Founder Mode: Christina Cacioppo, Founder & CEO, Vanta
In today’s episode, Christina Cacioppo gives us her take on founder mode, which is becoming more important now that Vanta has 1000 employees around the world. She told us about a new variant of the idea: founder mode in fundraising. Christina delayed fundraising till after Vanta hit $100m ARR, which caused some investors to dismiss her, but she ended up net ahead.
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Founder Mode: Kashish Gupta, Founder and co-CEO of Hightouch
In this episode we talked to Kashish Gupta of Hightouch, who made an important point about founder mode: one of the most important things founders can do that employees can't is to take big risks.
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Founder Mode: Paul Gross, Founder & CEO of Remora Carbon
In this episode we talk to Paul Gross of Remora Carbon, a startup that does carbon capture right out of the exhausts of trucks and trains. Paul has a unique take on founder mode: once a quarter he decides what the three top risks to the company are, and for that quarter, those three things, whatever they are, are the main things he works on.
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Founder Mode: Chris Best, Founder & CEO, Substack
In this episode, taped in front of a live audience, Chris Best tells us the story of Substack. He reminisces about his adventures with Elon Musk, and explains how he persisted in bringing to market a component of Substack that he knew was critical to their vision, even though any non-founder CEO would have killed it after years without any growth.
In this episode, Jake Heller talks about how he and his cofounder discovered the perfect product in a weekend of intense experimentation after GPT4 was released, and then changed the whole direction of the company. This was a classic case of founder mode, because Casetext was already 9 years old at that point and it was hard to convince everyone to change course.
Jessica Livingston and Carolynn Levy are The Social Radars. Carolynn and Jessica have been working together to help thousands of startups at Y Combinator for almost 20 years. Come be a fly on the wall as they talk to some of the most successful founders in Silicon Valley about how they did it.
Ireland