Ideas from our partners,
founders, and industry experts

Tennr co-founder and CEO Trey Holterman joins Joanne to talk about what it takes to make AI work in healthcare, and why the answer is not simply "better models."

Aaron Levie has been on the podcast twice before. After we published our context graphs thesis, he wrote a response, so we invited him on to continue the conversation.

As agents move into production, the bottleneck isn't intelligence: it's context. A conversation on context graphs, decision traces, and where value will accrue.

With Jonathan Siddharth, Co-founder and CEO, Turing

Ken Goldberg is a professor of engineering at UC Berkeley and the co-founder of Ambi Robotics, a company applying AI-enabled robotics to the logistics industry. Ken has spent over four decades working on one of the hardest problems in robotics: how machines perceive and manipulate the physical world. We spoke about why tasks that seem effortless to humans - like picking up a glass or folding laundry - are still incredibly difficult for robots.

In this episode, I sit down with Ion Stoica, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and the co-founder of Conviva, Databricks, and Anyscale. Over the last two decades, Ion’s research labs - the AMP Lab, the RISE Lab, and now the Sky Computing Lab - have seeded a generation of category-defining companies.

Ramesh Srinivasan, senior partner at McKinsey, shares how great leaders build empathy, resilience, and purpose

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Jaya Gupta sits down with Karan Goel, co-founder and CEO of Cartesia, a company pioneering the use of state space models (SSMs) for AI applications.

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Jaya Gupta sits down with Rohan Taori, a researcher on Anthropic's multimodal pre-training team.

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital Partner Sid Trivedi speaks to Chris "Tito" Sestito, the co-founder and CEO of HiddenLayer.

In this episode, I spoke to Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean. After helping build Google's search infrastructure and co-founding Rubrik (which recently hit $1B in revenue), Arvind launched Glean to solve the problem of enterprise search and help employees enhance their work with AI agents.

Welcome to AI in the Real World! In this episode, Foundation Capital General Partner Joanne Chen speaks with Melody Meckfessel, the CTO of Jasper.

Frank Slootman, former Snowflake CEO, shakes up the ‘Founder Mode’ debate

With Frank Slootman, former CEO of Snowflake

Welcome to AI in the Real World! I'm Andrew Han, a partner at Foundation Capital, and I'll be your host today. I work closely with technical founders who are building software to solve hard, valuable problems.

Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, has guided the cloud content management platform from a dorm room project into a publicly traded company with over $1B in annual revenue. In his second appearance on B2BaCEO, Aaron reflects on his founder journey, sharing how Box capitalized on cloud computing and their recent push to integrate generative AI.

Welcome to "AI in the Real World." I'm Steve Vassallo, a General Partner at Foundation Capital. In this series, we talk with leading AI researchers about their groundbreaking work and how it's being applied in real businesses today.

I talk with Recursal AI founder Eugene Cheah about RWKV, a new architecture for AI.

3 breakthroughs driving AI forward, from Regie.ai founder Srinath Sridhar

With Mohit Aron, Founder of Cohesity

In this post, I share learnings from my conversation with Chi Wang, a principal researcher at Microsoft and the creator of AutoGen.

Sanjit and I discuss his journey from grad student researcher to the founder of two major startup successes: Samsara, which recently hit $1B in ARR, and Meraki, acquired by Cisco for $1.2B.

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.

In the coming months, I’ll be hosting a series of in-depth conversations with leading AI researchers where we’ll explore how state-of-the-art models are being applied in the real world.

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

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.

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 cofounder 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.

I share takeaways from FC's inaugural Generative AI "Unconference." I announce our Generative AI 25 list! I share my latest pod with AI pioneer Matei Zaharia. I debrief our event at AGI House.

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.

As everyone listening to this podcast knows, the release of ChatGPT last November ushered in a new age of AI and catalyzed a wave of AI startups. For this episode of B2BaCEO, Ashu goes deep on AI with Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, former serial entrepreneur and investor, and current Chief Strategy Officer at Microsoft.

Beerud Sheth is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gupshup, a leading platform for cloud messaging. Prior to that he was the cofounder of what is now Upwork, a pioneer of online freelancing and remote work. Beerud took the slow and steady pace to winning the race, building two unicorns over 25 years.

Jonathan Siddharth is Co-founder and CEO of Turing, the platform that helps companies source, vet, match, and manage the world’s best software developers remotely. Jonathan started Turing in Foundation Capital’s offices four years ago and he’s since grown it into a $4B company.

I give you a brief overview of our enterprise investing strategy. I podcast with the CEO of Deel. I introduce you to my partner and futuristic daydreamer Jenny. Plus: Was design just a fad?

Alex Bouaziz is the guest for this edition of the show. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Deel, a global payroll solution that helps businesses hire anyone, anywhere. Founded in 2019, Alex and his team have grown the company into a unicorn with almost a thousand employees in just three short years!

On this episode, Ashu is coming to you from London, where he’s spending the summer. His guest is Christian Owens, founder and CEO of Paddle, a B2B payments infrastructure platform.

I explain how and why to calculate your company’s Golden Velocity. I chat with the second-handsomest Ashu Garg in tech. I introduce you to my partner and frustrated tennis pro Apoorva. Plus, meet a missionary misfit who’s trying to save the world.

On this episode, it’s Ashu Garg vs. Ashu Garg. Our guest is his good friend Ashu Garg, who also goes by Ashutosh. Ashutosh is the founder and CEO of Eightfold, an AI-powered talent-acquisition and -management platform, where our Ashu is a board member and early investor in the company.

On this episode, Ashu’s guest is Yamini Rangan, the CEO of HubSpot. The tagline of the B2BaCEO podcast is “from engineer to CEO,” and that’s exactly the path that Yamini took. She started out as an engineer, then moved to sales, and then eventually to running go-to-market operations as an executive.

On this episode, Ashu and Nikesh explore the importance of culture, and how it separates the great companies from the also-rans. Nikesh explains how he went about defining the culture at Palo Alto Networks and then translated that aspiration into reality, including how he approaches hiring.

On this episode, Ashu interviews Josh Reeves, founder and CEO of Gusto, which is reimagining payroll, benefits, and HR for modern companies. Josh joins Ashu to celebrate Gusto’s 10th anniversary.

DataBricks CEO and cofounder, Ali Ghodsi, is back on the podcast for a third time, making him the most frequent guest we’ve had on the show. On this episode, courtesy of our recent enterprise conference, FC BUILD 2021, Ali shares the founding story of Spark and DataBricks, and his own story of going from an academic to a CEO.

This episode’s guest is the one and only Frank Slootman. Frank is the chairman and CEO of Snowflake Computing, which he took public in a blockbuster IPO in 2020. Frank is also the author of the new book Amp It Up.

Dan Springer is a three-time Silicon Valley CEO. He’s currently the CEO of DocuSign, which he took public and subsequently scaled to more than $2 billion in run-rate revenue and $50+ billion in market cap. Any losers out there will want to stop listening now, because this episode is all about how to win: how to win as a CEO, how to win at go-to-market, and how to win the war for talent.

Rob Bernshteyn’s definition of product-market-fit is having “the least lines of code with the maximum amount of value and the highest willingness to pay for that value.” Rob is the CEO of Coupa, the leading business-spend management platform. He’s a product-led and metrics-driven CEO. So, naturally, this conversation is all about product and SaaS metrics. In this episode, Rob unpacks his definition of product-market fit and talks about his formula for scaling a SaaS company to a billion dollars.

This is a special bonus episode of B2BaCEO featuring one of Foundation Capital’s own CEOs, Max Simkoff. In 2016, Max founded Doma, a real estate transactions startup, out of our San Francisco office and Foundation led his Series A. Just last week, less than five years later, Doma started trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

This episode goes deep on a topic that many founders, especially first-time founders, obsess over but usually get wrong: OKRs, objectives and key results. And there’s literally no greater authority on this topic than our guest Deidre Paknad, CEO and cofounder of Workboard, the enterprise standard in OKR software and expertise. Deidre is one of the most methodical, systematic, and gutsy leaders we’ve ever had on the show. Many CEOs overdo or underdo OKRs. Listen to Deidre and she’ll tell you how to do OKRs right.

With Mike Decesare, Co-Chairman at Forescout Technologies & Doug Merritt, President & CEO at Splunk Doug Merritt and Mike DeCesare both hold leadership roles at prominent cybersecurity companies.

With George Kurtz, Co-Founder & CEO of CrowdStrike & Michelle Zatlyn, Co-Founder & COO of Cloudflare In this session from our FC BUILD conference, Ashu interviews two billion-dollar founders. When it comes to scaling management, engineering culture, and anticipating future markets, Cloudflare COO Michelle Zatlyn and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are the ones to ask.

With Edith Harbaugh, CEO & Co-Founder of LaunchDarkly & Tien Tzuo, CEO & Founder of Zuora In this installment of our FC BUILD series, my partner Steve Vassallo talks with Edith Harbaugh, co-founder and CEO of LaunchDarkly, and Tien Tzuo, co-founder and CEO of Zuora.

In this discussion from our recent enterprise conference FC BUILD, Ashu interviews Databricks founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi. A rather unconventional company, Databricks began as an open-source project at UC Berkeley that moved into the commercial space after the team realized its impact. Ali and Ashu discuss commercializing an open-source project, identifying product-market fit, and optimizing go-to-market.

This is a special episode of B2B a CEO. Last month, Foundation Capital held a special event for all of our CEOs. We hosted a conversation with Foundation’s most illustrious CEO, Reed Hastings, the CEO and cofounder of Netflix. General Partner Steve Vassallo and General Partner Emeritus Mike Schuh interviewed Reed about his new book, No Rules Rules.

From FC BUILD, our recent enterprise conference, Foundation Capital General Partner Joanne Chen interviews Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman. On the heels of his third major IPO, Frank discusses performance culture, scaling, and the future of data.

On this episode, Ashu interviews Edith Harbaugh, co-founder and CEO of feature management platform LaunchDarkly. They discuss what it takes to leap from an established job to pursue an idea, and how to tackle the woes of fundraising.

This episode’s guest is Ralph Clark, the president and CEO of ShotSpotter. Ralph has more than 30 years of experience in corporate finance and organizational leadership roles at IBM, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and several successful tech startups.

George Kurtz, the founder and CEO of Crowdstrike, the most successful cybersecurity company of the past decade, is the very special guest for this episode. George joins Ashu for in-depth conversation on everything from hiring, to board composition, to balancing a hybrid product-and-services model. George also gives specific advice for all you security founders listening.

With Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder & CEO of Databricks On this episode, we have Ali Ghodsi, cofounder and CEO of Databricks, a cloud platform for massive scale data engineering and collaborative data science. For the first third of the podcast, Ali tells us the story of how a research project at the AMP Lab at UC Berkeley grew into Databricks. This will be of particular interest to anyone who wants to know how to commercialize open source.

In part 2 of my interview with Mark Leslie, we dive deeper into his experience founding Veritas and leading it to become a Fortune 100 software company. We hear more about Mark’s eventual departure from his role as CEO to his current passion for teaching and investing.

Mark Leslie is the founder & CEO of Veritas Technology, a company he grew from an idea to a Fortune 100 powerhouse worth over $1B in revenue. My interview with Mark was so full of wisdom that we decided there was enough material for at least two episodes. In this first episode, I get into the weeds with Mark on topics ranging from how to manage your board, to pricing and sales, to annual planning. It’s a can’t-miss for all CEOs or CEO-hopefuls!

With Dale Holewinski, Startup Founder & CEO Coach at Decode For the first episode of the new year and new decade, a startup-founder-turned-CEO coach offers some guidance on being your best CEO self.

With Ion Stoica, Executive Chairman and Former CEO of Databricks; & Co-Founder of Conviva Two-time founder/CEO, and Berkeley computer science professor, Ion Stoica chats with Ashu about what it means to have an impact and how to go from academic to entrepreneur.

With Sudheesh Nair and Ajeet Singh of ThoughSpot Sudheesh Nair and Ajeet Singh discuss the tricky process of handing off the CEO baton. They also go deep on how to build a world-class sales organization.

With Kevin Johnson, CEO of Udemy Kevin Johnson led two companies in very different stages of growth. Here’s how he did it and what he looks for in new hires.

With Mohit Aron, CEO & Founder of Cohesity Two-time founder Mohit Aron tells me how blueprints and checklists can guide your startup in its earliest stages.

Burton Goldfield tells me his CEO strategy: know the results you want and build your company towards achieving them.

Aaron tells me how to scale your company while maintaining its culture and the benefits of going public.

Dorm room startup co-founder Aaron Levie tells me how he made the decision to pivot Box from a consumer product to an enterprise solution.

Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan tells me why and how happiness is an essential part of his multi-billion-dollar company.

Tien Tzuo, co-founder and CEO of Zuora, tells me how he tells his company’s story when he pitches to customers and investors and how to scale up to $1 billion.

Super-networker and Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta tells me how listening to people and creating a good company culture has turned the customer success software platform into a market leader.