Notable Perspectives

Nikita Shamgunov is the CEO of Neon, a new company building the next generation serverless Postgres database. Nikita got his PhD in St. Petersburg and worked as an engineer at Microsoft and Facebook before going on to co-found SingleStore, an analytical database company. At SingleStore, Nikita realized the massive size of the transaction databases market and the ubiquity of Postgres, the popular open-source database, all of which led him to found Neon. Neon separates the storage and compute functions to create a truly affordable and compelling cloud native Postgres. In this episode, Nikita talks to us about working with his co-founders Stas and Heikki, incubating Neon at Khosla Ventures (where Nikita is a partner), and the implications of separating compute and storage.

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Ryan Johson is the co-founder and CEO of Culdesac, which is working to build the first car-free city in the United States. After turning down M.I.T. and dropping out of Harvard, he chose to learn from the executives at Opendoor before co-founding Culdesac in 2018. Ryan has traveled to over 60 countries, but after visiting pedestrian and cyclist-friendly cities like Budapest and Amsterdam, Ryan was inspired to create a new city from scratch. Culdesac's first neighborhood, Culdesac Tempe, is currently being built in Arizona. The neighborhood opens later this year and will have 1000 residents on 17 acres. Residents receive a suite of mobility benefits, including free access to light rail, street cars, and buses. In this episode, Ryan talks to us about building infrastructure from the ground up and how Culdesac provides people with life at their front door.

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Bruce Felt is the CFO of Domo and a long-time friend of GGV Capital with a history that predates SaaS since he founded Renaissance Software in the late 1980s. With a well-rounded experience in finance, Bruce became the CFO for six companies, taking them through IPOs or M&As before bringing his expertise to the Domo team in 2014. Bruce faced his biggest challenge during his time as the CFO of SuccessFactors in 2007 during the financial crisis, and the company’s non-stop growth came to a grinding halt, share prices dropped, and cuts were made at the highest levels. Although SaaS was still new, Bruce convinced investors and analysts that SuccessFactors was poised to grow exponentially whenever the market was ready. He was right, and the company saw 10X growth over the next few quarters. Since joining Domo, Bruce has been able to pull from his playbook to successfully navigate the recent financial crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and is well-prepared for whatever may come next.Check out the chart on what a world-class financial organization should look like: https://bit.ly/3xYCvPe

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Steve Harvey is the CEO of BitSight, the cyber security platform used by nearly a quarter of the Fortune 500 companies and multiple government agencies around the world. With a background in risk assessment, Steve spent 13 years at the Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and became the CEO of BitSight in 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic. Because so many businesses were forced to go digital and adopt the work-from-home model, cyber-attacks became more prevalent than ever. Steve certainly had his work cut out for him, but in two short years made multiple acquisitions and received a $250M investment from Moody’s. With over 2,400 customers, BitSight has quickly become the most widely used security ratings service in the world and is showing no signs of slowing down. GGV is an incredibly proud investor in BitSight, with our own Glenn Solomon sitting on the board since 2016. In this episode, Steve talks about removing disruption at the highest level and entering a well-established company at its tipping point.

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Zeev Farbman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lightricks, which puts high-quality video and editing apps into the hands of average mobile phone users. Zeev immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union at the age of 12 and would go on to meet his future co-founders during his military service. He pursued a degree in computer science at the Hebrew University with the plan of becoming a tenured professor, but that quickly changed when Zeev and his new friends created their first app, Facetune, and founded Lightricks in 2013. While they set an initial goal of generating just $100,000 with their new app, Lightricks now has a $1.8B valuation. Facetune was released the same year the word “selfie” was added to the dictionary and became one of the most downloaded mobile apps almost overnight. Since then, Lightricks has pivoted to the content creator economy, building multiple app suites and toolkits, and recently found an equity partner in Tik Tok’s D’Amelio family. In this episode, Zeev walks us through his real-time decision-making and why we should all take “the shower test”.

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Guillermo Rauch is the Founder and CEO of Vercel, a cloud platform provider used to develop, preview, and ship frontend websites and applications using their Next.js open-source framework. Originally from Argentina, Guillermo taught himself JavaScript at just eleven years old and has developed multiple open-source libraries since then. He would go on to co-found LearnBoost and Cloudup, both of which were acquired by Automattic in 2013. Since the founding of Vercel in 2015, the company has already achieved Unicorn status, with GGV being a proud investor and having led a very successful $150M Series D round. Vercel now services more than 25,000 customers worldwide, including major companies like Uber and Facebook. In this episode, Guillermo talks about using open-source software to build communities and the importance of maintaining a developer-oriented approach. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Investor, Oren Yunger.

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Matan Bar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Melio, the B2B online payment service that allows small businesses to manage payments and receivables digitally. While consumers have been using peer-to-peer payment services for years, many small businesses were still sending checks in the mail, waiting days or even weeks for payments to go through. Now, Melio helps save precious time while increasing cash flow. The need for Melio exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the company raised $144M in just one year. Before founding Melio, Matan worked with PayPal and co-founded The Gifts Project, which was quickly acquired by eBay in 2011. Melio may be Matan’s first venture as a CEO, but the company was already given a $4B valuation after just three years and now has offices in Tel Aviv, New York, and Denver. With an incredibly promising future ahead of him, Matan continues to build both a winning service and a winning team.

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Tomer Weingarten is the Co-Founder and CEO of SentinelOne, an autonomous endpoint security platform with over 6,000 customers worldwide. SentinelOne prevents cyberattacks in real-time using AI and machine automation and helps companies adopt new technologies while staying protected. Before founding SentinelOne, Tomer worked as a software developer and founded multiple companies. SentinelOne now has over 1000 employees with offices in the U.S., Tel Aviv, and Tokyo and is recognized as one of the best and most diverse places to work. In June 2021 SentinelOne executed the biggest cybersecurity IPO to date, raising over $1B in a market cap of over $11B. In this episode, Tomer shares how he and his team plan to reshape the cybersecurity industry. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Investor, Oren Yunger.

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In this 15 minute salon episode, Sarika Garg, Co-founder & CEO of Cacheflow, shares why she and her Co-founder, Brian Zotter, decided to tackle the traditional SaaS buying experience with buy-now-pay-later. Cacheflow’s innovative approach has the potential to impact the way software is bought and sold across the global enterprise SaaS market, which is set to reach $400 billion in annual sales worldwide by 2025. Sarika was previously Chief Strategy Officer at procurement financing unicorn Tradeshift, where she helped build an invoice factoring business for suppliers and an AP automation platform for buyers. She spent the previous 13 years working at SAP, most recently running SAP Ariba, where she drove over $200M in sell-side revenue for Ariba cloud.

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Adam Markowitz is the Co-founder and CEO of Drata, the San Diego-based startup that provides companies with fast and efficient automated security compliance, a once painstakingly long and arduous process. A former rocket scientist, Adam founded his first startup, Portfolium, in 2013 and created a network of over 5M students, connecting them to mentors and future employers. Six years later he sold the company for $43M when he was just 32 years old. The first line of Drata’s code was written in July 2020 and the company has skyrocketed. GGV led Drata’s $25M Series A round earlier this year. Drata just announced a $100M Series B financing making the company a “unicorn” in an incredibly fast period. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Investor, Oren Yunger.

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