B2BaCEO (with Ashu Garg)

Foundation Capital, Ashu Garg
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B2BaCEO (with Ashu Garg) Podcast

B2B a CEO is the show about how to scale your enterprise startup and how to grow from founder to CEO. Hosted by Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital. Subscribe to the newsletter here: https://ashugarg.substack.com/

  1. How to Build a Company Around Cutting-Edge AI (Srinath Sridhar, Founder of Regie.ai)

    16 JUL

    How to Build a Company Around Cutting-Edge AI (Srinath Sridhar, Founder of Regie.ai)

    In this episode, I talk with Srinath Sridhar, CEO & Cofounder of Regie.ai, who has always been ahead of the AI curve. Sri and his co-founder Matt Millen started Regie.ai in 2019 with the idea that GPT-3 would transform how all of us write emails. Today, Regie uses AI to automate sales prospecting for the enterprise. The company's Auto-Pilot automates most of the repetitive tasks involved in demand generation, including writing sequences, scheduling calls and responding to emails. Sri knew in early 2019 that LLMs would be a game-changer. What he didn’t know was exactly what product to build. In this episode, we’ll dig into the details of how he did it.

    33 min
  2. How to Build a Multi-Billion-Dollar Software Business (Mohit Aron, Founder of Cohesity)

    14 JUN

    How to Build a Multi-Billion-Dollar Software Business (Mohit Aron, Founder of Cohesity)

    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

    1h 8m
  3. How to Grow from Ph.D. to Two-Time Startup CEO (Sanjit Biswas, Co-Founder & CEO of Samsara)

    3 MAY

    How to Grow from Ph.D. to Two-Time Startup CEO (Sanjit Biswas, Co-Founder & CEO of Samsara)

    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.

    59 min
  4. How to Win Your First Enterprise Customer (Doug Winter, Founder and CEO at Seismic)

    29 MAR

    How to Win Your First Enterprise Customer (Doug Winter, Founder and CEO at Seismic)

    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

    51 min
  5. How to Shape the Future of AI (Naveen Rao, VP of Generative AI at Databricks)

    22/12/2023

    How to Shape the Future of AI (Naveen Rao, VP of Generative AI at Databricks)

    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.

    1h 3m
  6. How to Power the AI Boom (Robert Nishihara, Co-Founder & CEO of Anyscale)

    17/11/2023

    How to Power the AI Boom (Robert Nishihara, Co-Founder & CEO of Anyscale)

    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.

    46 min
  7. How to Build, Scale, and Sell a Startup (Tracy Young, Co-Founder of TigerEye & PlanGrid)

    15/09/2023

    How to Build, Scale, and Sell a Startup (Tracy Young, Co-Founder of TigerEye & PlanGrid)

    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.

    48 min
  8. How to Deploy AI in Your Company (Matei Zaharia, CTO & Co-Founder of Databricks)

    02/06/2023

    How to Deploy AI in Your Company (Matei Zaharia, CTO & Co-Founder of Databricks)

    If you’re not hardcore about AI, then stop the podcast now — because this episode for real technology nerds. Ashu’s guest is Matei Zaharia, CTO and cofounder of Databricks, and a professor of computer science at Stanford University. Ashu and Matei cover a lot of ground — most of it technical, all of it very relevant for anyone who’s serious about building with artificial intelligence. They start with a discussion of Databricks’ early days: how the startup established a foothold in a market dominated by entrenched incumbents and some of the challenges Matei and his cofounders faced. The rest of the conversation is all about AI. Matei breaks down the most common challenges that enterprises run into when attempting to adopt AI. He shares tips for how startups can best deploy foundation models. And he speculates on what the game-changing new use cases for AI will be over the next two years. Matei also pulls back the kimono on some of the cutting-edge machine-learning research he and his team at Stanford are working on. Finally, listen to the end for a fascinating exchange about artificial intelligence beyond large language models.

    40 min
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About

B2B a CEO is the show about how to scale your enterprise startup and how to grow from founder to CEO. Hosted by Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital. Subscribe to the newsletter here: https://ashugarg.substack.com/

Information

  • Creator
    Foundation Capital, Ashu Garg
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2024
  • Episodes
    54
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © All rights reserved
  • Show Website
    B2BaCEO (with Ashu Garg)

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