack of consistency, and then hence why it falls off. And I think you do a really good job of keeping it up.

Laura Burkhauser: Yeah. So I think there are a few different workflows that work. The great thing about podcasting is, like, yes, I think if you decide to go to the podcasting route, I suggest that you put a block Friday mornings or Friday afternoons, and you just commit to—you know, it’s basically a meeting. You invite interesting people to that meeting. You do a little bit of prep in advance. You promise to make everyone on your podcast look good, so that no one’s expecting an oppo kind of thing. And you—and you just, like, have a great conversation and get into your editing habit and try and time box it. And you say, I’m gonna spend an hour talking, an hour editing, and then I’m gonna publish the podcast and do, like, 10 clips that I’ll post on social.

What’s great about podcasting and clips is those clips are things that you can share, you know, for two weeks. And if you wanna do a biweekly podcast, or even a monthly, it’s, like, great. Those clips can be the thing that you’re sharing in between each podcast.

Lauren Ipsen: That’s what I do.

Laura Burkhauser: Yeah, exactly. So that’s, like, one workflow. Another workflow I see, if you’re not doing the podcasting route, that I do sometimes is, you know, I’m in a studio right now. I haven’t done my hair and stuff like that. But sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll get in the studio because I have—there’s good lighting and a good camera here. And I’ll just like—I’m—so I think, like, either you’re kind of an improvisational person or you’re a scripted person.

I’m often improvisational. And so, I will, like—this is actually a fun hack. You can use ChatGPT voice mode and ask it to interview you on a topic ,and it kind of plays the interviewer kind of character.

Lauren Ipsen: No way.

Laura Burkhauser: Yeah. And you just talk to it about—like, I can say, like, “Hey, can you, you know, ask me a bunch of questions about how to build great product or how to build a really strong product team.” And it’ll just toss a bunch of questions my way, and I just answer them authentically. And then I can go through and edit it and find the clips, right?

Lauren Ipsen: Wow.

Laura Burkhauser: And it’s like, oh, there’s a clip. There’s a clip. Oh, I sounded like an idiot there. Let’s just delete that and never speak of it again. And so that’s, like—that’s a really great workflow. If you just wanna, like, okay, I’m gonna sit here for 30 minutes. I’m gonna talk to my computer and just kind of, like, riff. Right? And a lot of us are good at riffing.

Lauren Ipsen: And no pressure. And, yeah, I think that also helps with what different ideas can I speak to. And, also, I think naturally, when you’re doing your job, whatever it is, all day, every single day, you start to forget that you’ve got a lot of knowledge, and you know what you’re doing, you know? And there’s a lot that people can learn from whatever your craft is.

And so, yeah, sometimes it’s just taking a second to have someone else ask you questions, and then you realize, oh, I actually do have a system to that. Or, oh, I actually do have pretty strong opinions on some of this stuff. Right?

Laura Burkhauser: Yeah.

Lauren Ipsen: So I think that’s a great hack. I’m for sure going to use it, and I’ll tag you every time. Cite my sources.

Laura Burkhauser: Yeah. And I think eventually where you’ll get to—and probably, as a founder, you might already be there. But it’s like, okay, you can make kind of content about whatever you care about ,and sometimes I can’t help that. I’ll just make content about whatever’s on my mind. But ideally what you’re doing is, like, when you go into—and you talk to funders, or you go and you talk to, like, potential people that you’ve been trying to hire, you probably know the ways that they misunderstand your space or the ways where, like, they think one thing is true about your space or about kind of the way that things are going, but you think another thing is true.

And out of this, you kind of, like, create your manifesto. Like, this is what I think the space looks like. This is what I think the problems are. And this is why I think my product is an amazing kind of solution. And this is why I think you should work for me, or this is why I think you should fund me, or this is why, you know, I’m really excited to build this as our next road map. Right?

And then, if you start there, with that core set of beliefs, that helps you then understand, like, okay, this is my press story, right? This is what I would brief my PR person with. Like, I wanna make this the story that I read and—you know, in the Times or whatever.

But instead of that, it’s gonna be, like, great, this is my content lane. The four sub-hypotheses of the things that I believe about this space right now are, one, people need to make more video than ever, ever. Great. Like, that’s a content lane that someone in Descript or something should be out there saying, because I think it’s true, and because we need to start having that conversation.

So I’d say that’s, like—you can kind of start to think about what are the sub- bullets of the story that I want out in the world, and how can I create a content lane around those sub-bullets.

Lauren Ipsen: Yeah. I think that’s a great point. My CEO is incredibly high on, you know, we have to be pushing content. We have to be owning distribution lanes. We are only eight people at a VC firm that I think the general public thinks is at least 50 people, simply because of how much content we put out. But it’s all meaningful, it’s all authentic, and it’s all very specific to that individual and what makes sense for them.

And it really was something that I think coming into Decibel, for me, was, you know, thinking about what are the things that I’m passionate about? Where do I find comfort and a natural part of my personality that I think will allow me to excel here? And then what are the types of things that I actually think people care about?

And It’s a hard thing to find, but I think once you figure out, oh, these are— these are easy things for me to be able to create, they’re repeatable, and I do think people care, then it’s like you’re kind of set.

One of our investment partners started off by creating a Substack where she was really trying to focus on, you know, what people wanted to hear, and create things that she felt were kind of right down the center of the fairway. Was using ChatGPT a lot, and ultimately was not getting much of a response. And our CEO said, “Throw it all out the window and start talking like you talk to us.” Like, that’s what people want to hear, right?

Laura Burkhauser: Yes.

Lauren Ipsen: So she took that to a completely different extreme. And, I mean, she’ll reference a quote from someone and have it highlighted with a star, and it’s very glamorous and extra and fun and engaging. And there’s memes in it. And it’s—it breaks down so much of the content that people are already seeing all day long into something that’s really fun and the way we communicate about it on the backend in a lighthearted way.

Laura Burkhauser: Yeah.

Lauren Ipsen: And it has blown up. Like, people are loving it because she’s being authentic to her. She’s thrown what she thought she was supposed to do out the window and just taken on this lane that she feels is how she communicates to her husband about it or her friends. Right. So, it’s fun.

Laura Burkhauser: That’s great. Yeah. No, totally. I think that there is going to be this deluge of AI slop or people who think, like, oh, I’ve solved it. I can finally be a creator because I can just have AI generate all of the content. And I’ll just like, you know, say that content. And I’ll say, like, I am not bullish on that succeeding.

Now, what I’m not saying is that I’m not bullish on AI-assisted workflows. Hell, yes. AI-assisted workflows are an unlock. But there are things you can replace with AI. And I think I’m,even—someone showed me yesterday, like, an AI influencer that they’re making where they’ve clearly lovingly crafted every detail of this AI influencer’s personality, such that they’re almost real. And I’m like, that’s cool. That’s, like, a real creation, you know, that you’re—that you’re making.

So, but it’s, like, that’s high-effort AI, where someone’s really thought about it. And then I think there’s just ,like, when you are doing, yeah, I’m trying to appeal to everyone. I’m not gonna say anything controversial, and I’m just gonna have AI do all of the writing—it’s like, that’s a great way to be done, but it’s not a great way to build passionate kind of followers who go out and retweet you and say, “You’ve gotta read this person’s perspective.”

Lauren Ipsen: Yeah. It’s more of checking a box, doing it to do it, rather than putting something out there that actually comes with thought and empath and an understanding for what people actually want to read or see. Right?

Laura Burkhauser: Yeah.

Lauren Ipsen: Yeah, I’m right there with you. But I think it’s an interesting

process that we’ve all had to go through.

And maybe I’ll share this in the Substack too, but, basically, we all created a Venn diagram before we joined Decibel. And it’s—the exact pillars, I’ll have to go back and reference, but it comes back to, you know, who you are as a person, your specific passions, and then the craft that you want to continue to master or teach, and where they all intersect is kind of where your lane is, essentially.

And so, I think it’s an interesting thing for people to take a look at and be introspective about. Before, I mean, I initially started, I was going to just create a Substack and have it be kind of like my own monologue on different things that were happening. And I just realized that’s just not who I am. I like to yap.

Laura Burkhauser: Yeah. Totally.

Lauren Ipsen: I like to talk, and I like to chat through topics. And, you know, I think writing’s fun, but not to the extent where there’s—I mean, there’s other people that I think are better suited to put out great writing content. And I think for me, I really just like engaging with human beings. So why was I trying to do anything other than that?

So, yeah, I just think it takes a bit and a couple course corrections, and then you kind of figure out, oh, this is fun, and this works for me.

Laura Burkhauser: Yeah, there are kind of two parts in there that are really important. And the first part is, like, I think that, you know, we always need to ask when we’re creating content, who is this for? And what is the value to that person? And I think one of the ways that I see people go wrong is when they start to make content, they really know what’s in it for them.

They’re like, I want people to know my brand name. I want people to buy my product. But they aren’t really asking, like, what’s in it for the person that’s listening to this for 40 minutes or whatever.

And so one of the things that I sometimes have to kind of coach people to do is, like, you know, you don’t need to mention the name of our product, Descript, over and over again. You—

Lauren Ipsen: This isn’t an ad.

Laura Burkhauser: We need to create content that’s helpful no matter what tool people are using to, like—to make video, for example. And I—and so it can’t just be like, here’s why we’re better than all of our competitors, right? It has to try to make content that’s authentically useful to an audience, not just an advertisement. And that’s the stuff that people—that people will watch.

The other thing that you said that I think is so important is, like, you’re gonna get it wrong, and you’re gonna have to—you’re talking about the other person at your work. You’re talking about yourself. The first thing that you think is your thing and how you’re gonna, like, crack in is definitely gonna be wrong. So before you buy that $3,000 camera or before you get that like Shure microphone or before you whatever, tell everyone, “I have a Substack, and thou shalt”—you know, maybe just try it out for six weeks and see if it’s feeling like this is something that I can do.

Meanwhile, you can start to build up. Like ,if you’re doing a podcast, maybe you wanna film the first three or four and have them in the can and feel like “I like this,” before you publish them and promote them and stuff like that. Otherwise, you know, when you quit a couple weeks later, it’s gonna be a little—you’re gonna be a little sheepish.

Lauren Ipsen: Yeah, and you get—you get some inbound when they haven’t heard from you in a little bit. People are like, “Where you been? You still doing it?” Yeah. I’m like, yes, yes. I have six weddings in a row. Yes, I’m doing it.

Laura Burkhauser: My gosh.

Lauren Ipsen: Okay, cool. I think that’s all super, super helpful.

Talk to me a little bit about where you found success and specifically, I think a lot of people look for some moment where something goes viral, or they feel like they get a return on the investment.

Do you feel like there’s more of an importance on the viral thing or more of an importance on just continuing to do it and be real and you?

Laura Burkhauser: This is a great question. I think that going viral is not important, especially, I mean—so maybe if you have a product where, you know, you’re start—like, you’re just starting out, and it’s like a consumer product. You really need to go viral or something.

But a lot of us are—you know, have some kind of an enterprise or B2B component to the work that we’re doing. And in that world, going viral is not important. And that’s also like—you know, I said you need to pick your channel. Think about the channel that you actually need to succeed on. Because I think a lot of us watching the AI conversation think, like, oh, if it’s not on Twitter, it’s not—I’m not part of the AI conversation.

But it’s like, it takes a very specific kind of voice to break through on Twitter. But I’m telling you, the people that are buying your product are maybe not on Twitter. They’re maybe on LinkedIn or on the internet searching for things and being referred to a YouTube video.

And so, I think it’s much more important to think strategically about your channel and then just, like, put in—be consistent in your content creation. And I guarantee everyone, if you’re like, yeah, but how will I know about the ROI? Here’s, like—here’s a guarantee I give everyone. If you start making video content, and you keep it up for, let’s say, four months, I usually say six, but, really, I think four months, where you put out a video at least once a week for four months, if you use Descript to do it, and in four months, you’re like, this has not been positive ROI for me, I will refund a hundred percent of your subscription.

That’s how confident I am that you will have the leading indicators in just a few months that this is helping you get in front of the eyeballs of people who matter. Maybe not going viral, but I’ll tell you, after I started doing a couple of these videos, the first few videos, I think, like, I got a lot of engagement from people. Like I said, they were interview videos. That actually was super helpful for recruiting.

One of my—like, this is my job recommendation. I wrote kind of an interesting job recommendation, then did a couple of videos about interviewing. And we got a lot of really qualified candidates applying, so that was really helpful there. That’s what I was trying to make happen at that point.

But since I’ve sort of shifted into this role, and I’ve been doing more talking about the space in general, I have gotten inbounds for sales. And I have gotten, you know, people just telling me like, “Hey, I’ve seen your videos. You’re at Descript, right?” And that’s how they discovered that we’re in the set of people that they might wanna be considering.

So, to me, I think it was very obvious very early that, like, I’m getting in front of people in a way that I would never have access to them, trying to find their email or something like that. And I’m pretty confident that I’m not extraordinary at this. Like, I’m pretty confident that would be most people’s experience.

Lauren Ipsen: I disagree, but yes.

So one thing you talked to a little bit was distribution lanes. And I wanna chat about that a little bit because I think it’s important. This podcast in particular, we have it out on Substack, Apple, Spotify, YouTube. And I think that helps because there’s—and then LinkedIn, of course.

But there’s moments where one catches fire and the other doesn’t. And it’s just continuing to have visibility amongst lots of different channels. Can can you talk about that a little bit and why you feel there’s an importance to putting content out there across a multitude of different distribution lanes?

Laura Burkhauser: Yeah. I think that different distribution channels hit different people. So, typically, what I would advise is—so, YouTube, for example, and things like Spotify, these are really good for long-form content where the transcript is not only available to people, but to machines that crawl the internet and try to find good content to refer to people.

And a lot of it is long-lived. So some of our most popular YouTube videos didn’t get a lot of views and likes in the first few weeks that we kind of published them. But now that they’ve been on YouTube for years, cumulatively, they’re a pretty powerful referral channel.

And it’s the same with, like, if you’re a marketer, you know that this is how blog articles work, where it’s like, you know, you publish a blog article, and it can refer traffic to your website for years, if it’s a well-written article that is useful to people, that tends to show up when people ask a question like, how do I pick out a nice camera”

And it’s like, Descript, that’s one where it’s like—there’s like, what camera should I be using? And we wrote an article a couple of years ago that people just find because it’s a very good article about what camera you should start using when you’re getting into this stuff.

And that’s an example of just generally helpful content. So, you know, we kind of know this from the SEO game, but video is a really important part of SEO and AEO too. And it’s also just a really important part of how humans access information for months and years after you publish it.

And then I think social is often the funnel into YouTube or to your longer form stuff. And so that’s why clipping is so important. And that stuff is very ephemeral. Anyone who clicks on it is gonna click on it within, like,just a few hours of you posting it, usually. You know if it’s gonna be good or not.

And so that’s why, with social, you just want to have a ton of at-bats, and you wanna try it across a bunch of different channels and just try to get people to go from your short form stuff—not to your website, not to a sale page. Especially if—I mean, unless you’re in e-commerce, really like the—you wanna go from social to long form; from long form, whether it’s long-form like reading or long- form video or audio, to just being in the consideration set.

And then it takes time for that to—you know, if I’m listening to Decibel, I may listen to one of your podcasts. And then it’s only relevant that I know who you are 18 months later. But I’m like, hey, actually, I think Lauren is just someone in this space who knows so much about this. I’m gonna refer her to someone because I know this. That’s kind of the game you’re playing.

So if you’re focused too much on going viral, you’re really thinking short-term instead of thinking about, like, the long-term fruit that’s born from this. And then being in multiple distribution channels helps you have that full funnel experience, from tiny droplet of rain in TikTok to the expanding concentric circles of forming a relationship that that creates.

Lauren Ipsen: Yeah. I mean, I completely agree. And then I think, so often, people feel like if they put content out there that doesn’t have a million views or whatever it might be, that it’s—they failed. Right? And that’s just not the case. You know, I have been putting out this content now for over a year. And it’ll be as simple as, you know, one or two new founders reaching out and saying that they found it helpful and then that being a potential investment deal, or, you know, something that we take a deeper look at. And that in itself makes it worth it.

And, also, God, I learned so much from these conversations. So if, selfishly, I’m learning, someone else has to be, right? But I think it’s just as simple as that. But I think, so often, people are measuring it based on the amount of clicks or—and then feel the need to try and do something different or have a hot take. And sometimes it doesn’t have to be that, right?

Laura Burkhauser: Yeah.

Lauren Ipsen: Any other just pieces of advice, words of wisdom for people to just get started on doing this?

Laura Burkhauser: I love—I’m obsessed with, um, Bay Area billboards. I don’t know if you like them too, but they’re just—they’re so funny to me. I wish—honestly, like, I kind of wish I would put together a TikTok channel of just me reviewing Bay Area billboards.

But, in any case, they’re always just, like, so incredible. They’re just-

Lauren Ipsen: The best.

Laura Burkhauser: I love to drive my parents home from the airport and just be like, “Guess what that company does? Guess what that company does?” So anyways, but—

Lauren Ipsen: Did you see the most—this one woman? Did you see that she put up a billboard that’s like, “Marry Lisa,” with her contact information. And it’s literally, she just is asking someone to marry her, and it’s all an advertisement around why she’s great. So it’s, like, you’re driving from the airport, and it’s like, Vanta and E2B, and all these, like—you’ve got all of these AI agents, and then it’s like, Mary Lisa.

Laura Burkhauser: Lisa, I hope it works out for you, girl. That’s incredible.

Well, I went by one—I remember Intercom had one last year, and it was supposedly written by the Intercom CEO. And it was just like, I just need you to know three things. I need them—I need people driving by to know three things.

One, we have the best chat assistant. Two, it’s powered by AI.

I forget what the three things were, but you could tell—I mean, unless it was totally artificial, my sense was that the Intercom CEO was marching around, and he’s like, going—one of my mentors told me, the more senior you get, the more your job is to just go into different rooms and say the same three things over and over again. Right?

Lauren Ipsen: Honestly, yes.

Laura Burkhauser: So my guess is if you’re a founder, you’re a CEO, you’re listening to this, what are those three things, the three things that you would put on the Intercom billboard of, like, just put these things on the billboard?

And then, there you go. That is make a video that is just you saying those three things. Make it at 90 seconds long. Or make it four minutes and use Descript to cut it down to 90 seconds. Put it on LinkedIn, and see what happens. I think that is your assignment. And if no one engages, that’s fine. Don’t delete it. Right?

Some people tell me, like, “Well, I did all of this, and I posted it, and no one liked it, so I deleted it.” And I’m like, oh my gosh. Play the long game.

Lauren Ipsen: And even if people aren’t liking it—I just saw the other day on my own Instagram, now they can show who’s viewed your profile, or the number of people that have viewed your profile. It was somewhat terrifying. It was over a hundred thousand people had viewed my profile. But, you know, I’m definitely not getting that many likes or comments on things.

So people are still seeing your content when you put it out into the ether, right?

Laura Burkhauser: Exactly. Exactly. And I promise to retweet you, you know.

Lauren Ipsen: Thank you.

Laura Burkhauser: Let me know. Gimme a little DM, and I’ll be, like— retweet this person’s stuff.

Lauren Ipsen: God bless you. What are the three things that you have been putting out over and over and over into the world as a CEO?

Laura Burkhauser: Great question. I think that they are video is eating the world, right? Video is the dominant form of communication, and all of us— CEOs, teams, companies—need to be creating a lot more video if we want to be part of the story of what’s happening in the world.

The second thing is that I think that AI—that video generation is extremely important and is going to change the way that video is created, but don’t sleep on the orchestration and application layers, right? I don’t think that video generation is going to replace recorded media.

I think, instead, we need apps where we can put all of these different models together with recorded media and with other kind of traditional forms of editing media to create a truly horizontal video solution that can be used by everyone on your team because it is both easy and because it covers every single use case, and that’s what we aspire to be.

So I’d say that is—that’s—those are my—that’s my billboard. Now, if we could just condense that into about three words.

Lauren Ipsen: I love it. And that’s where ChatGPT comes in.

Laura Burkhauser: Yes. Thank you.

Lauren Ipsen: Okay. Laura, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I can’t thank you enough. I think this was super insightful for our listeners, for founders getting started on this. So appreciate you taking the time to talk through content. I know it’s gonna be incredibly valuable to them.

Laura Burkhauser: Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much for having me. It’s always a pleasure to chat.

Lauren Ipsen: So much fun. And thank you all for listening to Never Too Early. More to come soon.

In this episode of Never Too Early’s “Founder Therapy” series, Lauren Ipsen, talent partner at Decibel, sits down with Ash Devata, the CEO of GreyNoise Intelligence. Ash shares his unique journey from growing up in a small village in India to becoming a cybersecurity leader. He reflects on his career transitions, challenges faced while moving from large corporations like Cisco to leading a 55 person startup, and the importance of understanding and nurturing a company's ecosystem. Ash provides insights into maintaining relationships with founders, making tough decisions, and constantly adapting to changing market conditions. This episode is filled with valuable lessons for first-time CEOs and anyone interested in leadership in the tech startup world.

00:00 Introduction to Never Too Early Series
00:34 Meet Ash Devata: From Cisco to GreyNoise Intelligence
01:34 Ash's Journey: From India to Cybersecurity
03:17 Joining GreyNoise: The Decision-Making Process
07:00 Navigating CEO Challenges and Company Dynamics
12:06 Adapting from Large Corporations to Startups
16:12 Decision-Making and Collaboration with Founders
21:42 Understanding the Role of a New CEO
22:03 Building and Sustaining Relationships with Founders
23:00 Trusting Your Gut and Decision-Making
23:36 Personal Journey and Upbringing
24:13 Lessons from Family Business
26:06 Influence of Mentors and Leadership Philosophy
26:53 The Farmer Analogy and Ecosystem Management
27:54 Challenges of Remote Leadership
33:20 Adapting to Market Changes and Industry Shifts
35:23 Reflections on the CEO Role and Personal Growth
39:09 Final Thoughts and Advice for Aspiring CEOs

Want more of Never Too Early? Find us on Tiktok, @nevertooearly1 and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

LAUREN IPSEN: What's up, listeners? Welcome back to Never Too Early, a YouTube series focused on unconventional talent insights for founders. I'm Lauren Ipsen, Talent Partner at Decibel, and today, you're back on my Founder Therapy series.

In this series, we'll be spending time with executives that have recently taken the leap to either start their own venture-backed tech companies or jump into a CEO seat for the very first time. These are folks that are going to be sharing mistakes, common misconceptions, learnings, and a whole lot more.

So with that, I am beyond excited to welcome my guest today, Ash Devata. Ash was formerly the vice president and general manager of Cisco Zero Trust, and today is currently the CEO at GreyNoise Intelligence.

Ash, welcome to the show.

ASH DEVATA: Hi, Lauren. Oh, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

LAUREN IPSEN: Thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. And for those listening, Ash just got back from an incredible trip where he kind of disconnected from the tech world in its entirety. And then maybe an hour into him being back in San Francisco, I convinced him to do this. So thanks for doing it.

ASH DEVATA: Well, my pleasure. So at GreyNoise, where I am right now, we have a tradition of shutting down the company every summer for the July 4th weekend or the July 4th week. So I managed to squeeze an extra few days, took a vacation to Asia, and asked a few people in Asia that I was meeting on what they think about AI. And they looked at me like I’m an alien asking them alien questions, so this reminds me of kind of the bubble wheel in tech.

LAUREN IPSEN: A hundred percent. All right, so I want to start by just kind of jumping into your background, your career, and how you ultimately got into the CEO seat at GreyNoise. So maybe you can just start with informing the listeners a little bit about yourself.

ASH DEVATA: Sure. So right now, I'm the CEO of a cybersecurity startup called GreyNoise. We're in the space of threat intelligence about edge devices, and we sell that to governments. We sell that to fortune companies. We sell that to a lot of researchers. We're a relatively small company, 60 people, figuring things out, but we got good traction in the market.

LAUREN IPSEN: Mm-hmm.

ASH DEVATA: But rewind a lot. I was born in India in a small village in a family where we were growing rice and coconuts. That's my beginning. First generation graduate. Came to the US for my master's and a scholarship. Tried to work for a startup that is 10 people. Miserably failed. And then I joined a large company called EMC and then accidentally got into security. And I've been working in cybersecurity for about 15 years now.

LAUREN IPSEN: Awesome. Cool. I didn't know that about you. What an interesting start to life, and then to be here. I mean, that's—yeah. It's probably incredibly important to do what you just did then, and remind yourself of kind of where you came from and different aspects of the world.

ASH DEVATA: Yeah, yeah. You realize things from your childhood or, you know, teenage and later on that that influenced you, but you don't know that they play, actually, such a big role.

LAUREN IPSEN: Sure.

ASH DEVATA: I'll share the story later, but, you know, I was thinking about what influenced me to become a CEO. and there are aspects of my childhood and growing up, you know, that I feel played a significant role.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. Cool. I love that. Talk to me a little bit about how you stumbled upon GreyNoise and ultimately what brought you there, and why you were specifically excited about taking on the CEO seat there.

I had a conversation with a good friend of mine who—she's the CEO at TIAA. And she said, it's such an interesting thing when you come in and step into a CEO seat because, essentially, you're renting. You're renting the title. And, really, someone has created this company as a founder, and it's their baby. And you're almost coming in as a stepparent, essentially. But you want to show it the same love and care that they would. But it can be—it can be really difficult.

So I'm curious, what got you to GreyNoise, and ultimately how it's been being a CEO over the course of the past two years or so?

ASH DEVATA: To continue with your friend's analogy, maybe, you know, if it's co- parenting, it's like one direction, but if you are shifting the parents, then it's a different direction. Fortunately for me, it's more of co-parenting.

You know, I was in search for my next gig, and I was mainly exploring starting a company of my own. But I knew that I needed a technical co-founder. So I was in the market looking for a technical co-founder. And in that journey, I met Andrew Morris, the founder of GreyNoise.

And I think the decision point came down to three different things. You know, one is about me and my personal journey, what I want. The second is the founder and the founder's journey and what state the founder is in. And the third is the state of the company. What does the company actually need to go to the next level, whatever the next level actually means.

So that was my framework to make the right decision. And I feel things aligned on those three. For me, I wanted to work in very interesting tech that has impact, that has a small niche where we have a chance of winning, where I can actually have impact with building the right team and culture. That's what I was after.

The founder is extremely mission oriented. You know, Andrew just—he's a high school dropout. Comes from a family that's been serving in the Army since 1818—like, seven generations, and he's the first guy to break the chain. So he's got this enormous weight on his back to serve back to the country and sort of back to the community. And the choice of the tool for him is cybersecurity.

So, interestingly, he doesn't care about revenue, ARR, metrics, delivery, features. He just wants to catch the bad guys and be the best at catching the bad guys and sell that information as intel. So I loved that maniacal focus on mission, and that's all that matters for him. And he's one of the best hackers in the world. Understands edge and perimeter really, really well. So it's kind of—I felt it's an extremely complementary skill.

And I asked him when we were dating in the initial stage, what's giving him joy, and is he having fun with his role? And he was transparent enough and said, “Absolutely no.” Like he was hating all the meetings he's sitting in. He doesn't care about all these aspects of planning and go-to-market, but he's missing doing the actual technical work.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.

ASH DEVATA: Yeah. And then the company aspect, the company was at a phase where they got a really amazing traction. And then it's trying to figure out how do you go to the next level from product maturity, go-to-market, scaling across the world, you know, redefining the customer base, all those aspects. So I thought, like, the mix of what I want, where the founder is and where the company is, mapped pretty well for this case.

LAUREN IPSEN: A hundred percent. And it sounds like, all things considered— 'cause when I used to do CEO searches at my time at Daversa, I was—those were always really, really difficult. Usually, if you're conducting a CEO search, there's typically a little bit of hair on it for one reason or another. Maybe someone's being pushed out, or maybe they're putting up their hands and saying, “Hey, I don't think that this is the best role for me,” which it sounds like it was more of that in your situation.

But it can be really difficult to bring two parties in and have them kind of both take each other's hands and make it work. It sounds like you both have incredibly complementary skill sets. And you did have a situation where someone was saying there's probably someone better-suited to focus on the go-to-market and product vision side of things, and I just want to focus on what I love. And that's the hacking and technical side of things.

ASH DEVATA: Right.

LAUREN IPSEN: So as ideal as maybe it can be coming into a first-time CEO gig. Correct me if I'm wrong, though.

ASH DEVATA: Oh, absolutely. I feel I was fortunate to come across this unique situation because this is not a board-led search. They were not looking for a new CEO. They were actually looking for a go-to-market leader, and I'm looking for a co-founder. But the conversations led to, hey, we can actually work on this together.

And Andrew said, “Hey, if you want to join us, I'll actually make room for you because I'm no longer having fun doing the CEO game.” So it's the founder having the maturity to have the self-reflection and the humility to step down to a different role and then the courage to convince the board to say that, hey, we need to bring a new CEO. And all that worked out.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. And doing what's best for the baby at the end of the day. Right? So, ultimately, what made you decide that it was worth taking the leap and worth joining and kind of owning this thing in its entirety with him?

ASH DEVATA: Yeah. So, you know, all of us have mental models. So I had a bunch of mental models on what kind of company would work out or what needs to be true for a company to work out. And when I heard about GreyNoise and all the context I was getting from Andrew, that model was challenged. And that model was eventually broken.

And the thesis I had at the time was, not having all the basic foundational elements, GreyNoise somehow got amazing traction, amazing brand, and a set of logos that are using the product in and out really, really well in the right operational framework. So it was that curiosity that initially led me into trying to understand more on, wait, how did you get that customer?

We have like, you know, 20 or 25 of the Fortune 100 companies using the product, but they did not have any TRA enterprise go-to-market model. They had about 40, 50 federal government agencies, US and international, using the product, but they did not have, like, a dedicated, massive federal go-to-market, you know, approach.

So how are you able to get this amazing traction with the customers without having all these foundational elements? And you're not in a must-have product category either. So there must be something very unique I did not understand, or I don't understand, that that worked out. So that intellectual curiosity got me to understand more and more and more, and that's how we got into talking more.

LAUREN IPSEN: Cool. That's really cool. Yeah, it's so interesting. I was just talking to a friend who went through their whole job search with these parameters that she had in mind and took something completely different. And sometimes it's just a gut feeling, and at the end of the day, it's who you're working with and being excited about doing it together. And I personally believe that's the biggest thing. That's probably why I'm in the industry I'm in, but it's my strong belief, right? So.

ASH DEVATA: And another aspect is, you know, not—generally, you think of startups, you think of every startup needs to go to a billion-dollar revenue scale and have a massive exit. But sometimes you can think about, hey, maybe there are other kinds of startup where the rewards are different. It might be more mission-oriented, more impact-oriented, or you have a different level of satisfaction when you are working on a small niche segment.

So the outcome is not gonna be a billion dollar revenue, but it is gonna be a totally different kind of exit or kind of a customer base. You learn a lot in the process. So I had to—you know, I worked for Duo Security, which was acquired by Cisco, and that is in a segment where it's got a massive product-market fit.

We were selling multifactor authentication that everybody needed. Whereas, so that is the model I had. It's kind of Clayton Christensen's model of disruptive innovation. There's a bottom, massive market that is unaddressed. And if you make the solution friction-free and easy to use, you can actually start from the bottom of the pyramid, and eventually, you go up.

Whereas with GreyNoise, it's not something everybody needs. So, but people that need it value it a lot. So we're not relevant for everyone out there, but we are relevant for a small segment, and we are really, really relevant for them. So it's kind of a massive within the model there.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. So how do you shift your mindset going from a Duo into a Cisco and kind of operating at this obscene scale, right? 50,000 or so employees with Cisco, is that correct?

ASH DEVATA: Oh, close to a hundred thousand. Yeah.

LAUREN IPSEN: And then you are working with a company now that's 50 people.

ASH DEVATA: Yeah. 55 people, as of today.

LAUREN IPSEN: Wow. So it feels like two different worlds, right? I think something that, you know, we're always taught to look for when we're looking for CEOs or people that have kind of had the ability to—whether it's own a business unit in its entirety or kind of a P&L, or some type of general management type of role. And then usually product strategists or product visionaries are really, you know, great to be able to naturally take on that seat.

So it's not surprising that you found your way into a CEO gig, but how crazy was it going into a company at such drastic—a drastically different scale?

ASH DEVATA: I mean, it's extremely different, that's for sure. But I was fortunate enough to see smaller companies in the past. When I joined Duo, we were about 50 people. And I got a front line seat at Duo to understand what it means to be part of 50-people company.

LAUREN IPSEN: Mm.

ASH DEVATA: Before that, I was at a 10-people company, so I had some idea. But a stable, powerful company like Cisco definitely spoils you. Think about an initiative for your product or your business unit. There is a department somewhere within Cisco that can help you. You think about expanding into Japan, there's a Japanese sales team. You want to internationalize and localize your product. There is a team that specializes in that.

So it's more about understanding how the ecosystem works and then going and building those relationships and getting work done. It's almost like working for the government or working at a large university that is, you know, well-established. You have functions, you have maturity.

With a startup, I mean, we're trying to sell in the Middle East. We're figuring out what is the right entity or the legal framework in which we need to operate. I never thought, you know, that would be a problem we need to figure out because, you know, at Cisco you had teams and teams that helped you on those.

LAUREN IPSEN: Right, right. So talk about that a little bit. So how do you now navigate not having the resources that you did, not having massive teams? What's your first kind of go-to when you're entering new territory that just feels completely unknown, and everyone's looking to you as the CEO to tell them where to go and how to go about doing it?

ASH DEVATA: You act like you have answers. People feel confident. I mean, one of the best things working for large companies like Cisco is you understand how the system works. Again, it doesn't come for granted. But if you are in a large company, and you are curious enough to understand how the system works, you spend cycles in figuring that out.

You know, you can write your notes, you can talk with people, and people are generally, like, open to share. So if you have that curiosity, you form your framework. So, no, this is how business operates. If you wanna work with the governments in the Middle East, as an example.

So I did that a lot when I was at EMC back in the day, my first large enterprise I worked with, and then at RSA, and then Cisco. So I had some mental models. So I think that is helping me a lot.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.

ASH DEVATA: You know, for example, we're trying to expand into a specific segment. We're trying to build a new product. So those things don't scare me as much now because I'm like, oh, I know how this is done. I've seen this work get operationalized in big companies. So my advice to people if you're at large companies is take advantage of the machinery that operates there. You know, that was not given. Somebody built it. And there's so much you can learn just by observing how the system works there.

LAUREN IPSEN: Totally, totally. We touched on this a little bit, but I want to talk a little bit more about you're taking on a CEO role, and there's a founder who's built a lot of this from zero to one, what it then looks like from a decision-making perspective and how you collaborate, but also determine at the end of the day who kind of makes the calls. So, try and walk me through what that looks like on a day-to-day basis.

ASH DEVATA: So when I first joined GreyNoise, we talked about it because a lot of people advised me that, hey, this is going to be an area of potential friction.

LAUREN IPSEN: Right.

ASH DEVATA: So Andrew and I sat together. We wrote kind of rules of engagement. But the reality is that did not work out. Yeah. Theoretically thinking about, hey, there's gonna be

this conflict area in the future. How will we resolve it? Of course, you're gonna write, like, really cool things. But when the actual time comes—

LAUREN IPSEN: When we're purchased for $50 billion, right?

ASH DEVATA: Yeah, or people changes. Like, for example, we both talked about, hey, if I make a decision about a people change, and you personally know that person, you know, they reach out to you and you say you veto my decision, how do we deal with that situation? So we talked about those things. And unfortunately, a situation like that came into reality like four months after I joined.

We were trying to make some people changes. And Andrew and I agreed on what changes need to be made. And I told him, like, let's sit on it for a couple of days before we announce and execute on this. And next day, he came back and said, “I agree with all these changes, but with these two people, can we do this other thing? Because I really enjoy working with them, and they're really cool people.” So—and that was a real situation.

So for me, the approach I took was, it's not about, no, I already made a decision, or we agreed on X. I took the approach of, okay, let's go to first principles. Forget about these people. How do we want to make decisions in the company? Do we want to hire and work with people we like, or do we want to hire and work with people that we think are right for the company at this stage?

LAUREN IPSEN: That’s tough.

ASH DEVATA: They're brilliant people, the right people, yeah. But not for this job at this stage of the company. So revisiting the first principles on how we want to make decisions, what's right for the company, that—at least, you know, Andrew's a logical guy. So that logical approach helped us win the emotions that he was, you know, dealing with at the time.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.

ASH DEVATA: And at least for now, we are following the same template, that there—this happens on a—not a daily basis, but now maybe once every couple of weeks.

LAUREN IPSEN: Sure.

ASH DEVATA: It could be about a feature, a product, someone we want to hire, you know, arc structure, someone—something we wanna communicate. And the thing that is working is going back to the first principles. How do we want to make these decisions? What's right for the company? And let's talk about the why, and let the best idea win. It's not about Andrew versus Ash; it's more about what's right for the company.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah, I love that. Yeah. I think it's so difficult to do, especially when emotions are tied. And I've seen firsthand falling out between great partners because of the people situation. That's so heavy and so difficult, especially when you have people that have maybe followed one individual from multiple companies, and you establish these roots, and you feel a sense of, you know—I guess a sense of responsibility for their success at the company that they, you know, were brought over to.

And some of these things, yes, you're spot on. It comes back to, this has nothing to do with how they are as a person or whether or not they're great at what they do. Let's just actually be honest with ourselves. Do we think, at this stage, in this role, this is the right person? If we were going to conduct a search right now for this person, would they look like this? Right?

ASH DEVATA: I mean, in addition to that, another way—another aspect there is the size of the decision, right? It's kind of the old saying of pick the battles you want to fight. Is this decision worth this extra level of diligence? What is the impact of this? What is the resource of the decision look like? And there might be some areas where it's worth just leaving the way it is.

Or you can say, you know, this is the founder chip bucket. And mentally, you can categorize a bunch of things into the founder chip bucket, right? So you can take different models, but there's some decisions where it's consequential for the future of the company or the culture, and you want to fight or analyze those decisions really, really well.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. What would be your advice for someone coming into a CEO seat, as a first time CEO, where there's a founder in place that maybe isn't as open-minded to changing up some of the dynamics internally or, you know, hearing you out. Because this is a very real thing that happens.

ASH DEVATA: One aspect which I wish I did more was thinking about the why.

LAUREN IPSEN: Mm-hmm.

ASH DEVATA: So why are they bringing a new CEO, and why are they bringing you as an individual? Sometimes when you're on the other side of the job search, and I know that this is a job search, you kind of—you—it's a game theory, right? So you are selling yourself, and you have that tiny fear. What if you don't get this? What does the other alternative look like? And so on.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.

ASH DEVATA: But I would say be very courageous and really dig deeper into understanding the why. Why they're bringing a new CEO, and then why they're picking you. And it might be for strengths you don't think you have or you're not aware of, but they see that, or it might be something else. So you want to have more clarity in that.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.

ASH DEVATA: Second aspect is the relationship with the founder. You know, a bunch of people advised me, hey, you have to build a relationship. But what I would say, it's not about building it; it's all about sustaining it. And the founder deals with a different level of stress and weight. This is their baby. They dedicated their lives. The trade-offs they made to get to

the company, to get the company to the state where it is today. You as a new CEO just don't have the context of that. So you need to come with a level of respect about all your “don't knows” that happened before you got in.

So there might be some decisions where you think, how the heck did you pick yellow for that? Right? But you have no idea what were the conditions on which yellow was picked. So you want to respect the past decisions because you don't understand. You were not there. And nurturing the relationship with the founder is an everyday process because sometimes they can go up and down because they're just feeling a different level of pressure.

And then the other aspect is, I would say, trust your gut feeling more than you would normally do. I wish I did that. You know, I was initially like, oh, this should be X, Y, Z, or this should be in a different way. But I gave it too much of patience maybe. So as a result of that, we took longer to make a certain set of decisions. In hindsight, I wish we moved faster because I had the gut feeling.

But again, who knows? If you move too fast, it might be too brittle, and you might break it. Maybe it's a balance there. Yeah.

LAUREN IPSEN: I want to come back to when you thought that you might be interpersonally well-suited to be a CEO. And you said that part of this maybe comes back to your upbringing or, you know, the—your childhood, even a little bit. So talk to me a little bit about kind of why you thought that you might be someone down the line that could be well- positioned to run a company.

ASH DEVATA: I never thought about the title called the CEO. For me, it's more about running a business. And fortunately or unfortunately, running a business was very trivial in my mind. Because I was exposed to a lot of businesspeople growing up. So my dad was a, high school dropout. He was a farmer, but he saw a lot of gaps in the farming—as in, like, you know, he had a tractor and the tractor would break all the time. To get the tractor repaired, he had to go to a city, so he would lose two days and all that.

So he saw the gap. He started an automobile servicing shop, and then a bunch of other tractor owners came in. They serviced the tractors. And they all said they want to buy one more tractor, but they don't have enough financial support to buy a second tractor.

And back in the day, it used to take, like, two to three years to get a loan from the bank. So he raised some money from a bunch of rich people and started providing leasing and financial services to people that want to buy tractors.

LAUREN IPSEN: Wow.

ASH DEVATA: And then some of these people wanted to buy tuk-tuks, the autos in India, and then wanted to buy cars. They wanted buy trucks and machinery, like heavy cranes and all that stuff. Fast-forward to a decade, we had a financial services company that was doing leasing and hire purchase, and we had half a dozen branches, and the company went for an IPO.

LAUREN IPSEN: Oh, my goodness.

ASH DEVATA: Yeah. And I was just a kid on the sidelines looking at all this happened. So.

LAUREN IPSEN: Wow.

ASH DEVATA: And so it kind of showed me that, hey, your dad, who was a high school dropout, who was just growing coconuts and rice, is able to do that. So it is relatively not trivial, but it's doable. And the thing you wanna focus on—

LAUREN IPSEN: That’s so cool.

ASH DEVATA: The thing you want to focus on is, are you solving a problem, and are you building the right ecosystem to solve the problem?

And then just a lot of patience and day-to-day discipline. That hustle is required every day. You know, not every day is gonna be great. You get punched multiple times every week, but you just get up and keep walking. So that was— that is ingrained. So I felt like anything is possible, and it's doable.

And then a second big aspect, I would say, is one of the CEOs I worked very closely with is Dug Song, the founder and CEO of Duo. At one time he did—he told me when I was talking with him that the questions I was asking and the way I was running product org was almost like a CEO because my horizon of the business is way beyond product.

So he said I cared about things that typically a product leader doesn't necessarily care about, which is about expansion strategy, go to market, CX, and finance, and culture, and HR, and so on and so forth. And I always felt like that should be the job of every leader. Like, you know, you don't own your function, you own the company, so you need to run the company in the right way.

LAUREN IPSEN: Right.

ASH DEVATA: So I think those definitely influenced me in terms of, yeah, you should run a business. You should understand the ecosystem. And going to the farming analogy, I always believed in this, you know, when you're a farmer, you actually don't grow the plant. The plant grows by itself. Your job is to understand what is the ecosystem required for the plant to grow and control all those resources—enough water, enough sunlight, enough fertilizer, and so on.

So it's all about that care of, do I understand what needs to be true for this to grow? And am I capable of providing those resources in a timely fashion? And it's not gonna work in a systematic way, but you need to understand, oh, there's too much of water, so I should not water for two days. There’s very little soil, or there’s a storm, so maybe I should put it here.

So figuring that ecosystem for me feels like a lot of fun because it keeps changing. It's different based on the market conditions, different based on the company. But you as a CEO actually don't do any work. You are more like orchestrating. I cannot play any instrument, but I'm a great orchestrator.

LAUREN IPSEN: Absolutely. And that's the job. That is the job to a T. That's really cool. And I love the analogy. That's awesome. I am curious what it's like being at a company where you probably personally know and interact with just about everyone all the time. How does that just change your perspective on how to manage people more generally and where to focus on growing and developing talent?

ASH DEVATA: I see a different view there.

LAUREN IPSEN: Sure.

ASH DEVATA: Maybe it's because of my tenure with GreyNoise, which is, you know, less than a year and a half, versus my tenure with the previous company, with Duo. Including Cisco, it was eight-plus years.

One challenge I still face every day is—I realized this about myself—I'm more of a in-person working style. That's my natural style. So I struggle whenever the communication has to be through a screen, whether that's texting, Slack, or everything else. And GreyNoise is all remote. And I'm someone that came into the game after, in the middle of the story. So half the movie was done before I got in.

You cannot go back and build a relationship. I was not there when that story was happening. And my natural style of relationship-building is not enabled here because we're all-remote company, and we cannot afford changing that model right now.

So I don't think I have the personal relationship that you expect for a small company with the founder—you know, that a founder has with every employee that I have here. So I do not have that. But if I rewind to Duo—because Duo was about 50 people when I joined, and we were scaling. I was personally involved in a lot of hiring decisions, so I think I had more personal relationships with people there because I was involved—I was involved in building the company. And again, it's eight-year tenure there.

But here, you know, I have a very tight relationship with my executive team. I have good relationship with the next level team because I do skip levels, and I meet them often. But one thing I continue to struggle with is how do you build next level relationship with people in a fully remote environment, when you as a CEO came in the middle of the story? And everyone is accepting you with a grain of salt because, you know, you are the outlier. You are the foreign body of the system.

LAUREN IPSEN: Right. How do you gain credibility?

ASH DEVATA: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it just takes time, right? You can do a splash, you can talk about every plan you have on day one, month one, but the proof is in the pudding.

Are you delivering? Are you actually changing the culture? Are we winning more because of the initiatives you started? Are you showing up? So I think all those things matter.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. I remember I was running a CEO search a while back, and there was this woman that I thought was absolutely perfect for the role, and they were so excited about her. She came in, and she just—she did such a thorough evaluation of what she felt needed to be done when she came in, in the first, you know, 90 or so days.

And she called me and said, “I just don't wanna be the bad person anymore. I don't wanna be the bad guy or girl. It's just hard.” She's like, “I know what needs to happen. I can do it. It will be great once it's done. And I don't know if I have it in me.” It's just a hard role to play sometimes.

And then add in the remote component to it, right? That's really hard. I think it's possible to— the whole process of gaining credibility, I do think, takes—it's a lot slower, in my personal opinion, when it's all happening remotely. Yeah. Being side-by-side people, they just get to know you as an individual too and realize, oh, this is a good person that genuinely has the best intentions for the company or for the people here.

So you get to understand people in a different way, as opposed to, I'm entirely guilty of only talking to my direct colleagues. And I think I have a great relationship with them, but when I need to. Right? As opposed to just because, or just to have a mind meld or share things. Right? So, yeah, it's a tricky one.

ASH DEVATA: And to come to the conclusions on what changes you want to make. You know, I feel it's your first 30, 60, 90 days of the company, and you're trying to ask a bunch of people. And so what you're getting is the declared feedback from the employees, right? They're all declarative. But what you do not have is the observed feedback.

So—because you do not have enough time observing how things are working. So people are generally good at telling what they think you want to hear, especially when it's remote and you can't see the body language in the right way and whatnot. So I think—I wish people think more actively about making decisions based on observed behavior versus declared behavior.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.

ASH DEVATA: Yeah. How you process—

LAUREN IPSEN: That’s a great delineation.

ASH DEVATA: Yeah.

LAUREN IPSEN: And there's some that I think it's such a fine balance because you can come in, and obviously, you want to show the board and the team that you're here, and you're ready to make great change. And all of that's great. And it has to be so finely balanced with being a sponge and just kind of taking it all in and, yeah, observing what's actually happening

and, you know, what you wanna fight for and what's maybe not worth it and all of these different things, right?

ASH DEVATA: Yep. And another aspect of that is the company's not constant. You know, the company's changing. The market conditions are changing. So it's a moving ecosystem. And, you know, I joined GreyNoise last year, and I believe the change that has been happening in the industry in the last three years is kind of unprecedented, driven by AI, and of course, all the geopolitical events happening in the cyberspace.

So it's kind of, your theses are valid for a quarter, and then the ecosystem changes, and then you come with a new insight the next quarter. So it's not that the company is constant, and you have time to dig deep. You’re like, you know, constantly thinking about what is changing with the market and what does the relevancy actually mean on a day-to-day basis.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. There's a lot of people that, over the course of the past year, especially folks that were coming out of big organizations when there was all these macroeconomic shifts that were happening, decided, oh, I'd rather just build a company as opposed to, you know, going in and joining something as product officer at, you know, a company that's maybe Series B or what have you.

Because there's a lot of action that's happening that's still so early in AI and at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity. So, so many amazing execs that came from these big, big entities are now, for the first time, either in building mode as a founder or, for the first time, have done what you've done and taken on a CEO seat for an early stage company.

What do you think the most important things that maybe you've learned over the course of your time at GreyNoise have been that maybe you just—you weren't privy to, or you didn't feel like anyone gave you a heads up on, or that have been kind of new, different challenges that you hope that, you know, folks would vet before deciding to make the leap?

ASH DEVATA: I feel, you know, to constantly rewrite your job description as a CEO, who came in the middle of the story and as the company's growing. So you—so rewriting job description, meaning at a very high level, I feel the CEO's job is to make sure, number one, the company doesn't die. And, number two, the company is relevant. And, number three, the company's actually growing.

So what is your role in the market? And so on and so forth. But where you focus on? Is it people issues, technology, go-to-market, getting funding, managing the board? Like, what area do you precisely focus on might needs to change based on the state of the union and what's changing in the market on a—not a weekly basis, but at least on a monthly basis. So I wish somebody told me that, hey, proactively think about your focus areas on a monthly basis, versus, you know, you have a template. That's one.

Second is, a lot of people said, hey, CEO jobs are gonna be very, very lonely because you cannot provide all the context to any one group of stakeholders because they'll freak out. You know, you still manage with a certain tone the board. You manage your executive team in a different way. You manage the whole company employee, you know, all hands in a different way.

But I felt that is kind of a mis-advice. I trust my executive team a lot. I share a lot of context. So maybe there's a way where, if you build enough trust with the immediate executive team, the job doesn't need to be—

LAUREN IPSEN: So lonely?

ASH DEVATA: So lonely as they say it should be, or it is in general.

LAUREN IPSEN: I love that. It feels more like a partnership.

ASH DEVATA: Yeah. So, you know, you are vulnerable. You tell them, I don't know the answer. I'm scared too, you know, about the survival of this particular project. And so you have a different level of trust. So that's—I wish people told me that. Hey, proactively figure out—you don't need to be too lonely, you know, in your CEO gig.

LAUREN IPSEN: And you don't need to necessarily immediately have the answer to everything on your own. Right? I think that's a cool—that's a really great perspective.

ASH DEVATA: Yeah. Yeah. And when I was at Cisco, I was having a blast. Cisco is a phenomenal company to work for. But I felt like I was getting really comfortable. And I always believed, like, comfort and growth are diametrically opposite, so.

And I also felt it's a—you know, once you're very comfortable with a very large company for a very long time, you might not be able to operate in a small startup because the struggles are very different. You're used to a certain level of ecosystem support, right? So I was scared about the level of comfort and my future inability to work for a small startup, and that was one of the drivers for me to leave Cisco at the time.

LAUREN IPSEN: Okay.

ASH DEVATA: And it was very personal. So I would recommend people, you know, if— there's nothing wrong in working with a large company for the rest of your life, but, you know, if you're—if that's what you want to do, you should completely do that.

LAUREN IPSEN: Right.

ASH DEVATA: Do not underestimate the scale and the support a large company provides. At a small startup, you know, you have to do everything from zero to one, and survival is, like, top of mind. At Cisco, you don't think about survival every day. And—

LAUREN IPSEN: That’s true. Yeah.

ASH DEVATA: Yeah. You know, that's the last thing in your mind, right? At Cisco, I always used to think about, you got 80 gods to please. I grew up in a Hindu family. So you always think about hundreds of gods. And every god has a role. Like, there's a god for rain, there's a god for thunder.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.

ASH DEVATA: So at Cisco, you have a lot of gods to please. No matter what decision you make, that decision can be vetoed by some god sitting somewhere. So you always try to understand how many gods exist. What is their intention? What do they prioritize? And how does your decision align with them?

And you don't have those kind of aspects with a startup, right? You are the decision-maker. The buck stops with you.

But, bottom line, I feel, if you ever thought about giving it a shot, you should totally try being a CEO. You know, I think about this framework of a lot of us have only 80,000 hours to work. You know, you start working when you're 25. You retire when you're 65. So if you're lucky, you got 80,000 hours to work in your life and

LAUREN IPSEN: I like that you position it that way. You get to, yeah.

ASH DEVATA: Yeah. And there's no, you know, APR on it. You know, it's not earning any interest. There's no dividends. If you're lucky, you get all the 80,000. So, you know, if you want to categorize 5,000 of the 80,000 you have—and a lot of us don't have all the 80,000 right now; you're somewhere in the middle. So, you know, just don't think too much. You can say, I'm gonna categorize 5,000 or 7,000 off that remaining 20,000 left for me to try a CEO gig. Let's see what happens.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. Cool. This has been incredibly helpful. I so appreciate you taking the time. I think this is gonna be so helpful for our founders, especially first-time founders and CEOs that are jumping into the spot that you jumped into, similarly. So thank you for hopping on the show, especially right when you got back from a trip of disconnection. Welcome back to technology, Ash. I appreciate you.

ASH DEVATA: Well, the best way is to come back to technology, Lauren. And thanks for having me. This is wonderful. Enjoyed very much talking with you and, you know, sharing my tiny context I have.

LAUREN IPSEN: Awesome. Thank you so much. And for all of you tuning in, more to come on Never Too Early: Founder Therapy. We'll talk soon. Bye-bye.

In this episode of 'Never Too Early,' host Lauren Ipsen is joined by Jonathan Schneider, founder of Moderne and US Army alum. They delve into topics crucial for business leaders and operators, such as multi-year deals, pricing strategy, and knowing when to fight versus fold. Jonathan shares his journey from Netflix to founding Moderne, his insights on pricing models, challenges with enterprise deals, and the importance of aligning incentives with customers. The discussion provides valuable advice for founders, including the idea of 'planning to lose' and being prepared for rejection.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:53 Jonathan Schneider's Background and Journey to Founding Moderne
03:24 Diving into Pricing Strategies
04:04 Multi-Year Deals: Pros and Cons
07:22 Dynamic Pricing Models and Enterprise Sales
19:26 Knowing When to Fight or Fold in Business Deals
28:08 Reflections and Advice for Founders
31:13 Lightning Round and Conclusion

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In this episode of 'Never Too Early,' host Lauren Ipsen, Talent Partner at Decibel, welcomes Maria Zhang, former VP of Engineering at Google and other major tech companies, who recently launched her startup, Palona AI. Maria discusses her new venture, her transition from corporate roles to founding a startup, key insights from talking to over a hundred customers, and the importance of building for the buyer. Maria also shares practical advice on building products, recruiting early teams, and navigating the complexities of go-to-market strategies for first-time founders.

00:00 Introduction to Never Too Early Series
00:29 Meet Maria Zhang: A Journey of Excellence
00:46 Launching Polona AI: The Stealth Journey
01:45 Deep Seek and AI Advancements
04:48 Building AI Agents with Personality
12:21 The Founder Journey: Challenges and Learnings
15:38 Forming the Dream Team
18:13 Mentorship and Startup Beginnings
18:48 Building a Founding Team
21:04 Hiring for Go-to-Market Roles
26:53 Balancing Recruitment and Sales
30:42 Navigating Venture Capital
35:44 Advice for First-Time Founders
37:41 Recommended Resources for Founders

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In this episode of Never Too Early's Founder Therapy Series, Lauren Ipsen from Decibel sits down with Matt Peters, the former Chief Product Officer at Expel and now a tech entrepreneur. They discuss his journey to becoming a founder, including his early career experiences, the challenges of building his company Fixify, and the learnings from product development to managing investors. Matt shares invaluable insights on the importance of understanding customer needs, building a strong team, and maintaining emotional resilience in the startup world.

00:00 Introduction to Never Too Early
00:20 Meet Matt Peters: From CPO to Founder
01:03 The Founder Itch: Matt's Journey
01:48 Building a Product and a Company
02:26 Early Career and Key Learnings
03:36 The Aha Moments
05:07 The Decision to Found Fixify
10:30 Challenges and Pivots in Product Development
18:22 Go-to-Market Strategies and Customer Insights
20:24 Managing Stakeholders and Investor Relations
24:49 Building a Strong Founding Team
26:05 Effective Hiring Strategies
28:16 Onboarding and Early Success
31:33 Tracking Success and Setting Goals
38:13 Reflecting on Leadership and Emotional Resilience
42:07 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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In the first episode of NTE’s Founder Therapy Series, Lauren Ipsen, Talent Partner at Decibel, interviews Navrina Singh, founder and CEO of Credo AI. Navrina shares her journey from leading AI products at Microsoft to founding Credo AI in 2020. She discusses the challenges she faced, such as creating a new category in AI governance and navigating the complexities of the startup world. The conversation also covers essential advice for new founders, the importance of trusting one's gut, and strategies for attracting and retaining talent. The episode concludes with insights into successful venture partnerships and the future of AI governance.

00:00 Welcome to Never Too Early: Founder Therapy Series
00:27 Introducing Navrina Singh: From Microsoft Exec to Entrepreneur
01:11 The Journey to Founding Credo AI
03:54 Challenges and Misconceptions in AI Governance
08:58 Building a Strong Team and Company Culture
22:17 Navigating Venture Capital and Fundraising
31:00 Advice for Aspiring Founders
38:52 Speed Round and Final Thoughts

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@nevertooearly1 and subscribe  to us wherever you get your podcasts.

In this episode of 'Never Too Early,' host Lauren Ipsen from Decibel engages with Amy Kim, the Chief Revenue Officer at A.Team, discussing the strategic use of contractors for early-stage startups. Amy provides insights into the evolving gig economy, emphasizing the paradigm shift towards output-driven organizations in a rapidly changing workforce landscape. She discusses the benefits of hiring contractors, such as flexibility and cost efficiency, while addressing common concerns and misconceptions about their investment and reliability. 

The conversation also covers A.Team's rigorous vetting process for high-caliber talent, differences in contractor versus full-time employee compensation, and the importance of cultural fit and regular feedback. Amy shares her perspective on when it is optimal to hire contractors, stressing function over company stage, and encourages founders to overcome traditional stigmas associated with contract work as they build agile, impact-focused teams.

00:00 Introduction to Never Too Early

00:19 Meet Amy Kim: CRO at The A.Team

02:42 Question One: What are the pros and cons of hiring contractors versus ful time employees? Amy and Lauren address the negative association that usually comes with hiring contractors as opposed to full time employees and why it shouldn’t be taken at face value.

06:31 Question Two: Do I vet contractors the same as I do full time employees? Amy talks through not only how the A.Team vets talent that they let into their contract community, but also ways to ensure that your company is also choosing the right contractor.

13:20 Question Three: What does compensation typically look like for contractors versus full time employees? Lauren talks about how contractors can often charge a premium on the front end, or actually be more expensive from a cash perspective than hiring a full time employee, but overall, are ultimately cheaper for the organization.

15:33 Question Four: When is it less optimal to engage contractors? Amy talks about how it’s actually less important to focus on the stage of the company for contractor support and more important to focus on the specialty or function.

17:25 Question Five: How do I ensure that contractors feel properly incentivized? The biggest reason contractors fail is when they are not properly incentivized or treated as a player on the field. Amy talks about the importance of frequent check-ins and aligning incentives early in the contract engagement process.

Want more of Never Too Early? Find us on Tiktok, @nevertooearly1 and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts.

In this episode of 'Never Too Early,' Lauren Ipsen, Talent Partner at Decibel, hosts Sally Carson, an experienced design leader with a background at LinkedIn and Duo Security. Together, they explore the top five questions founders have about building their design organizations from scratch. Key topics include the timing and type of first design hires, the roles of product and brand design, introducing user research, and the benefits of hiring generalists versus specialists. Sally also shares her personal experiences and offers practical advice for effectively growing a design team in a startup environment.

00:00 Introduction to Never Too Early

00:19 Meet Sally Carson: Design Leader Extraordinaire

02:05 Diving into Design: Top Questions Answered

02:22 Question One: How should founders think about their first design hire? Sally and Lauren talk about when the right time to invest in design is and what investing in design looks like in the early days.

06:01 Question Two: How important is seniority for your first design hire? What’s the right level? Lauren talks about her own experience hiring designers and how she struggled to find designers for a startup that successfully balanced strategy and execution. Sally also talks through why it might make sense to avoid marquee names like Meta and Google early on.  

09:09 Question Three: Sally discusses how she personally feels that it’s important to invest in product design first, especially before finding PMF. Pouring fire on the brand component and the marketing funnel should come after.

11:02 Question 4: When is the right time to invest in user research? Sally talks about how user research has really moved away from the academic connotation it came with 15 years ago and has become far more pragmatic today. She talks about how the right person in UX can be great to hire sooner rather than later.

14:49 Question 5: Should founders be hiring Specialists early on or Generalists? Sally talks about why she feels it makes sense to introduce specialization later in a company’s growth cycle.

16:59 Sally’s Final Advice for Founders

18:51 Closing Remarks and Contact Information

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In this episode of 'Never Too Early,' host Lauren Ipsen, Talent Partner at Decibel, interviews Giri Sreenivas, Chief Product Officer at Docker, about essential strategies for founders building their product organizations for the very first time. The conversation addresses when to hire your first PM, the importance of founders remaining involved in the product vision, and the pros/cons between hiring a CPTO versus two different leaders. Giri shares his experiences from being a founder to building products at scale, offering valuable advice on hiring, managing product teams, and achieving product market fit. Key takeaways include understanding the optimal time for bringing in a PM, the roles of product leaders, and practical tips for maintaining a balance between founder oversight and effective delegation.

00:00 Introduction to Never Too Early

00:19 Meet Giri Srinivas

01:23 Question 1: When is the right time to hire your first PM? Giri talks about how the founder should really be playing the part of the PM, perhaps even longer than you might imagine.

05:11 Question 2: How do you determine the right seniority of your first product hire? Giri talks about how he tends to lean towards hiring a PM rather than a Head of Product until you feel that you have established PMF.

08:56 Question 3: What is the right DNA for your first Head of Product? Giri personally has a bit of a bias towards a more technical type of product leader. Here’s why.

13:16 Question 4: What is the most productive way to set up your EPD organization? Giri discusses the pros and cons of the “four musketeer model” as well as hiring a CPTO or one person to own it all.

17:14 Question 5: Do you have any other final tips for founders? Giri has a unique perspective being a multiple time founder and most recently a Chief Product Officer at a growth-stage company. He reminds founders of the importance of staying close to the product strategy and the executive leaders that you hire.

19:16 Conclusion

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In this episode of Never Too Early, Lauren Ipsen from Decibel talks with Nir Polak, co-founder and former CEO of Exabeam, about selecting a co-founder and productive co-founder dynamics for new founders. Nir comes from 18 years of information security experience. He shares the importance of complementary skill sets, and maintaining open communication and a “no-ego culture.” Lauren and Nir also discuss the significance of founder agreements, handling equity splits, and navigating conflicts and decision-making. The conversation offers practical advice for founders to ensure a successful partnership.

00:00 Introduction to Never Too Early

00:20 Guest Introduction: Nir Polak

01:10 A Funny Anecdote from Nir's Past

02:27 Question 1:  How do you meet potential co-founders? Nir and Lauren talk through how to evaluate whether you should start a company with someone.

03:07 Question 2: Do you think it's more productive to be mostly aligned with your co-founder or have two founders with very different POVs? Nir talks about how it is important to find a co-founder who compliments you and makes you whole, but doesn’t mirror you.

08:55 Question 3: How do you determine who makes decisions? How does voting work? Can one person fire another? Nir believes in “one throat to choke,” and explains why this tends to make him a non-believer in co-founding CEOs.

10:57 Question 4: How should equity be set up? Lauren and Nir share their perspectives on how to set the cap table up for success and avoid corrections down the road.

15:43 Question 5: What are some questions you feel are important to align on before starting a business with someone? Nir talks through how evaluating a partner to go into business with is similar to evaluating a partner you want to spend your life with. He talks through the importance of aligning on values and addressing potential hurdles early.

18:59 Final Tips and Conclusion

Want more of Never Too Early? Find us on Tiktok, @nevertooearly1 and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

LAUREN IPSEN: Welcome to Never Too Early, a YouTube series focused on unconventional talent insights for founders. I'm Lauren Ipsen, Talent Partner at Decibel. In each episode, we'll cover the top five commonly asked questions that we get from founders building their organizations for the very first time. It's never too early to learn from the best.

I'm super excited to introduce my guest today, Nir Polak. Nir was most recently the co- founder and CEO of Exabeam. He has 18 years of experience in information security, including executive experience setting company strategy, driving execution, building new products, and bringing them to market.

He is currently now a builder at WhiteRabbit, which is leading the way for building the next generation of cybersecurity companies. So he is one of the most qualified to answer the top five questions we get from founders that are looking for their co-founders for the very first time.

Welcome to the show. Thank you for joining.

NIR POLAK: Thank you. Happy to be here.

LAUREN IPSEN: I really appreciate you taking the time. I just covered your incredibly impressive professional background. Tell the listeners something fun about you, though.

NIR POLAK: Fun about me. I don't know if it's fun, but people won't know. I almost went to jail in sixth grade.

LAUREN IPSEN: Okay. Tell us more.

NIR POLAK: So it was April Fools’, and a friend of mine and I wanted to kind of do a trick on one of our teachers. We went on this class trip, and during the class trip, we forgot, or she forgot, one of the students. And he got stuck alone and needed to kind of have his parents come and pick him up. It was a whole fiasco on that.

So we, April Fools’, thought that we were going to do something funny. So we wrote a letter from the principal that literally fired her and we signed it with the principal's signature. Now, we – we’re not that stupid. So we use the sister of my friend to do that. But, long story short, police investigations. It was a lot of fun. So that was my fun story.

LAUREN IPSEN: Oh my God. That is a fun story. Where did that leave you after? How did you get out of the debacle?

NIR POLAK: Oh, we just – we came out and just said, “Hey, it's us.”

LAUREN IPSEN: Cool. That's a fun one. Thank you for sharing. I love it. Okay.

So today, Nir and I are going to chat through a couple of different components to how you should pick your co-founder, and co-founder dynamics, and the best way to ensure that you're set up for a successful marriage. It's something that comes up a lot, and so I think it'll be really beneficial for our founders to go deep on.

So I'm going to start with the questions that I get, and then hopefully towards the end, we can cover some questions that you think are helpful to align on, and we'll go from there. Does that sound like a good plan?

NIR POLAK: Sounds great.

LAUREN IPSEN: Cool. Let's start with how you can meet other potential co-founders. And once you do meet people that are interested in potentially starting something and passionate around the same area, then how you evaluate whether or not they could be a good fit for a coworker or a co-partner.

NIR POLAK: Last company I did. a company called Exabeam. we were three co-founders, one that I knew very, very well, because I hired him to our prior company. So I got a chance to work with him for, probably, I want to say, seven years prior, so we had a lot of working relationship. And – but one that we did not know, and I got reference to him through a common person.

So I didn't need to do a lot of various datings to find the co-founder. We kind of found somebody out of the gate that kind of, like, worked really well. But what do you do? You're looking first – one is you're looking to complete kind of who you are. So you're not looking for people that are like you. Okay?

You're looking for people that, you know, are going to add value in whatever lane they're running, if it's technology, if it's product, if it's research. If it's the CEO, what do they bring to the table? But what you're relying on is, you're relying on values and perspective of the world, and, you know, So you're going on dates. You just spend a lot of dates with them.

You go out and drink and you talk about life, and you talk about their childhood, and you’re just wanting to get to know them as a person. And then you do just a lot of back channel references.

So you asked, where do you find these people? So, that's an interesting question, because I did not need to go to Seek, but I'll tell you what I'm doing now for these companies that we're building is, we're looking for a typecast of people, depending for what position. And we're going to offer them a founder position in one of our ideas.

So we literally have someone like you, Lauren, that is searching for talent, and we kind of have a typecast. What are the companies, what positions, how do they look like, like, from a career trajectory. And then we start dating them, and we figure out how it goes.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. Cool. I've been doing a lot of that, obviously, as I'm sure you can imagine. And it's always really interesting to see. I mean, some founders, I'll connect them with advisors or folks that we can infuse into their fold in a fractional capacity. And then over time, they start to build rapport and start to get more excited about what they're building, and then maybe lean into more of a full-time co-founder-type role.

It's such a difficult one, especially when it's one individual that came with this idea, and then someone else, where you're wanting to give them founder equity or the same incentive and energy around the long-term vision for a product. But how do you do that when you weren't the one that initially thought of it, and all of these types of things?

So it's a difficult thing to pattern match and to marry people around an idea when it was one individual's idea, I have found.

NIR POLAK: I think that people, I think, put too much, I would say, weight into the idea itself. A company is much more than an idea.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.

NIR POLAK: An idea is something very thin. You know, companies change. Their strategy changes. Even when you have the idea that doing ideation, validation, validating the idea, bringing that to a strategy, to a minimal viable product, understanding how to go to market against that, there is so much to do than just an idea.

A company is a combination of a team, an opportunity, and an execution. And I think the idea is somewhere in the opportunity, but it's not – there's so much more in there.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah.

NIR POLAK: And I think somebody bringing the idea is great if – I don't know. My last company I did, the idea was mine because I came up with it.

But would I say that, kind of, like, my co-founders felt that the company is less theirs than mine? I don't think so. We founded it together, and we jumped on the journey together, with the ups and downs.

And the difference between an employee and a founder is a founder is not employed by the company. Maybe it is on paper, but it's their baby. It's a much bigger responsibility than just kind of, like, being an employee. And that's what you're looking for. It's not necessarily somebody that came with it. I think that people that think the idea is everything? It's just the beginning of pulling on a thread.

LAUREN IPSEN: I think that's really cool. I think that's the difficult part to vet for, right, is trying to vet for people that are going to treat your baby like their baby, right? And really adopt that baby and take on ownership as a legitimate parent, to continue to just exhaust that metaphor.

One thing you spoke to that I want to dive a little deeper on is finding individuals that can complement your skill set, so – or complete you. I have a lot of founders in our portfolio that come from companies that, they've worked together, and they immediately start hiring great people that they've worked with in the past. But then it's a lot of like-minded individuals that are working on a problem together, and so not a lot of challenging of ideals, ideas, or different perspectives.

So my question for you is: Do you feel that it's more productive to have founders that are like-minded and really aligned on all of the same things, or to have someone come in that has a very, very different perspective than the initial co-founder?

NIR POLAK: Yeah. So I think that there's an element – again, what you want to align on is, you want to align on the working behavior and your values of what you want your baby to be, and how you want the interactions to take place, and conflict resolution to take place. But conflict is healthy. You do not want kind of, like, “yes” men all to each other.

You kind of need that yin and yang. You do need to bring that different perspective and capabilities. And I think people that work with each other in the past are great, you know? Kind of like – I've seen multiple companies that that founding team is now on their third founding, kind of a third company. And it's the same founding team over and over again, and they complete each other super well. They're very different than each other, but they all respect each other.

I don't believe in just a Kumbaya. Kumbaya doesn't create a good company.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So differing perspectives is great, but there's a difference between, you know, having different perspectives and also just being able to work together and respect each other and create synergy in a dynamic working environment, right?

Talk to me a little bit about – I mean, the equity side of things comes up often. So how do you determine who makes the decisions? How does voting work? Can one person fire another person? Let's just assume, unfortunately, because these things do happen, that in this situation, things have hit the fan, and we have to come to some resolution and determine who's going to be the driving force for the company.

NIR POLAK: So there isn't, like, one formula, but I can give guiding factors a little bit. One is, everybody has reverse vest. And it's a four-year. It's enough time to kind of build time. There is a cliff. It's a one-year cliff. It's very important, all these different things.

And, now, what we've done in our last company is we've created what's called a founder agreement, which was a document that we kind of all agreed on what would be the working relationship? Who could fire whom? How would that go? And the last company was me and another guy that knew each other very well. We had a third that we knew less. And what could happen? And, you know, would we push him out at one point? How would that look like?

So what we did is we created a way where all of us report to the board. And they don't report to me as a CEO; they report to the board, just to put comfort for people. To kind of say, okay, it's gonna be us and the investor that's gonna make a decision, yea or nay. Same way that the board has control over the CEO itself, kind of hiring and hiring the CEO.

When it comes to conflict resolution, or kind of which idea, the best idea needs to win. And that really depends on ego. And if your – one of your allies has to be no ego in order for that to work, and then accept ideas that are not yours. And say, well, that is something you're getting – you're probably right. And that needs to have a – that goes back to the values and the culture. You need people that are like-minded on that, that won't have the ego to do that.

And then in the end, as the company grows, now you're not a founding team, it is a lot on the shoulders of the CEO. It's like, you're starting to hire more executives, and they make the decision. And, you know, that's how it goes. It’s not a dictatorship, but that's – they have the responsibility.

LAUREN IPSEN: Totally an aside, but what's your perspective on co-founding CEOs?

NIR POLAK: I don't like it.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah, I don't either. Elaborate. Tell me more.

NIR POLAK: Look, there could be a situation where you have somebody that owns all the go-to-market side of the house, customer-facing, and somebody that owns every side, but there still needs to be one decision-making. You can have office of the CEO, but you're going to have conflicts. And if these people get along great, then great, but when they don't, you're going to have issues.

I'm a believer in one throat to choke. That's how it goes. And that's why, when things go well, it's a team win. And when things go bad, the CEO screwed up.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. What have you seen is most common from an equity standpoint? Let's say it's a co-founding CTO and, you know, a founding CEO. Even split? What feels right?

NIR POLAK: Again, it's what feels right. There are two views here. There is the view that it's common split, half/half, or third, third, third, whatever that is. And there's a view that’s, look, in the end, is who's going to have much more responsibility, and kind of going to have much more burden? CEO will have more, head of Engineering will have slightly less, and then you head of research, even slightly less than that. So that's kind of how it goes.

But I am not, let's say, religious about this. But I'm also not religious about kind of like, I think, if you win together, you win together, and you're working together. I also think it's important, though, when you're doing these dates and kind of figuring out it, it is a long journey. And, as you said, you're talking about a minimum of four years together.

It's important to also meet the spouses and the families to kind of really make sure that everybody understands that this is – they're going to give their life and soul to that because that's where the equity comes into play, so.

LAUREN IPSEN: Are there any questions that you think are really important to align on? You talked about bringing in family or meeting other key stakeholders.

But talk to me a little bit about the most important things that you think founders should be aligning on from a value standpoint, questions that they should feel similarly about.

One that comes up a lot is when to sell, if we sell. Those types of things, I think, would be helpful to cover.

NIR POLAK: You're looking for people that view the world in similar ways. Well, you know, for us, it was no ego. It was super important to kind of be able to –for all the founding team, is because you just want the best ideas to win. And you need to create an environment that does that.

The second thing was with regards to open communication. So just everything is on the table all the time, and we talk about it. The third was kind of teamwork, like always kind of believing in, we're doing things together. There's no this, they, him, her, that. There's us.

And the only – what you want to do is like, when you're hiring an executive, you want to do a lot of back channels.

So you're not asking for references from a founder. That's meaningless. LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. Yeah.

NIR POLAK: You want to go back, and you're sending a Lauren to say, hey, Lauren, I want the somebody that reported to them, somebody that was a peer of them, somebody that managed them. And then you want to know exactly how did they interact? Not at the good times – when the shit hit the fan.

What do they do? You know, what do they do in stress? How does it look like? What is your view about responsibility? What different political issues they may have faced in their career, and how do they defuse those? That's what you're trying to figure out. And you want to do like five or six of those, of different folks along the career to kind of calibrate.

LAUREN IPSEN: I totally agree. Someone talked to me about how references are like your Instagram story or your own personal reel and how you want to be perceived. And then back channels are the photos that you're tagged in that you want to untag yourself from sometimes, right? So back channels are where you really get to the core of who these people are as executives.

NIR POLAK: And what you want to do is you want to confront the feedback you received with the founder. And you want to see how do they interact once they've been confronted with this.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. Cool. I think that's great. Any other final tips, learnings of founder dynamics that you think are really helpful?

NIR POLAK: A journey of a company can be very long. But selling or not selling, there's always opportunities along the way, and you want to make sure that you're aligned on them when the opportunities arise. But everybody has their span. Some people are okay from zero to one, and others from zero to ten, and others from that.

And in the beginning, the founding team is just doing the zero to one. And they may not fit later on. They might not like what they've done later on. And it's important to kind of keep that in perspective all the time. Because one's a founder, you still need to do the right thing by the company at every stage.

So you kind of need – I wouldn't call it divorce, but you kind of need to separate sometimes when the time is right.

LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. Cool. This is all incredibly helpful. Thank you so much for joining and for sharing your insights. And I appreciate how candid you were too. I know that some of these things are not the easiest to work through. And I know it'll be super helpful for our founders to learn from your direct experiences.

So, thank you so much for joining me on the show. NIR POLAK: Thank you for having me.

LAUREN IPSEN: Lovely to have you. And thank you all for tuning in to Never Too Early. More to come soon.