Grit

Guest: Shoaib Makani, CEO of Motive

“When we fail,” says Shoaib Makani, “it is because we have not understood the customer problem deeply and allowed them to guide us.” This wisdom is hard-won: Motive…

Guest: Tom Hale, CEO of Oura

When he was growing up, Tom Hale’s family had pretty ordinary dinner-table conversations: What happened today, how was school, etc. But every day after dinner, Tom and his…

Guest: Rachel Pike, COO at Modern Treasury

Payment operations startup Modern Treasury is not afraid to do things in “our own weird way,” says COO Rachel Pike. Its values statement is a 150 word essay,…

Guest: Ashley Kramer, CMO & CSO of GitLab

One day, when Ashley Kramer was an SVP at Alteryx, one of her direct reports hit her with a dose of reality: “She said, ‘I think you are trying to put me on a…

Guest: Jen Vescio, Chief Business Development Officer at Uber and founder of Awestruck Ventures

If you were to look at Jen Vescio’s calendar, it might look like a pack of Skittles: Every single one of…

Guest: Nikesh Arora, CEO and Chairman of Palo Alto Networks

Nikesh Arora has been in the C-Suite for more than two decades, including a 10-year stint as Google’s chief business officer and — most rece…

Guests: Alex Smith and Shaun Livingston, former players for the San Francisco 49ers and Golden State Warriors

“I just thought, the best of my life is behind me.” That’s what former NFL quarterback Ale…

Guest: Andre Iguodala, forward for the Golden State Warriors

The average professional basketball career lasts around four years. By the first time Andre Iguodala came to play for the Golden State Warr…

Guest: Al Gore, Former Vice President and chairman of The Climate Reality Project

Al Gore has been talking about all kinds of renewable energy for decades. The former U.S. Vice President, Nobel Peace …

Guest: Giancarlo “GC” Lionetti, CRO of Zapier

“I live in a constant state of paranoia,” says Zapier CRO Giancarlo “GC” Lionetti, “which I guess is healthy and unhealthy.” A lifelong hard worker who sh…

Guest: Claire Hughes Johnson, author of Scaling People and Corporate Officer at Stripe

Former Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson’s new book, Scaling People, is not your typical business book: Informed b…

Guest: Rania Succar, CEO of Intuit Mailchimp

Ten years out of college, and with two advanced degrees under her belt, Rania Succar knew she wanted to be an operator. Taking a job at Google taught her a…

Guest: Lesley Young, CRO of Gem

Lesley Young’s favorite book is “The Obstacle Is The Way,” in which Ryan Holiday argues that the process of working hard to achieve something is more important than the…

Guest: Javier Molina, CRO of Starburst

Starburst CRO Javier Molina’s peers, former colleagues, and even his wife often tell him the same thing: He’s difficult to read.  That doesn’t mean he’s not list…

All of Dennis Lyandres’ mentors — and even his parents — thought he was making a mistake when he joined Procore in 2014. At the time, he was working at the “it” company in Silicon Valley, Cloudera, a…

In the middle of the Great Recession, Thomas Dohmke quit a stable job at a good company because “I wanted to build stuff again.” Specifically, he was inspired by the release of the first software dev…

Freshworks president Dennis Woodside copes with stress by running as often as he can, a habit that began when he was CEO of Motorola Mobility. So far, he has run “16 to 17” Ironman triathlons. He’s a…

The best advice Brex founder and co-CEO Henrique Dubugras ever received came from Snap CEO Evan Spiegel: The best CEOs, Spiegel told him, are “extremely authentic to themselves ... If you try to emul…

“When you create something,” says ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott, “that gives you the ability to help and do good and achieve for the most people possible.” Bill left his first corporate job at Xerox …

With more than 1,200 employees, it isn’t easy for Gong co-founder and CEO Amit Bendov to stay in touch with everyone. So, his team has established a series of regular programs to communicate the comp…