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.

How to B2B a CEO (with Ashu Garg)

How to Scale Product-Market Fit (Rob Bernshteyn, CEO & Chairman, Coupa Software)

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.You can watch the full story of how Doma went from proof-of-concept to public company in our new video series, “Diary of a Startup."But this episode of the podcast focusses on what Max learned it takes for a FOUNDER-CEO to build a great company. Max walks us through all the critical first steps, even the seemingly trivial ones, for starting a business. He gets into the minds of VC investors and what founders need to do to really impress them. And he lays out, in no uncertain terms, who exactly is and isn’t a real entrepreneur.

BONUS: How to Architect the Future (Max Simkoff, Founder & CEO of Doma)

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.

How to Do OKRs Right (Deidre Paknad, CEO & Co-Founder of WorkBoard)

Doug Merritt and Mike DeCesare both hold leadership roles at prominent cybersecurity companies. But before they made their way into the CEO seat, both spent many years in a variety of operational positions, gaining a 360-degree view of their respective businesses. Today, Doug leads the team at Splunk with empathy, ensuring all contributors feel valued. And Mike, now co-chairman at Forescout Technologies, explains how his holistic professional journey has made him a more thoughtful leader. We’ll hear from both executives in this next installment from our FC BUILD series, this time moderated by my partner and resident cybersecurity expert, Sid Trivedi. Sid questions Doug and Mike about where privacy is heading in a post-Covid world and about some of the hot topics in the world of cybersecurity today.

How to Protect Your Perimeter (Doug Merritt and Mike DeCesare)

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. Each shares a bit about their respective company’s journeys — plus, George explains how a company is like a race car!

How to Go From Idea to IPO (George Kurtz & Michelle Zatlyn)

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. Both former engineers, Edith and Tien offer advice for building a startup, discuss scaling in the time of virtual work, and dissect the art of managing others and themselves.

How to Grow as a CEO (Tien Tzuo and Edith Harbaugh)

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.

How to Commercialize Open Source (Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder & CEO of Databricks)

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. Reed discusses the evolution of Netflix, and what he’s learned over the decades about how to build a high-performance culture. He also shares a few stories from back in the day. https://foundationcapital.com/how-to-manage-on-the-edge-of-chaos/

How to Manage on the Edge of Chaos (Reed Hastings, CEO & Co-Founder of Netflix)

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.

How to Build a Snowflake (Frank Slootman, Chairman & CEO of Snowflake)

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. Edith and Ashu spend the lion’s share of the conversation on the all-important topic of sales. How to sell yourself, your company, and your product. And what to look for when you’re hiring a sales leader.

How to Sell Yourself, Your Startup, and Your Product (Edith Harbaugh, CEO & CoFounder of LaunchDarkly)

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. He and Ashu talk about how executives and the tech industry can confront bias and systemic racism.

How to Be an Anti-Racist CEO (Ralph Clark, President & CEO of ShotSpotter)

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.

How to Hate Losing (George Kurtz, Founder & CEO of Crowdstrike)

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. After that, Ali gives listeners a crash course on how to build an early stage go-to-market machine—from how and who to hire, to how to coordinate sales and marketing, to how to execute. It's a fantastic bootcamp for startup CEOs.

How to Go to Market (Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder & CEO of Databricks)

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.

How to Make Your CEO Dreams Come True (Mark Leslie, Managing General Partner at Leslie Ventures)

This special episode of the podcast is part oral history of when the plague came to Silicon Valley and part anthology of advice for startups dealing with the fallout of Covid-19. Five CEOs and one CFO, at companies ranging from early stage to public market, share their experiences of coping with the business impact of the pandemic and offer advice for how best to manage through the crisis. The guests for this episode are Mohit Aron, CEO at Cohesity; Andrew Feldman, CEO at Cerebras Systems; Jack Lazar, former CFO; Mark Leslie, retired CEO at Veritas Technologies; Jonathan Siddharth, CEO at Turing; and Derek Steer, CEO at Mode.

How to Get Through the Covid-19 Crisis (Various)

How to B2B a CEO is the show about how to scale your enterprise startup and how to grow from founder to CEO. Hosted by Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital.

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How to B2B a CEO (with Ashu Garg)

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