Notable Perspectives

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

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

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

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

Jay Kaplan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Synack, the hacker-powered security platform for the enterprise. Prior to founding Synack, Jay served in a number of cyber-related positions at the Department of Defense and NSA, as a member of the DoD’s Incident Response and Red Team and as a Senior Computer Network Exploitation and Vulnerability Analyst at the National Security Agency. He received multiple accolades for classified work conducted while at the NSA, where his focus was supporting counterterrorism-related intelligence operations. Jay was a former member of the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th President. He received a BS in Computer Science with a focus on Information Assurance and a MS in Engineering Management from George Washington University while studying under a DoD/NSA-sponsored fellowship.

Highlights from the episode:4:02 How do you go from the NSA to building a hacking company?6:21 How did you find your cofounder?9:33 How did you find product-market fit?11:03 How did you launch your go-to-market strategy and break into a new geography?13:01 Why did you choose to launch your business in SF?13:45 How did you win your first customers?16:33 How did early customers change what you are building? Did you change certain things you weren’t expecting to in those early days?17:46 How have you thought about building your team and what’s important when you’re hiring somebody new? What’s worked well for you and what are some pitfalls to avoid?20:27 How do you balance the job of selling the product with the other responsibilities of being a CEO?22:05 When building your team, how did you decide it was the right time to bring on execs?24:07 How did you generate demand around a new product?26:35 What’s the worst moment you’ve had in a meeting?27:55 Tell us about your hiring philosophy 29:18 What’s the best thing you’ve done to maintain the spirit and culture of your company?30:59 What is the best book that you’ve read recently?

Follow Notable Capital: 

X: @notablecap 

LinkedIn: @Notable Capital 

Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/ 

Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0

Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094

Repeat CEO Nick Mehta joined Gainsight in its Series A and has since grown the company into the customer success management category leader. In this episode Nick shares what it takes to build an industry leading company in a previously non-existent category, how to use customer conferences as a way to build community, and how to attract a roster of all-star VCs.

Prior to Gainsight, Nick was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners where he focused on developing opportunities in the enterprise application and infrastructure markets. Prior to Accel, Nick served as Chief Executive Officer of LiveOffice, where he led the company’s profitable growth to $25 MM in revenue and successful sale to Symantec. During college in the mid 1990s, Nick co-founded his first business, a venture-funded online golf retailer called Chipshot.com that became one of the top 20 online retailers of its time. Nick holds a Bachelor's degree in Biochemistry and a Master's degree in Computer Science from Harvard University.

Highlights from the episode: 4:00 As a CEO, what are the things you focus on early in building the company?5:07 How do you grow a new market? How do you build awareness?7:03 Tell us more about customer conferences as a way to sell enterprise software8:50 How did you grow the community around your product?12:05 How do you measure if your community building efforts are successful?13:19 How do you sell to large enterprises? Tell us about your go-to-market strategy15:38 How do you identify key stakeholders and who you should be selling to?18:24 How do you price your enterprise product?19:05 Have you lost a customer and how do you deal with it?22:33 How do you resuscitate a customer to win them back?21:08 How do you maintain that your company feels personable as you scale your customer base and grow the company?23:25 How do you think about competition?26:25 How do you think about culture and how did you pick your company’s values?29:24 How do you approach diversity and inclusion?31:05 As a repeat CEO, how did you do things differently this time around? What advice would you give to first time CEOs?34:20 How do you attract great VCs?37:10 Hot Seat Questions

Follow Notable Capital: 

X: @notablecap 

LinkedIn: @Notable Capital 

Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/ 

Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0

Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094

Kelly Wright tells the story of how selling books door-to-door shaped her approach to start-up sales and how she went from the first sales person at Tableau to becoming the EVP and scaled the company to nearly $1B in revenue.

Kelly brings 20 years of experience in leadership and sales roles, including ten years at Tableau selling the company’s award-winning applications. She has previously held positions at a number of high profile companies, including VP positions at At Hoc, a major venture-backed software company in Silicon Valley, and sales and management positions at Southwestern, Inc., Dale Carnegie and Bank of America. With an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an undergraduate degree from Stanford University, Kelly has also spent time at strategic consulting firms Bain & Company and McKinsey & Company, helping executives solve strategic questions about organizational structures, channel conflict, operations, pricing and international expansion.

Highlights:3:47 Why did you choose a sales role? What attracts you to sales?4:16 What was it like to be the first sales person at Tableau and scale it to close to $1B in revenue and become EVP?9:14 How do you decide between working with advisors vs. hiring experts?10:23 What advice were you given on how to scale?12:50 How do you build and maintain positive culture?16:06 As the company scaled, how did it change how you managed the team?20:20 How did you coach the sales team?26:51 How did you manage your time as a sales leader?29:58 What were some of the best life lessons you’ve learned?33:19 Hot Seat Questions

Follow Notable Capital: 

X: @notablecap 

LinkedIn: @Notable Capital 

Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/ 

Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0

Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094

In this episode, Eric talks about building a capital intensive business across multiple geographies and how he balances speed vs. scale. He also discusses his controversial take on hiring, how poker influences his outlook on business, and how to transition from an IC to a manager.

Eric Wu is co-founder and CEO of Opendoor, a consumer technology company that is reinventing how people buy and sell real estate. Prior to Opendoor, Eric was the founder and CEO of Movity.com, a geo-data analytics company acquired by Trulia.com in 2011. At Trulia, Eric led location, social, and consumer product development. Eric also co-founded RentAdvisor.com, which was later acquired by Apartment List, and runs a real estate fund that has invested in over 100 multi-family units. Eric has been an investor and advisor to a number of startups and social enterprises including Watsi, CareMessage, and Color Genomics.

Follow Notable Capital: 

X: @notablecap 

LinkedIn: @Notable Capital 

Visit Our Website: https://www.notablecap.com/ 

Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/43j3cMkcKIgHuXu1tFHWpz?si=a326d0cd016f47c0

Subscribe on Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/notable-perspectives/id1392649094