Grit

Touch The Top CEO Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind person to summit Mount Everest, climbs hundreds of mountains every year. And he’s learned over the years that sometimes, the smartest thing to do i…

After rescuing his first startup BigMachines from the brink of bankruptcy and building it to positive cash flow, Godard Abel thought the express lane of life was opening up to him. But after the boar…

Mark Roberge’s first anxiety attack hit him six months after 9/11, and his second hit him in the middle of a big speech while he was an executive at HubSpot. And Roberge, who now lectures at Harvard …

Canva CMO Zach Kitschke was the company’s fifth employee, joining right before the product launched to the public — or, that was the plan anyway. Emerging technologies like HTML5 and negative feedbac…

Girish Mathrubootham is the founder and CEO of Freshworks, the first Indian SaaS company to be listed in NASDAQ — and when he’s in his home country, he gets the celebrity treatment. Freshworks’ 2021 …

Riot Games CMO Jason Bunge knows you might roll your eyes when he says this, but he doesn’t care, because it’s the truth: Marketing doesn’t get enough respect. Although many companies have convinced …

Before Peter Reinhardt started his current company, Charm Industrial, he was the CEO and co-founder of the customer data platform Segment, which almost died in its first year. Why? He was afraid to a…

Clari CEO Andy Byrne says he never wants to look back and see that he put more into his work than his family. But that doesn’t mean he can’t learn a thing or two from running a 600-person multi-billi…

In the early days of Okta, co-founder Frederic Kerrest was courting a 3,000-person company in Louisiana, which was considering Okta and one other vendor. When he learned who he was up against, he sai…

In April, a young girl was kidnapped and sexually assaulted in Yakima, Wash., and later told police she was picked up by a stranger in a car. The case might have gone cold there, if Yakima hadn’t jus…

Leyla Seka has a clear idea of “what makes me great” as the COO of Ironclad: She’s incredibly direct with her team. Although many people are not comfortable with getting direct feedback, she says, “I…

When Alex Norstrom started working at Spotify in 2011, CEO Daniel Ek told him there were three goals: Growth, growth, and growth. But Alex — now the Chief Freemium Business Officer — argued that his …

Thrive CEO Arianna Huffington is best known for the pioneering online publication she founded, the Huffington Post, which she left in 2016. The experience of running the site awakened her to the most…

Archana Agrawal started her job as CMO of Airtable on March 18, 2020 — the same week that the US began to “shelter in place” as cases of the novel coronavirus rapidly rose. With kids who would be sta…

As the CMO for Square, Lauren Weinberg spends a lot of her time talking to new and inexperienced small business owners — and she knows that each of them has wisdom that the others could benefit from.…

Handshake CEO and co-founder Garrett Lord was amazed when he first learned that Silicon Valley firms like Google recruited on college campuses ... just not his, Michigan Technical University. But aft…

ThoughtSpot CMO Scott Holden spent eight years at Salesforce, putting in the time every year behind the scenes at Dreamforce watching the company reach 20,000 employees. And he probably could have th…

Every year, ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck writes a memo to his executive team, which is made to look like a letter to the board of directors. Even though he founded DiscoverOrg — the company that bought …

Jaimie Buss, CRO of the e-learning platform Articulate, had an epiphany several years ago. While trying to simultaneously give her toddler a bath and catch up on work emails, some water splashed on h…

George Felix, now the CMO of Tinder, was marketing Old Spice body wash at a time when the brand was circling the drain. His team at Procter & Gamble almost let their big break slip away when initiall…