257th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Therese Tucker, BlackLine

Therese Tucker, Founder and CEO of BlackLine, is a very successful female entrepreneur who followed our core philosophy of bootstrap first, raise money later. When I first met her in 2009, her company was in the $10 million revenue range. Subsequently, it has continued to grow at 50% CAGR year over year, and Therese raised private equity funding in 2013 to take liquidity for herself and her team. With annual recurring revenue in the $65 million range, and continued growth at 50%, $100 million revenue is not far in the horizon. And with that, the company’s valuation will easily touch unicorn levels.

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244th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Aaron Skonnard, Pluralsight

Aaron Skonnard, Founder and CEO of Pluralsight, one of the few EdTech ventures out there that are scaling at Unicorn levels, discusses his journey over the last decade. Aaron bootstrapped Pluralsight to $16 million in revenue before raising a $27.5 million Series A at almost a $100 million valuation. From there on, the company has gone on to follow a roll-up strategy with additional funding and is currently valued at close to $1 billion.

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248th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Ross Mason, MuleSoft

Ross Mason, Founder of MuleSoft, has built a terrific commercial open source company that is scaling at Unicorn rates, with freemium conversion rates in the 5-6% range. Ross discusses how he got the company off the ground, and built a product strategy that makes such high conversion rates possible.

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255th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Fred Luddy, ServiceNow

Fred Luddy is Founder of ServiceNow, one of the most successful companies in the history of enterprise software. Founded in 2003, ServiceNow is valued at over $12 billion in the public market. This is a truly wonderful discussion, marked with Fred’s warmth, humility and wit: “We hire people with a lot of experience. We ask them to bring their knowledge, and leave their baggage!”

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285th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Adam Singolda, Taboola

Adam Singolda, Founder CEO of Taboola, has had a fascinating journey as an entrepreneur. It took him four years to get product market fit, and today, the company is at over $200M in revenue. Persistence pays off. Resilience is the single most important characteristic that drives entrepreneurial success.

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352nd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Ron Heinz, Signal Peak Ventures

Ron Heinz, Founder and Managing Director at Signal Peak Ventures, a venture firm operating mostly in the Rocky Mountain corridor, discusses what’s happening in Utah, as well as Colorado and Arizona. We’ve covered a number of companies from that area including Pluralsight, InsideSales, Steals.com, Ping Identity, and InfusionSoft. Today there are over a thousand funded startups in those geographies. Bootstrapping runs heavy in the startup culture of the region.

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231st 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Tod Francis, Shasta Ventures

Tod Francis, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, starts with a discussion on the history of retail, all the way from shoe stores, to departmental stores, and back to specialty retail. This is followed by a similar overview of the history of e-commerce ranging from Amazon’s strategy to how specialty retail is translating into niche e-commerce, and how Tod is looking at investments in the category.

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250th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Scott Sandell, NEA

Scott Sandell, General Partner at NEA, is one of NEA’s star investors. He has been named to the Forbes Midas list every year since 2007, and has been involved with eight Unicorn companies including Salesforce.com, Workday, Webex, Tableau, and others. Scott discusses, specifically, Webex and Tableau in quite a bit of depth. In both companies, the scrappy, capital-efficient management of those businesses were striking!

Among Silicon Valley’s venture firms, NEA holds a special place in my own entrepreneurial journey, being the first VC firm that I successfully raised funding from. Oddly, and we discuss this, at the time in the late nineties, the fact that my company was doing product development in India was considered unacceptable. Of course, all that changed in due course, and today India is firmly established on the startup map, as are China, Europe, and many other nations. NEA was an early adopter of the global entrepreneurship trend, and has offices in India and China. They also invest elsewhere in the world, where they don’t have offices.

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240th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Shomit Ghose, Onset Ventures

Shomit Ghose, Partner at Onset Ventures, is also a veteran startup executive with multiple IPOs under his belt. He highlights the fact that 70,000 ventures received angel funding in 2014, but the number of companies receiving venture funding remains constant year over year at about 1,000 per year. Focusing on building value is of paramount importance, so that you can validate and prove your value proposition.

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282nd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Susan Mason, Aligned Partners

Susan Mason, General Partner at Aligned Ventures, talks about the dysfunctions of the broader venture capital model, and what her firm is doing to address those. Excellent conversation, please listen.

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303rd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Ho Nam, Altos Ventures

Ho Nam, Managing Director at Altos Ventures, makes a clear distinction between capital efficient company building and the “grow at costs in all sorts of unsustainable ways” philosophy. These are two distinctly different ways of building businesses.

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305th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Stewart Alsop, Alsop Louie Venture

Stewart Alsop, Partner at Alsop Louie Partners, has been a VC for 20 years, and before that, a journalist for another 20 years in the technology industry. This conversation is wide-ranging, spanning autonomous vehicles, unreasonable entrepreneurs, etc.

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319th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Rehan Yar Khan, Orios Venture Partners

Rehan Yar Khan is General Partner at Orios Venture Partners, and an early investor in the Indian startup scene. Rehan’s core focus is on the Indian consumer opportunity, and that is what we focus on in this discussion.

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330th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Hernan Kazah, Kaszek Ventures

Hernan Kazah is Co-founder and Managing Partner at Kaszek Ventures, one of the earliest VC firms to start investing in the Latin American market. Hernan is a Co-founder of MercadoLibre, Latin America’s ecommerce leader. This discussion features a comprehensive overview of the trends in the Latin American startup scene.

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299th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Heidi Roizen, DFJ

Heidi Roizen, Operating Partner at DFJ, discusses her important article, “How to Build a Unicorn From Scratch – and Walk Away with Nothing,” and imparts crucial lessons to entrepreneurs on how to look at terms in a venture financing situation.

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