B2BaCEO (with Ashu Garg‪)‬ Foundation Capital, Ashu Garg

In this episode, I'm excited to welcome Mohit Aron back to B2BaCEO for the second time. As the founder of Cohesity and co-founder of Nutanix, Mohit is a titan in the world of enterprise GTM and infrastructure software. With two wildly successful companies under his belt, he's a true expert when it comes to building enterprise software businesses from the ground up.

In our conversation, Mohit shares his proven frameworks for validating startup ideas. He reveals hard-won lessons from starting Nutanix and Cohesity, with real-world examples that bring his advice to life. We explore product-market fit—what it really looks like in practice—as well as how to build a team and manage performance in a high-growth startup. We wrap up by discussing the topic du jour, generative AI, and the opportunities it opens for startups.

This episode is full of insights for technical founders. I hope you enjoy it!

(00:00) Intro
(00:21) Mohit's framework for a bulletproof startup hypothesis document
(07:53) Why your MVP shouldn't be your full vision
(10:39) Cohesity's journey from 0 to 1, 1 to 10, and 10 to 100+
(17:19) Examples of founders not being intellectually honest about their hypotheses
(20:35) How to accurately size your startup's market (TAM)
(23:55) Balancing founder conviction with naysayer feedback
(31:02) Adapting the hypothesis document for the generative AI era
(34:19) Mohit's definition of product-market fit
(39:05) When to hit the gas on sales hiring (and when not to)
(44:59) Mohit's system for competency-based hiring
(53:17) Implementing performance management via quarterly calibrations
(56:00) What Mohit would do differently as a technical founder
(58:07) Mohit's top advice for founders
(60:09) The industries ripe for disruption by generative AI
(62:04) Book recommendations for founders

My guest today is Sanjit Biswas, the co-founder and CEO of Samsara, a platform that helps companies digitize their physical operations. In 2023, Samsara reached $1 billion in annual recurring revenue, making it one of the fastest startups in history to hit this milestone.

My guest today is Doug Winter, the founder and CEO of Seismic, a leading enterprise sales enablement platform. Today, Seismic has a team of 1,500 people and nearly $400 million in recurring revenue.

We start the conversation with Doug explaining what sales enablement actually means. From there, we turn to the early days of Seismic and unpack Doug’s approach to finding product-market fit, positioning, and targeting enterprise customers from day one. He speaks candidly about the challenges of scaling and closes with actionable advice for founders in 2024.
Fewer than 1% of B2B software companies reach Seismic’s scale. Doug’s story offers a valuable blueprint for founders with similarly audacious ambitions.

I hope you find this conversation as inspiring as I did. Let’s dive in!

(00:00) Cold open
(2:21) Doug explains what sales enablement is
(3:39) Genesis of the idea for Seismic
(7:08) Seismic's scrappy early days
(13:10) Lessons from fundraising
(18:23) Targeting large enterprises from day one
(22:32) Scaling a GTM engine
(28:23) Making proactive leadership changes
(37:12) Running great board meetings
(40:59) Impact of AI on Seismic's business
(44:42) Advice for founders starting in 2024

My guest this month is Naveen Rao, the co-founder of MosaicML and current head of Generative AI at Databricks.

Naveen's journey is unique, as it echoes the evolution of AI itself. He’s best known for founding and selling two successful companies. The first, Nervana, an AI-focused chip company, was acquired by Intel for $400 million in 2016. The second, MosaicML, was acquired by Databricks in June for $1.3 billion.

In our conversation, we unpack the insights and frameworks that led Naveen to make these bets in the first place. We begin by exploring his long history in AI research and startups, from his early days at Qualcomm, his founding of Nervana, and the genesis of MosaicML.

We then turn to the complexities of the ever-changing AI landscape and go behind the scenes of MosaicML’s acquisition by Databricks. We close with Naveen’s takes on the most urgent questions in AI, including the recent tumult at OpenAI, the road to AGI, the role of regulation, and where he thinks generative AI will go next.

What struck me most is Naveen’s remarkable ability to not only anticipate the future but also actively pave the path toward it. For founders looking to navigate our current AI moment, this episode is full of valuable lessons.

In this episode of B2BaCEO, I speak with Robert Nishihara, co-founder and CEO of Anyscale. Anyscale’s aspiration is to build the fastest, most cost-efficient infrastructure for running LLMs and AI workloads. When it is successful, Anyscale will be to the AI era what Microsoft was for the PC era: the underlying operating system on which all AI applications are developed and run.

Anyscale is built on Ray, an open-source compute framework that Robert and his co-founders developed as PhD students at UC Berkeley. Under the guidance of Professor Ion Stoica, who also co-founded Conviva and Databricks, the team sought to make distributed computing broadly accessible. Anyscale was then launched as a fully managed platform for Ray, making even the toughest problems in distributed computing easy for developers to tackle. Today, Anyscale is a billion-dollar business powering mission-critical AI use cases at companies like Amazon, Cohere, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Visa.

If you’ve been a PhD student at UC Berkeley, created a popular open-source framework, and built a billion-dollar business on top of it, you’ve likely learned a thing or two along the way. Robert’s story offers valuable lessons for fellow founders and builders at all stages of the startup journey.

My guest this month is Tracy Young, the co-founder and former CEO of PlanGrid, a productivity tool for construction companies. From going through YC and losing a co-founder to cancer, to being acquired by Autodesk for $875 million, Tracy has picked up many valuable lessons that other founders and CEOs can learn from.

Our conversation unpacks these lessons, including finding (and keeping!) product-market fit, navigating startup growing pains, showing up effectively to board meetings, and managing the emotional toll of fundraising. We also speak about Tracy’s new venture, TigerEye, and what she’s doing differently the second time around.

After having countless conversations with founders over the years, I thought I’d heard it all. Tracy proved me wrong. Her story serves as an inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs in any industry.