Sit Down Startup

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Vishal Sunak, Founder of LinkSquares, shares his journey of building software for legal teams. Listen as he speaks to Sit Down Startup's host Adam O'Donnell about raising $161 million over five rounds of venture capital, overcoming fundraising struggles, and unlocking the secrets to growth. 

Discover the importance of building a strong product, founder-led sales, and knowledge assembly, as well as how to validate product ideas before building solutions. 

Vishal also gives invaluable advice on understanding buyers as well as his superpower as a founder. Don't miss out on this engaging and informative episode packed with valuable insights that every founder should know.

Join Adam O'Donnell on Sit Down Startup as he sits down with David Cummings, the founder of Pardot, which eventually sold to Salesforce. In this episode, they discuss pivoting from unsuccessful strategies, customer discovery, and marketing automation platform, while sharing their personal stories of startup challenges.

Adam O'Donnell sits down with Elliot Shmukler, former Chief Growth Officer at Instacart and co-founder of Anomalo, to discuss the challenges data teams face in detecting and solving data quality issues using machine learning.

Despite the initial failure of their product to meet customer needs, Anomalo was able to grow 10x ARR during the big recession by listening to customer feedback and building a fully-featured product to address gaps in their initial product.

Elliot emphasizes the importance of talking to customers regularly and trusting your gut when experimenting with ideas. Through a shared Slack channel and regular office hours, Anomalo maintains its customer feedback loop, leading to successful customer experiences for their notable clients like Discover Financial, Buzzfeed, and Notion.

This episode provides invaluable advice for any startup founder looking to develop a successful product that meets the needs of their customers.

Welcome to the Sit Down Startup podcast, where host Adam O'Donnell interviews entrepreneurs and startup founders about their inspirational stories.

In this episode, Adam brings in Ami Luttwak, the CTO and co-founder of Wiz, one of the largest cloud security companies. Ami shares the hands-on culture of the company, where all managers do the work themselves, and explains how they identified a gap in the market by combining vulnerability, application, network exposure, and identity analysis. Together, they discuss the success of Wiz, how the COVID-19 pandemic was actually beneficial to their product development, and the importance of focusing on the customers' needs.

Listen now and be inspired by their entrepreneurial journey!

Glean was founded in 2019 as an AI-powered workplace search engine aimed at helping people browse through their company apps to find the information they need and boost productivity. Since then, Glean has raised $155M+ and grown to 200+ employees while staying true to its initial mission.

In this episode its founder, Arvind Jain, shares his experience and provides a few key insights:

• Ask the hard questions. Make sure prospective clients are willing and able to implement what you’re offering.

• Quantify the problem. Prove the value of your product by quantifying the problem your customers face.

• Sell at the top. Pitch your product to key leaders such as CIOs, and let the word spread internally.

Jesse Lipson initially thought he would become a philosophy professor — until he took a job with a startup that changed his career path. After founding his first company Sharefile in 2005, he sold it to Citrix in late 2011 for almost $100M. And in October 2017 he established Levitate, which helps relationship-based businesses keep in touch with clients in a more personal and authentic way.

This entrepreneur offers a few insights from his career to date:

• Acquisitions are a rollercoaster. Deals can take months to finalize and it’s important to maintain focus while they’re ongoing.

• Do the hard work. Attracting customers doesn’t happen overnight, so be prepared to go the extra mile.

• Be data-driven. The benefits of testing and measuring everything outweigh the costs.

During Truora’s first year, they raised no money. Four years later, this customer-engagement and WhatsApp-first startup has come a long way, with 8M USD in ARR, 14M USD in revenue, and presence across seven Latin American countries.

Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Bilbao shares his tips for founders looking to succeed:  

• Hire the best people you can. Talent comes first; good recruiting never fails.

• Do the homework beforehand. Spend time on the setup and talk to founders before going to market.

• Don’t avoid the “no”. If you tell someone all the cons and they’re still interested in your product or service, the deal is likely to go through.

When Chris Ebeling co-founded entertainment company Virtually Human back in 2018, Blockchain was just becoming popular. Since then, the company has raised $21M+ and their online horse racing game ZED RUN gained an impressive following. 

In this episode, Chris talks to Adam about his experience launching in the digital world and shares a few tips:  

• Innovation comes with risks. Don’t be afraid to seek advice; be transparent and self-critical.

• Nothing is permanent. If you believe in an idea, don’t overthink it — start making it a reality.

• Involve the community. When your product is in beta, let your users weigh in on what is and isn’t working.

Zapier has one mission: to help companies use automation to connect tools and apps so data can automatically move between them. The business was founded in 2012 and their remote team has since expanded worldwide across 40 countries.

Founder Mike Knoop shared some takeaways from their 11-year journey so far:

• Stay patient. Growth is organic, so be prepared to play the long game.

• Tap into search. Creating landing pages will make your product more visible to potential customers.

• Always look ahead. Where do you want your company to be heading?