Not Another CEO Podcast

Agents are now viewing docs more than humans. They make up roughly 80% of the traffic to Mintlify's docs, even as those docs reach over 100 million people a month. In January, it was the reverse.

In under a year, the main readers of developer docs went from people to AI agents. The company behind that shift is Mintlify, which powers docs and knowledge bases for more than 20,000 companies, including Anthropic, Microsoft and Amazon.

On this episode of Not Another CEO, David Politis talks with Han Wang, co-founder and CEO of Mintlify. Mintlify raised a $45 million Series B at a $500 million valuation, co-led by a16z and Salesforce Ventures. Han walks through the pivots that came before it, including the sleepless week that led to the idea, and how he runs and hires for a company that keeps changing.

Takeaways:

1. Keep the problem, change the solution. Han pivoted about three times during YC and about twice more after, but every idea circled the same problem: helping developers learn to build with a product. Each failure fed the next attempt, unlike founders who jump from fintech to construction tech to logistics.

2. Customers will hand you the answer. At pivot number seven, Han was lying awake wondering what to tell his investors. Customers had been asking why he didn’t just power their docs. He kept not wanting to, then built a prototype in a weekend.

3. Investors are guessing too. Han says investors are acting on their best guesses and know it. The one thing he’d look for is former operating experience, ideally a founder, because they talk about how to hit the number, not just the number itself.

4. Hire for slope, then talk candidates out of the job. Startup roles change fast, so Han hires for growth. He runs an anti-sell on finalists, explaining why they shouldn’t join and what it will take to grow into the role.

5. AI made coding obsolete, not judgment. Han says product sense, system design and collaboration still matter. His interviews now lean on those, and LeetCode-style rounds and simple take-homes are gone.

6. Your job resets every few months. Scaling from two people to 100+ meant handing off what he used to do himself. Han says every few months he looks at his job and thinks he was bad at it, and the founder can’t easily be swapped out.

Quote of the show

The one living constant is to constantly trust your instincts and know how to rightly prioritize what really matters in front of you. - Han Wang, CEO & Co-Founder, Mintlify

Guest Featured in this Episode: Han Wang, CEO & Co-Founder, Mintlify

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/handotdev/

Mintlify: https://mintlify.com/

We also break this episode down into a full write-up on Substack, where we turn every conversation into a practical playbook with the biggest lessons, frameworks, and strategies discussed in each episode.

Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:56 Meet Han Wang, CEO of Mintlify
02:11 The Sunday habit: what really matters right now
04:57 What Mintlify does and why agents are now 80% of docs traffic
07:17 Eight pivots: how Mintlify found the "obvious" business
11:43 Pivot seven: the sleepless week and the docs idea
14:06 Founder-market fit and why pivots should compound
16:50 Why investors are guessing too
22:09 The one thing to look for in an investor
25:27 Mintlify's culture: top-down, in-office and relocating to SF
32:49 Hiring for growth over experience
37:06 The anti-sell: talking candidates out of the job
39:37 How AI changed the engineering interview
42:46 The hardest part: growing as a CEO
49:07 Why the founders you look up to are struggling too
53:38 What Mintlify looks like in 2030
54:48 Han's immigrant upbringing, the dropout and his parents
57:52 Han's support system
59:35 Advice to his younger self: dream bigger

Scott Staples asked one question when he became CEO of First Advantage: can someone show me the strategy document?

The answer was no. There wasn't one. The company was 15 years old, doing $400 million in revenue, and had just lost some of its biggest customers. Ten years later, revenue is at $1.6 billion. Four times the revenue, same company, same industry.

Scott is the CEO of First Advantage, a background screening company that runs more than 200 million screens a year for over 80,000 customers worldwide, including roughly two thirds of the Fortune 100, across 200 countries and territories. He inherited First Advantage in 2017, when it was losing revenue and clients, and turned it into the fastest growing player in the industry within a year.

Here were my biggest takeaways.

1. Fix the culture before anything else. When Scott arrived, the real problem wasn't go to market or product. It was silos. Finance doing its own thing, sales doing its own thing, nobody talking to each other. He rebuilt the culture around teamwork first. As he put it, when you're trying to turn a ship in an ocean, you need teamwork.
2. Find the core problem first. Scott asked for the company's strategy document on day one. There wasn't one. Instead of guessing at fixes, he got every leader in a room and diagnosed the real issue from zero.
3. Show up, even without the answers. Scott personally visited 20 to 30 of the company's biggest customers in his first weeks. Over and over he heard the same thing: no one's been here in over a year.
4. Match your pitch to your buyer. First Advantage had one sales rep calling on a bank in the morning, a retailer at lunch, and a hospital network in the afternoon, same pitch, three completely different buyers. Scott did a massive reorg of the company around verticals instead.
5. The next fraud fight is AI versus AI. Candidates are using AI to fake resumes, credentials, and now entire job interviews. Scott says about 300 US companies have already reported that they inadvertently hired North Korean agents.

Quote of the Show:
"When you're trying to change a company, when you're trying to turn a ship in an ocean, you need teamwork. So I think the biggest thing that I focused on, which is the most important thing, was addressing culture and fixing culture."
Scott Staples, CEO, First Advantage.

Guests Featured in this episode:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottdavidstaples/
First Advantage: https://fadv.com/

We also break this episode down into a full write-up on Substack, with the exact playbook Scott used to fix the culture and rebuild the strategy from scratch, we're building out a full library of playbooks and lessons from every episode on Substack.

Sources:

• ClearanceJobs (May 17, 2024) – “U.S. Companies Tricked by North Korean IT Workers: DOJ Unveils Complex Fraud Network”
  https://news.clearancejobs.com/2024/05/17/doj-reveals-u-s-companies-unwittingly-hired-north-korean-it-workers/
• Gartner (July 31, 2025) – “Gartner Survey Shows Just 26% of Job Applicants Trust AI Will Fairly Evaluate Them”
  https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-07-31-gartner-survey-shows-just-26-percent-of-job-applicants-trust-ai-will-fairly-evaluate-them

Chapters:

00:00 - Trailer
01:05 - Intro
02:22 - Fixing Culture First: The One Thing He'd Do Again
04:53 - Finding the Core Problem
08:14 - The Listening Tour: Buying Time with Customers
22:59 - Matching the Pitch to the Buyer
33:28 - The Bad AI Epidemic in Hiring
47:17 - The Biggest Challenge Faced as CEO
54:10 - Where First Advantage Will Be in 3 Years
57:05 - Advice to His Younger Self

He rejected a founder’s seed round. When that founder went out to raise his Series A, Jake’s firm was the first call he made.

Jake is the Managing Partner at Camber Creek, a venture firm that invests in proptech and fintech, has nearly $1 billion under management and has backed more than 50 companies, including Bilt Rewards. Before venture, he worked in consulting at Deloitte and BCG, then in government, first at GSA and then as a senior policy advisor on the National Economic Council in the Obama White House.

He and David have known each other for over 25 years. In this episode of Not Another CEO, he explains how he decides whether to back a founder, what founders get wrong about his side of the table, and what the White House taught him about building companies.

Here are the best takeaways from the episode:

1. Resilience beats everything: Jake backs founders who found a problem with no good solution and will do whatever it takes to solve it, not people drawn to the Silicon Valley or YC image. Very few companies become multibillion dollar successes overnight, so he wants the founder who can keep going through the hard stretches.

2. A no can be a request for proof: Jake passed on Bilt’s seed round but told the founder to stay in touch. Over the next 12 months the founder did what he said he would, including partnerships with banks, airlines and hotels, and Camber Creek was the first call for the next round.

3. Self-awareness is a filter: Jake would rather hear what you got wrong than hear that everything is perfect. A founder who can’t name what keeps them up at night is a quick pass, because it shows a lack of self-awareness and empathy for customers, employees and investors.

4. He decides fast, then verifies: About 30 minutes tells Jake whether he wants to partner with someone for ten years. Customers, other investors and even a college roommate then tell him whether that person will build a big company.

5. Bring your board questions you can’t answer yourself: The most common pitfall Jake sees is founders asking questions they already know the answer to. Send the financials in advance and spend the meeting on real strategic choices, with board members who bring different backgrounds.

Quote of the Show

“To me, one of the biggest turn offs is when I meet a founder and I say, you know, what keeps you up at night? And they say nothing.” - Jake Fingert, Managing Partner, Camber Creek

Guest featured in this episode: Jake Fingert, Managing Partner, Camber Creek

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-broder-fingert-a4388b3/

Camber Creek: https://cambercreek.com/

We also break this episode down into a full write-up on Substack, where we turn every conversation into a practical playbook with the biggest lessons, frameworks, and strategies discussed in each episode.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
02:07 The one trait Jake looks for in founders
03:53 Passing on Bilt's seed round
08:23 The red flag: "nothing keeps me up at night"
10:21 How fast a VC decides
15:25 How to run a board meeting
22:53 From GSA to the White House
27:23 What founders don't understand about VCs
33:13 How Jake has changed in ten years
38:00 Is this 2021 again?
42:53 Moats and founder-led sales in the AI era
55:15 What to teach your kids: AI tools and finding truth

Big funds may not fight for you unless you’re in their top 5% of companies, and Michal Rokosz explains how to tell which kind of investor you’re talking to.

Michal is a partner at Inovo Venture Partners, a Warsaw-based seed fund and one of the leading early-stage investors in Central and Eastern Europe. Before investing he was an operator, as managing director at foodpanda and COO at Booksy, and he has backed more than 25 companies.

In this conversation with David Politis, he breaks down how fast VCs decide, why capital can beat operational excellence, and how his region went from copying proven startups to building frontier AI companies.

Key takeaways
1. Investors decide faster than you think: Michal can often tell within the first five minutes whether a founder is an outlier, and the full decision takes about two weeks. His fund found that its fastest investments tended to perform best.

2. Your backstory is part of the pitch: From an Olympiad win to an overnight drive for a missing part, the stories founders skip are often what set them apart. Michal says a founder who can’t explain why they’re exceptional will lose to one who can.

3. More money can beat better operations: At foodpanda, his team was less efficient than several competitors but had more funding, and that was enough to win. In AI, the same logic means a company that grabs the market while losing money can beat one that gets the economics right first.

4. A VC isn’t grading your business: Michal says his job is to find the anomalies. A fund needs one or two companies to return the whole fund, so a founder with a lower ceiling shouldn’t expect the same valuation as one with a higher ceiling.

5. Big funds may not fight for you: Outside a large fund’s top 5% of companies, you may get little attention, while a smaller fund may treat you as one of its most important bets. Talk to a few of an investor’s founders before you sign.

6. Not every founder should raise venture capital: Michal argues that some founders are better off bootstrapping to a profitable business, and that VC only makes sense if you’re aiming to build something huge.

Quote of the Show :
“If I have like five times more money and I'm 20% less efficient, I'm still going to win” - Michal Rokosz, Partner at Inovo Venture Partners

Guest Featured in this Episode: Michal Rokosz, Partner at Inovo Venture Partners
LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrokosz/
Inovo Venture Partners : https://www.linkedin.com/company/inovovc/home/

We also break this episode down into a full write-up on Substack, where we turn every conversation into a practical playbook with the biggest lessons, frameworks, and strategies discussed in each episode.

Chapters:
00:00 Meet Michal Rokosz
02:07 What Inovo looks for in a founder
04:07 Why your backstory is the pitch
09:23 How fast Inovo decides to invest
11:10 Viktor and the founder who killed his own project
16:40 Why big VCs won't fight for you
19:56 How Central and Eastern Europe has changed
28:00 Are we in an AI bubble?
31:21 Why VCs need a company that can return the fund
36:21 Two founders, one wins by losing money
41:15 What founders get wrong about VCs
43:04 Why Michal loves being an investor

When you sell your company and hit the milestone most founders only dream of, why does it feel so lonely?

Barak Kaufman has met around 2,000 exited founders, and almost all of them describe the same thing.

In this episode of Not Another CEO Podcast, I sat down with Barak Kaufman, an investor, operator, exited founder and community builder.

Barak started his career at Insight Partners, co-founded Intello (Which competed with my company, BetterCloud), and sold it to SailPoint in 2021. He then started Post-Exit Founders, now more than 7,000 members across 12 countries. Today he is a partner at Vine Ventures and Chief Strategy Officer at Wonderful, an applied AI company.

We cover identity loss after an exit, building in the AI era, startup life in New York and Israel, and what founders get wrong about investors.

Takeaways

1. The hardest part of an exit is identity, not money: Barak says most exited founders feel lost and lonely, and many end up with a boss for the first time in years.

2. Take a year off and commit to nothing: His advice is 12 months, not six and not 24. The biggest mistake he sees is jumping into the next company because the in-between phase is uncomfortable.

3. Luck and agency both matter: Exited founders split on whether they got lucky or slaved for it. Barak believes in agency and says the founders he respects most don’t blame the situation.

4. Building in the AI era is faster, but the fundamentals haven’t changed: Wonderful’s deals are mostly over $1M a year, versus about $30K at Intello. A-plus talent, enablement and enterprise trust still decide who wins.

5. Believe your pitch: Barak admits he’s not sure he truly believed his own billion-dollar story at Intello. His standard for founders is believing that you will get there, not that you can.

6. Run your fundraise like a process: Most VCs have less figured out than founders think, and FOMO drives a lot of decisions. Be tactical, not passive.

Quote of the Show

“When you build a company and you sell that company and you reach the milestone that many would only dream of, it ends up feeling very weird and very lonely.” - Barak Kaufman, Chief Strategy Officer, Wonderful

Guest Featured in this Episode: Barak Kaufman, Chief Strategy Officer, Wonderful
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barakk/

Post-Exit Founders: https://pef.co/

Vine Ventures: https://vineventures.com/

Wonderful: https://www.wonderful.ai/

We also break this episode down into a full write-up on Substack, where we turn every conversation into a practical playbook with the biggest lessons, frameworks, and strategies discussed in each episode.

Chapters:

00:00 Trailer & Introduction
02:47 From investor to founder to Wonderful's Chief Strategy Officer
04:46 What Wonderful does and how it started
07:37 Building in the SaaS era vs. the AI era
11:07 What stays the same: talent, enablement and enterprise sales
17:44 Inside Post-Exit Founders: the identity loss after an exit
22:30 Take a year off, and the paths after an exit
30:28 Why everyone wants to be a founder
34:06 Luck, skill and what sets exited founders apart
38:05 Agency over timing: Airtable, Miro and COVID
44:29 New York vs. Israel startup ecosystems
48:01 Inside Israel's talent war
51:14 What founders don't understand about investors
57:53 FOMO, hot rounds and the flight to quality
1:00:02 The advice he'd give his younger self

Most founders think the best story wins. Alex Konrad has spent 15 years watching what happens when the story is all there is.

In this episode, Alex Konrad, Founder of Upstarts Media, joins me to share what he's learned from covering the biggest names in tech. He spent more than a decade at Forbes writing cover stories on people like Marc Benioff and the Collison brothers, ran the Midas List for ten years, and co-created the Cloud 100. In February 2025, he left to build Upstarts Media on his own.

From the one trait he sees in the most successful founders to why great storytelling can make or break a company, Alex unpacks what he's learned from watching thousands of founders and investors up close. We also get into the loneliness of being a solo founder, the customer stories that stay with you, and what it takes to build a bootstrapped media company.

If you're building a company, raising capital, or wondering whether you're built for the founder journey, this conversation will change how you think about obsession, storytelling, and what actually lasts.

Key Takeaways:

- The Obsession Is the Real Qualifier: The most successful founders Alex has interviewed aren't building for wealth or Twitter popularity. They're almost sick in the head about the work, and they couldn't live with themselves doing anything else. Alex explains why the founders chasing the lifestyle, the YC badge, or the title tend to burn out faster.

- Find Your One Superpower: Early on, a founder should be able to do one thing better than anyone they could hire. For Alex, it's storytelling. For me, it turned out to be motivating people.

- Storytelling Should Accelerate the Story, Not Be the Story: If you're a great salesperson selling magic beans, it catches up to you eventually.

- What Great Investors Actually Do: After a decade on the Midas List, Alex says the number one thing CEOs want is an investor who feels like part of the team.

- Great Founders Find Great Markets: Silicon Valley says a great founder can't fix a bad market. Alex isn't so sure. With how many companies pivot in the AI era, he believes a great founder will evolve into the market, or prove everyone wrong about how big it was.

- Online Can Build a Brand or Eat Your Day: Alex recently wrote about CEOs and investors who are highly online to terminally online. We talk about the real advantage of a public brand, the risk of the doom scroll, and why he suggests putting your time on social media on the calendar.

Quote of the Show:
"Storytelling should accelerate your story, for good and bad. It shouldn't be the entire story." – Alex Konrad, Founder, Upstarts Media

Guest Featured in This Episode: Alex Konrad, Founder, Upstarts Media
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexrkonrad/
Upstarts Media: https://www.linkedin.com/company/upstarts-media/

We also break this episode down into a full write-up on Substack, where we turn every conversation into a practical playbook with the biggest lessons, frameworks, and strategies discussed in each episode.

Chapters:

00:00 - Intro
02:01 - How Alex decides who to cover
11:37 - Why Alex left Forbes to build Upstarts
17:52 - The number one trait of successful founders
19:56 - Founder cycles and finding your one superpower
27:05 - The Midas List and what makes a great investor
34:35 - Storytelling and the trillion-dollar outcome
40:23 - Building Upstarts solo and bootstrapped
42:14 - The loneliness of being a solo founder
44:26 - Crazy customer stories and "Elon-level" security
49:16 - Terminally online founders
54:59 - Where Upstarts is in three years

Eoin Hinchy spent 15 years living the exact problem he'd eventually build a company to solve. First at Deloitte, then eBay, then as Director of Information Security at DocuSign, he watched security teams burn hours gluing broken tools together by hand. So in 2018, he and his co-founder Thomas left to build the product they wished they'd had, out of a small office in Dublin.

That company is Tines. Today it's 450 people across Dublin, Boston, San Francisco and Sydney, has raised over $270 million from Goldman Sachs, SoftBank, Accel and others, is valued at over a billion dollars, and is approaching $100 million in ARR. In this episode, we talk about the moment Tines decided to blow up its own winning product to get ahead of AI, why he's never built a pitch deck in his life, and the piece of advice he'd give himself before his very first job.

Key Takeaways:

Why founders beat sales teams from $60B companies: Eoin explains the difference between a missionary and a mercenary, and why buyers can feel it immediately.

Refounding the company at its best quarter ever: The "falling off a building" analogy Eoin uses for why Tines rebuilt its core product around AI before the market forced their hand, and how he broke the news to his team and board.

Why no customer was ever forced to migrate: The promise Eoin made to protect the people who got Tines to where it is today.

Raising $270M without a single pitch deck: How Tines picked investors the way you'd pick a co-founder, and why Eoin never went looking for capital.

"Nobody cares" : The reframe that Eoin says makes the hardest parts of the job easier, not harder.

The Wizard of Oz moment: What happened the first time Eoin worked inside a company he used to think was run by geniuses.

Quote of the Show:

"The failures aren't going to be these dramatic explosions. They're going to be this kind of like quiet, unrequited effort where you put in all this hard work and like, everybody's kind of like, yeah, cool and moves on."
— Eoin Hinchy, Co-Founder & CEO, Tines

Guest Featured in This Episode: Eoin Hinchy, Co-Founder & CEO, Tines
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eoinhinchy/
Tines: https://www.tines.com/

We also break this episode down into a full write-up on Substack, where we turn every conversation into a practical playbook with the biggest lessons, frameworks, and strategies discussed in each episode.

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:02:35 - Best Decision at Tines: Picking a Problem He Lived
00:06:26 - Why Founders Beat Sales Teams
00:11:18 - Spending 30–50% of His Week With Customers
00:12:58 - The Refounding Moment Begins
00:17:22 - The "Falling Off a Building" Analogy
00:21:13 - Telling the Team and the Board
00:24:38 - No Existing Customer Was Ever Forced to Migrate
00:33:13 - Bootstrapping and the First Raise
00:33:33 - Blossom Capital Shows Up at Their Office
00:36:33 - How He Actually Picked Investors
00:38:27 - Board as an Extension of the Team
00:41:27 - Building a Fully Remote, Global Team
00:43:18 - Biggest Challenge: "Nobody Cares"
00:55:48 - The Wizard of Oz Moment
00:58:38 - What Actually Drives Him
00:59:48 - Advice to His Younger Self

Most people think experience is your greatest advantage. Ronnen Harary believes it can become your biggest blind spot.

In this episode, Ronnen Harary, Co-Founder of Spin Master, shares the lessons behind building one of the world's most successful toy and entertainment companies, the creator of global brands like Paw Patrol, Bakugan, Air Hogs, Rubik's Cube, and Etch A Sketch.

From turning down a $100 million Hollywood deal he now regrets, to explaining why it's riskier not to bet on yourself, Ronnen unpacks the mindset that helped Spin Master grow from three friends with an idea into a multi-billion-dollar public company.

Key Takeaways:
1. The Power of Not Knowing: Sometimes experience becomes a limitation. Ronnen explains why the lack of conventional wisdom helped Spin Master create products that industry veterans had already dismissed, and why trusting your instincts matters more than following what everyone else believes.

2. Bet on Yourself Early: Your 20s are a unique window to take meaningful risks. As responsibilities grow, so does the cost of leaving a stable career. Ronnen argues that waiting until you feel "ready" often means you never start at all.

3. Create Your Own Luck: Luck isn't something that happens to you. It's something you earn by staying in motion, building relationships, and consistently putting yourself in situations where unexpected opportunities can find you.

4. Trust Your Instincts: The same experience that helps you build a successful company can eventually cause you to overthink. Ronnen shares why he believes your intuition is often a better guide than your intellect when making the biggest decisions.

5. Build a Culture of Ideas: Some of Spin Master's best ideas came from meetings that everyone else wanted to cancel. Ronnen explains why protecting time for open discussion and pulling the right people into the room fuels creativity and better decision-making.

Quote of the Show:
"The power isn't in not knowing. It's in not letting your intellect override what you know internally." – Ronnen Harary, Co-Founder, Spin Master

Guest Featured in This Episode: Ronnen Harary, Co-Founder, Spin Master
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronnen-harary-99b13370/
Spin Master: https://www.spinmaster.com/en-US/
No Experience Necessary: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/789812/no-experience-necessary-by-ronnen-harary/

Chapters:
00:00:00 — Trailer & Introduction
00:02:05 — The 32-Year Tri-Founder Partnership
00:05:34 — "The Power of Not Knowing" & The Air Hogs Story
00:09:00 — The $100M Bakugan Regret
00:10:26 — Betting on Yourself in Your 20s & Inverse Risk
00:16:44 — Early Parent Support
00:18:47 — Becoming a "Grinder"
00:22:46 — Operational Discipline
00:27:14 — Making Your Own Luck: The Flick Tricks Story
00:33:40 — "Tethered Freedom" & Owning Your Culture
00:35:20 — Seeking Micro-Mentors & Writing "No Experience Required"
00:38:46 — The Decision to Take Spin Master Public
00:41:28 — The Origin Story of Paw Patrol
00:47:08 — Evolution of the Toy Industry
00:49:45 — Future Outlook for Spin Master
00:50:37 — Ronen’s Background
00:53:39 — Early Hustles
00:58:03 — Core Drive
00:59:13 — Workaholism, Burnout, and Health Sacrifices
01:04:03 — Advice to Younger Self

Most companies that start the FedRAMP process never finish it.

Irina Denisenko built a business on getting you through it in 90 days, and said so, loudly, when everyone told her not to.

Irina is the founder and CEO of Knox Systems, a company that gets software companies FedRAMP certified — the federal government's exhaustive cybersecurity authorization required to sell to agencies like the Pentagon — in 90 days instead of the usual multi-year process.

Two years in, Knox has raised over $30 million, crossed 100 customers, and counts Adobe among them. Before this, Irina was COO of Class Technologies, where she had to get her own company FedRAMP certified and ended up acquiring an already, authorized company just to get through the process. She later spun that capability out as Knox.

Here were my biggest takeaways:
1. Trust that you know your market better than the room does: When advisors pushed Irina to soften her tagline, she refused. "I know my market. I've lived this problem," she told me.

2. Turn a cost center into a revenue unlock: Irina assumed her first customers would come through CISOs. Instead, her first ten came from calling friends who ran companies. The real unlock was reframing FedRAMP: it's not a compliance expense, it's access to a market a company was previously shut out of entirely.

3. Make your investors work for you, even when you're not raising: Irina stays close to her investor network specifically because boardrooms are where FedRAMP tends to get dismissed as too slow to bother with. She's built a habit of asking investors to correct that in the room on her behalf.

4. Kill a bad bet before you defend it: Knox made an early bet on a specific AI approach to auto-remediate security vulnerabilities. The technology wasn't ready yet, and by the time that was undeniable, they'd already sunk real time and money into it.

5. Never underpay your best people: Irina calls her hiring approach "Delta Force" — senior only, nobody walking in without years of reps elsewhere. Her rule on comp: she's never once regretted overpaying for the right person, and calls the opposite mindset "pennywise, pound foolish."

Quote of the Show:
"If you know your market, you should know how to talk to them. And if you don't know your market, you go figure out your market first.” - Irina Denisenko, Founder & CEO, Knox Systems

Guest Featured in this Episode:
Irina Denisenko: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irinadenisenko/
Knox Systems: https://knoxsystems.com/

If you enjoy the episode, please like and subscribe on your favourite platforms and share with your network.

We also break this episode down into a full write-up on Substack, with the exact playbook Irina used to build a go-to-market motion around a tagline everyone told her to drop, we're building out a full library of playbooks and lessons from every episode on Substack.

Chapters:
00:00:00 — Intro: Irina Denisenko & Knox Systems
00:02:13 — The "FedRAMP in 90 Days" Tagline
00:06:34 — Building In-Person Across 3 Cities
00:08:52 — Hiring Only "Delta Force" Talent
00:11:41 — Revenue Per Employee in the Age of AI
00:17:10 — How She Vets a Delta Force Hire
00:25:57 — Never Regretting Overpaying for Talent
00:31:26 — Landing the First 10 Customers
00:42:41 — Investors as Her Best Referral Channel
00:47:43 — "Who Cares About This Market"
00:52:31 — The Valuation Hangover
01:02:16 — Scrapping a Year of AI Work
01:05:29 — From the Soviet Union to Founder
01:16:41 — Closing Advice: Integrity Above All

I've interviewed over 100 founders and CEOs on Not Another CEO. I've asked them about their hardest days, their biggest regrets, and the sacrifices they made to build what they built. I never thought I'd be the one in that seat.

This week, my own kids flipped the mic on me. Sammy and Noah wrote their own questions and interviewed me for the show, and I had no idea what was coming. We covered the worst week of my career, firing people I actually liked, the sacrifices I made that I'd still make again, and the moment my son stumped two successful CEOs on a live stage with a single question.

Here's what we got into:

Where it started: My father, their grandfather, built companies my whole life, and he put me on the BCC of every email he ever sent so I could learn the business before I had a job in it. My actual first paycheck came from a summer carrying furniture up four story walk ups for a moving company in New York.

The worst week of my career: one week in 2019 where we lost our biggest customer, our incoming CRO backed out the day before he was supposed to start, I found out I wasn't winning an award I really wanted, I tore my Achilles, and I missed a family trip to Israel, all in the span of five days.

Firing people I liked: I've fired hundreds of people over 20 years, including good friends. My kids asked how I could do that, and we talked about why it's actually the kinder move when it's done right.

The sacrifice question: I missed my son's first steps building BetterCloud, and I left the hospital right after my younger son was born to go straight to a VC meeting. My kids wanted to know if I'd still make that call today.

Comparing myself to other CEOs: yes, I still get jealous scrolling LinkedIn. It was worse when I was actually running BetterCloud and too deep in the weeds to see anything but my own world.

How I define success: the same answer my son got out of me at our first ever live show, the one that stumped Kass and Mike Lazarow in front of a packed room.

This is a different kind of episode for the show, and it might be one of my favorites. Thanks for listening, and thanks to Sammy and Noah for the toughest interview I've ever done.

Quote of the Show:
"The way that I define success is being able to meaningfully impact other people's lives while significantly benefiting your own life." — David Politis, Host, Not Another CEO Podcast

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Trailer
00:02:22 - BetterCloud's Biggest Lesson
00:04:52 - What Inspired Me to Want to Be a CEO
00:07:12 - My First Job
00:10:14 - Pitching BetterCloud to My Own Kids
00:15:21 - What 100+ Interviews Taught Me About Building a Company 00:20:31 - AI and the Skills That Won't Get Replaced
00:23:37 - The Hardest Days
00:29:35 - Still Bad At It, Jealous of Other CEOs
00:33:13 - How I Define Success
00:41:29 - The Sacrifice Question
00:46:47 - Trust Your Gut