Grit

Joubin Mirzadegan
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Grit

Grit explores what it takes to create, build, and scale world-class organizations. It features weekly episodes highlighting the leaders who are pushing their companies to make a difference. This series is hosted by Joubin Mirzadegan, go to market operating partner at Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm investing in history-making founders.

  1. #218 CEO Etsy, Josh Silverman: Second Acts

    2 DAYS AGO

    #218 CEO Etsy, Josh Silverman: Second Acts

    Guest: Josh Silverman, CEO of Etsy When Josh Silverman joined the board of Etsy, he had one condition: “Don’t ask me to the be the CEO.” And technically, they didn’t ask. One day, he got a phone call informing him the board had elected him as the new CEO, just days before an earnings miss. He knew the odds were against him — layoffs would be necessary, and “I was going to have to be the villain” — but decided to say yes out of a sense of duty to Etsy’s users and workers. “If I can be helpful, I have a responsibility to do it,” Josh says. Chapters: (00:55) - Energy management (02:42) - Meetings (09:56) - Etsy’s strategy (13:36) - Learning to delegate (17:10) - Setting an example (24:17) - Evite’s rise and fall (27:46) - Self vs. company (30:22) - Legacy (34:21) - Control and agency (37:44) - Joining Etsy’s board (40:40) - Becoming CEO (46:16) - Culture shock (48:09) - “We need you, trust us” (51:25) - eBay and Skype (57:15) - Pushed out (01:00:40) - Accountability and family (01:03:53) - Time horizons (01:05:55) - Gen AI-supported art (01:08:29) - Who Etsy is hiring and what “grit” means to Josh Mentioned in this episode: Ken Chenault and American Express, Nick Daniel, Rachana Kumar, Ticketmaster and IAC, Etsy Studios, Silverlake, Shopping.com, Google, Microsoft, and Austin City Limits.  Links: Connect with Josh LinkedInConnect with Joubin TwitterLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.com  Learn more about Kleiner Perkins This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

    1h 10m
  2. #217 CEO & Co-Founder Codeium, Varun Mohan w/ Leigh Marie Braswell: Limitless

    18 NOV

    #217 CEO & Co-Founder Codeium, Varun Mohan w/ Leigh Marie Braswell: Limitless

    Guests: Varun Mohan, CEO & Co-Founder of Codeium; and Leigh Marie Braswell, partner at Kleiner Perkins “A lot of people are really bad at knowing what good is,” says Codeium CEO Varun Mohan. Specifically, he’s thinking of startups that hire based on a “logo” — a well-known company on the résumé — rather than exceptional talent. Codeium is based in Mountain View, CA, and Varun believes that it’s incumbent on any new startup to hire in the San Francisco Bay Area, because of how exceptional talent is concentrated there.  “When you hire someone that’s 10x better,” he says, “you can’t replace them with 10 1x people. Because the the 10x person is going to be thinking of ideas that none of these 1x people are ever going to think of.” Chapters: (01:05) - Ludicrous growth (03:54) - Seizing opportunity (07:29) - Product-market fit (13:05) - Scale AI & MIT (17:42) - Coding efficiency (22:58) - Larger companies (25:20) - Varun and Leigh Marie’s working relationship (29:51) - Pivoting to Codeium (34:00) - Giving away the product (37:01) - The code-gen landscape (42:20) - Annual reinvention (45:00) - Picking a problem (47:07) - Bipul Sinha’s help (50:43) - Ambition (53:13) - Building in Silicon Valley (55:11) - Spotting talent (59:11) - Who Codeium is hiring (59:43) - What “grit” means to Varun Mentioned in this episode: Graham Moreno, Wiz, ChatGPT, Google, Nuro, Goldman Sachs, Waymo, the DARPA Challenge, Alex Wang, Douglas Chen, Safeway, Equinox, Carlos Delatorre and MongoDB, The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon, GitHub Copilot, Microsoft, Exafunction, Mamoon Hamid, Figma, JPMorgan Chase, Starlink, SpaceX, Rubrik, Michael Dell, Stripe, and John Doerr. Links: Connect with Varun LinkedInTwitterConnect with Leigh Marie LinkedInTwitterConnect with Joubin TwitterLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.com  Learn more about Kleiner Perkins This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

    1h 1m
  3. #216 Founder Khan Academy, Sal Khan: Dangerously Curious

    11 NOV

    #216 Founder Khan Academy, Sal Khan: Dangerously Curious

    Guest: Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy AI is poised to change nearly every business, but few are changing as quickly as education. And Sal Khan, who has spend more than a decade manually creating more than 7,000 educational videos, says that’s a good thing. He’s encouraged Khan Academy to focus on “disrupt[ing] ourselves ... more than almost any other organization that I know of.”  The reason is backed up by the data: Personalized tutors — designed to help students achieve mastery in a subject, but previously thought to be unscalable — could shift the educational bell curve “significantly to the right,” Sal says. Chapters: (00:52) - John and Ann Doerr (05:20) - Khan Academy’s origins (07:42) - What it is now (12:43) - Emotional fortitude (15:25) - Generating revenue (19:36) - The two-sigma “problem” (21:31) - OpenAI and Sam Altman (24:47) - What AI can do (27:56) - Cheating and other fears (30:06) - Video production (34:08) - Standardized tests (38:36) - AI tutors’ tone (40:22) - Not leaving the closet (43:20) - Who Khan Academy is hiring (45:58) - What “grit” means to Sal Mentioned in this episode: Nasdaq, Dan Wohl, Vedic and Buddhist literature, Microsoft, Benjamin Bloom, ChatGPT, the Turing Test, Greg Brockman, Donald Trump, Bing Chat and Sydney, Khanmigo, the SAT and ACT, Schoolhouse.world, Craig Silverstein and Google, John Resig and jQuery, and Angela Duckworth. Links: Connect with Sal TwitterLinkedInConnect with Joubin TwitterLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.com  Learn more about Kleiner Perkins This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

    47 min
  4. #215 COO Rippling Matt MacInnis: Learn the Engine

    4 NOV

    #215 COO Rippling Matt MacInnis: Learn the Engine

    Guest: Matt MacInnis, COO of Rippling One of the most important things a non-founder can do, says Rippling COO Matt MacInnis, is to learn how to operate in the context of the company they’re joining. His CEO, Parker Conrad, “spikes” in certain skill areas, and the rest of the executive team needs to maximize his ability to thrive while “taking care of the rest of it.” Matt likened the work to being a hobbyist airplane pilot, who can’t get a license without knowing all the minute details about their plane’s engine and aerodynamics.  “You can’t be a good pilot if you don’t understand the engine, because if something goes wrong, you want to be able to troubleshoot it,” he says. “An executive coming in to fly your airplane better learn the engine.” Chapters: (01:08) - Telling Rippling’s story (04:27) - Founding & failing at Inkling (09:30) - Different types of hard (13:55) - Discipline and stamina (15:22) - Meeting with Steve Jobs (19:20) - Definitely, give up! (22:29) - Product-market fit (27:15) - Founders and culture (33:24) - Executive instincts (36:06) - Talent Signal and AI (40:06) - 150 former founders (44:08) - Zero to one projects (48:06) - The failure of Silicon Valley Bank (55:25) - Routines and discipline (59:37) - Disagreeing with Parker (01:02:25) - Who Rippling is hiring (01:03:37) - What “grit” means to Matt Mentioned in this episode: Parker Conrad, London Breed, Apple, Sequoia Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Tenaya Capital, digital textbooks on iPad, Oricom, Netscape, Peter Cho, Eddy Cue, John Couch, iBooks, Slack, Airbnb, Paul Graham, Brian Chesky, “founder mode,” Larry Ellison, Ivan Zhao and Notion, Intel and ARM, Salesforce, United Airlines, LLMs, GitHub, DocuCharm, Peter Thiel, Mamoon Hamid, Expensify, Navan, Costco, Comcast, HBO’s Silicon Valley, Jensen Huang and NVIDIA, and Taylor Swift. Links: Connect with Matt LinkedInTwitterConnect with Joubin TwitterLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.com  Learn more about Kleiner Perkins This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

    1h 5m
  5. #214 Former CEO Hulu & WarnerMedia Jason Kilar: No Labels

    28 OCT

    #214 Former CEO Hulu & WarnerMedia Jason Kilar: No Labels

    Guest: Jason Kilar, former CEO & co-founder of Hulu and former CEO of WarnerMedia When Jason Kilar was a child, he was obsessed with Walt Disney — not just as a filmmaker or the creator of Disneyland, but as an entrepreneur. He started his career at the Walt Disney Company (where else?) but then got his first opportunity to help build something new when a young startup entrepreneur from Seattle visited his business school classroom. Most of Jason’s classmates predicted the failure of this startup, Amazon.com, which elicited “this awesome laugh, the Jeff Bezos trademark laugh.” How a leader reacts to criticism or doubts, Jason learned, says a lot about their conviction and intelligence. Chapters: (01:08) - Bing Gordon and John Doerr (04:11) - Warner Bros. (06:12) - Walt Disney (11:10) - Working at Disney (14:32) - What makes it special (18:31) - Meeting your heroes (20:06) - “Walt’s folly,” Disneyland (22:45) - Harvard and Amazon (25:09) - Meeting Jeff Bezos (29:10) - “Help people understand Amazon exists” (33:25) - Amazon’s culture (38:07) - What Warner Bros. makes (40:55) - Obscurity and relevance (45:53) - Feeling the lows (50:09) - Launching Hulu (53:36) - NewCo or ClownCo? (59:13) - Over-communication (01:03:14) - The future of TV memo (01:06:46) - Innovator’s dilemma (01:08:57) - No labels (01:14:04) - Unfinished business (01:16:22) - Staying present (01:20:26) - The theatrical window (01:26:19) - What’s next? Mentioned in this episode: Amazon, The Matrix, Star Wars: A New Hope, Disney World, Diane Disney Miller, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Michael Eisner, Universal Studios and Harry Potter, Disney University, Jeffrey Rayport, Barnes & Noble, Joel Spiegel, David Risher, Joy Covey, Garry Trudeau and Doonesbury, Andy Jassy, Brian Birtwistle, Jim Kingsbury, Vessel and Verizon, HBO, Friends, Hogwarts Legacy, Sony, Netflix, NBCUniversal, Paramount, AT&T, Discovery, Richard Tom, Kara Swisher, Fox, YouTube and Google, Saturday Night Live, Peter Chernin, Jeff Zucker, Bob Iger, Andy Rachleff and Benchmark, CBS, Miracle on 34th Street, Marissa Mayer and Yahoo, Rony Abovitz and Magic Leap, House of the Dragon and Industry, Dune, Christopher Nolan, and the TSA. Links: Connect with Jason TwitterLinkedInConnect with Joubin TwitterLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.com  Learn more about Kleiner Perkins This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

    1h 30m
  6. #213 CEO & Co-Founder Loom Joe Thomas w/ Ilya Fushman: After the Exit

    21 OCT

    #213 CEO & Co-Founder Loom Joe Thomas w/ Ilya Fushman: After the Exit

    Guests: Joe Thomas, CEO and co-founder of Loom; and Ilya Fushman, partner at Kleiner Perkins Loom CEO Joe Thomas had a lot of things to think about before he sold his company to Atlassian for $975 million: The impact an acquisition might have on the product, how to keep the Loom brand alive, the risk of remaining independent... but it wasn’t until after the deal was announced that he really understood what it meant for his team.  “I didn't know how emotional it'd be for me,” Joe says. “All of the Loom employees, current and former, that reached out when this was announced, they did their calculation and they're like, ‘Oh my God.’ That, to me, was the most emotionally transformative part of the process. I didn't fully recognize what that would be like, on the individual front.” Chapters: (01:34) - The Atlassian acquisition (05:25) - The bittersweet moment (08:15) - Transforming Loom (13:30) - Ilya’s perspective (18:04) - Life-changing (22:55) - Doing it again (25:00) - Loom’s early days (28:26) - The Series A (32:33) - Turning on monetization (35:37) - The Series B (37:05) - Loom AI (43:13) - Revenue orientation (48:18) - The acquisition landscape (52:27) - Working inside Atlassian (54:04) - Atlanta tech (55:00) - Who Atlassian is hiring (55:24) - What “grit” means to Joe Mentioned in this episode: Wilson Sonsini, Vinay Hiremath, Andrew Reed and Sequoia Capital, Zoom, Mike Cannon-Brookes, Shahed Khan, COTU Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Scott Farquhar, the Lindy Effect, SVB, Google Chrome, Dropbox, Slack, Snapchat, HubSpot, the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter, Dylan Field and Figma, Atlassian Rovo, Palo Alto Networks, Salesforce, and Garrett Langley and Flock Safety. Links: Connect with Joe LinkedInTwitterConnect with Ilya TwitterLinkedInConnect with Joubin TwitterLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.com  Learn more about Kleiner Perkins This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

    57 min
  7. #212 Founder Magic Leap & SynthBee Rony Abovitz: Underdog

    14 OCT

    #212 Founder Magic Leap & SynthBee Rony Abovitz: Underdog

    Guest: Rony Abovitz, founder & CEO of SynthBee SynthBee CEO Rony Abovitz grew up “really believing” in Star Wars and the idea that there could be benevolent, artificially intelligent beings like R2-D2 and C-3PO. “It wasn't a dystopian vision of the future,” he says. “It wasn't HAL from 2001.  It wasn't the Terminator. It wasn't Skynet.  It was this kind of friendly, empathetic, more utopian vision.”  George Lucas himself told Rony to tone it down and not “take it so literally” — but he was undeterred. The way he describes today’s leading AI powers sounds like an idealistic Rebel conceptualizing the Evil Empire. “You’ve got companies that receive massive funding that want to take all the data in the world ... I feel that's a massive mistake,” Rony says. “We become serfs. They become the Lords. They become the Kings. I'm completely opposed to that. So I started to imagine for SynthBee what is a different form of computing intelligence, one that could help us, but have much more safety [and] human centrism.” Chapters: (01:12) - Fundraising (02:27) - Meeting John Doerr (07:05) - The Beast (10:06) - Unfinished business (11:47) - Apple and Meta (15:20) - The COVID-19 pandemic (21:12) - “Investors panicked” (25:28) - Shaquille O’Neal vs. digital Shaq (29:43) - Magic Leap alumni (32:45) - Financial outcomes (38:27) - Peggy Johnson (40:27) - “A weird version of hell” (44:08) - A strange intro to Google (50:42) - Larry Page and Sergey Brin (54:27) - Founder voting power (01:00:40) - Mako Surgical (01:03:04) - The 9/11 term sheet (01:06:40) - The worst pitch ever (01:09:55) - The 2008 IPO (01:16:15) - Selling to Stryker (01:18:30) - What is SynthBee? (01:26:44) - Humility in tech (01:31:44) - Who SynthBee is hiring Mentioned in this episode: Scott Hassan, Bing Gordon, Chewy, Mary Meeker, Suitable Technologies and Beam, NASA, Mark Zuckerberg, Matthew Ball, NTT Docomo, Blade Runner, Wired Magazine, CES, Dow Jones, Tesla, Zoom, OpenAI and Anthropic, Adam Silver and the NBA, John Monos, the Apple Vision Pro, Madden NFL, McLaren, Satya Nadella and Microsoft, the HoloLens, Godzilla and King Kong, Willow Garage and ROS, Trading Places, Z-KAT, Frederic Moll, John Freund, Christopher Dewey, John and Christine Whitman, Sycamore Ventures, Andy Bechtelstein, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, Kevin Lobo, Muhammad Ali, Star Wars and George Lucas, Yuval Noah Harari, and Infosys. Links: Connect with Rony LinkedInConnect with Joubin TwitterLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.com  Learn more about Kleiner Perkins This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

    1h 34m
  8. #211 CEO & Co-Founder Klarna, Sebastian Siemiatkowski: Country Cousin

    7 OCT

    #211 CEO & Co-Founder Klarna, Sebastian Siemiatkowski: Country Cousin

    Guest: Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO and co-founder of Klarna Living and working in Stockholm, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski thinks a lot about how he’s perceived in Silicon Valley: “I feel like here I am, I am the small, country cousin from Sweden.” And on top of that, he knew that someone like Sam Altman wouldn’t initially think of a European banking startup as an ideal partner for OpenAI — so, he made up an excuse to fly to San Francisco and meet with Altman.  “I felt like, OK, this is going to be the busiest man in the world very soon,” Sebastian recalls. “When I first booked it with Sam, I think I got three hours in his calendar. By the time I arrived in San Francisco, it was down to 30 minutes.” Chapters: (01:02) - Workday and Salesforce (06:01) - Rolling your own (08:45) - AI-driven customer service (15:33) - Automation at scale for business (19:28) - The Toyota way (23:40) - Sam Altman (25:36) - Playing offense (28:25) - Reinventing Klarna (31:44) - The startup journey (35:37) - Common equity (39:28) - Champions League (42:24) - Hype cycles (47:35) - Sebastian’s father (52:28) - Control and stability (57:23) - Comfort zone vs. stretch zone (01:02:27) - Creating resilience (01:06:23) - Why Klarna isn’t hiring Mentioned in this episode: OpenAI, Seeking Alpha, Slack, Workday, ChatGPT, Stripe, CRMs, Mark Benioff, Twitter, Anthropic, Waymo, Devin AI, the Collison brothers and Stripe, Pieter van der Does and Adyen, Daniel Ek and Spotify, General Atlantic, DST Global, Anton Levy, Michael Moritz, Sequoia Capital, Niklas Adalberth, PayPal, CNBC, “Under Pressure” by Queen, Boris Johnson, Elon Musk, Google, Sam Walton, Made in America, Nina Siemiatkowski, and Snoop Dogg. Links: Connect with Sebastian TwitterLinkedInConnect with Joubin TwitterLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.com Learn more about Kleiner Perkins This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

    1h 9m
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About

Grit explores what it takes to create, build, and scale world-class organizations. It features weekly episodes highlighting the leaders who are pushing their companies to make a difference. This series is hosted by Joubin Mirzadegan, go to market operating partner at Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm investing in history-making founders.

Information

  • Creator
    Joubin Mirzadegan
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2024
  • Episodes
    219
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Kleiner Perkins
  • Show Website
    Grit

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