Holger Seim, co-founder and CEO of Blinkist, speaks with Michael about how Blinkist emerged out of shifting consumption patterns, geographic expansion out of Germany, where the company may be headed, and how to stick to your long-term strategic vision while also incorporating responses to ongoing c…
Diego Camberos, COO of Vodafone Qatar and former CEO of Tigo Millicom Senegal and Rwanda, joins Michael to share insight into navigating cultural differences in different markets, how “radical simplification” has served as the bedrock of Vodafone’s success, and how to build a corporate culture that…
Cameron Herold, Founder of the COO Alliance and former COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK, talks to Michael about building a successful company culture, effective process implementation, and what a strong relationship between a COO and CEO should look like. They also touch on how to attract “A” players to your …
Cathy Hawley, former Chief People Officer of Return Path and Co-Founder of Bolster, sits down with Michael to discuss the importance of intentionality and an agile mindset in building a remote company culture, how people operations grew out of traditional human resources, and why employers should f…
Dale Pfeifer, CEO of Goodworld, chats on scaling social impact through tech, the evolution of CSR (corporate social responsibility) from consumer targeted to greater corporate involvement, Mastercard, Citi, and BlackRock's leadership in CSR, the impact of the pandemic on accelerating CSR, the chall…
Jenny Lawton knows how to run businesses. Period. From her role as CEO of Makerbot, democratizing 3D printing (and exiting for $400M), to being COO of LittleBits (BB8's learning division), to running Techstars, one of the world's most prolific and successful seed funds and accelerators, Jenny has a…
Handshake COO, Jonathan Stull, joins to talk about the journey of building a three-sided marketplace to $100M ARR at a $3.5B valuation with over 500 employees. We touch on the role of COO at Handshake; Jonathan's path from waiting tables to Capital Hill to PE to tech; compromising on tactics but no…
GoGuardian COO, Cyrus Mistry, spent 14 years at Google as the Director of Product Management for Chromebooks bringing computers to schools, before joining GoGaurdian as COO right when they raised $200M in new funding from Tiger Global Management. Cyrus has a wealth of knowledge not only stemming fr…
Art Harding is the COO at People.ai, and joins to share how People.ai has supported their Ukrainian team members, how coaching is inspiring for the right to inspect performance and provide timely and meaningful feedback, the operational mandate of E2T: driving efficiency, effectiveness, and transfo…
Angela Tucci, COO at Uplight, joins to talk about running a $1.5B company created from the M&A of 6 companies, advocating for voice & equity for women in the workforce, finding an inspiring CEO, working with utility companies to reduce their carbon footprint, taking private equity vs. VC funding, i…
Ken Weary is the COO of Hotjar and joins to chat on running a fully remote 200 person company, being a digital nomad traveling for over 7 years as a COO with a family, going through M&A and diligence on the buyer, always having a just cause as the "why" behind what you do, and BYOR, Bring Your Own …
Former Lyft executive, Steve Taylor, joins to talk about Lyft's growth from early days to $20B IPO, managing the NYC and DC Lyft markets with a $500M P&L, taking analog experiences and making them digital, and his latest work on HipTrain, an at-home fitness app that connects personal trainers with …
ExecThread CEO, Joe Meyer on Accessing Hidden Exec Retained Searches & How to Land Them, Exiting to Apple & AOL, Organic Supply/Demand Creation & Growth, the Motivation of Failure, & How to Overcome Any Challenge.
Joe has been a successful start-up CEO and operating executive at high-growth tec…
Kettle COO, Nathaniel Manning, talks about balancing risk in a changing climate, structure without bureaucracy, evolution by design, good decision making, the social contract of insurance, and sitting on a monastery cushion for 3 months. He also talks about old guard vs new guard, building the plan…
Dave Weiss, co-founder, and COO of Hatch, joins us to discuss what it takes to confound a hardware company with his wife, sell 2 million IoT devices, the heightened consumer expectations of hardware, visit customers' homes, going from Shark Tank to VC fundraising, moving from CTO at BabyCenter to C…
Dia&Co. COO and former LVMH Chief Digital Officer, Valerie Hoecke, joins to chat on how a $50B co. like LVMH preps you for anything, how Dia&Co. solves the shopping challenges faced by plus size women, the impact of size discrimination in the workforce, the challenges that "try before you buy" crea…
Catherine Stewart, former COO at Shippo and former CBO at Automattic, joins us in part one of a special two-parter, to talk about the craft of scaling operations at hyper-growth tech companies. Topics include shifting strategic priorities at Automattic to also focus on e-commerce and revenue genera…
Doug Hanna, COO at Grafana Labs, joins us to discuss scaling a company to $3B in valuation after raising $330M in funding. As a former Zendesk VP of Ops, Doug has had front seats at both companies, during hyper-growth. This episode, Part 2, focuses on scaling the go-to-market machine of a multi-bil…
Doug Hanna, COO at Grafana Labs, joins us to discuss scaling a company to $3B in valuation after raising $330M in funding. As a former Zendesk VP of Ops, Doug has had front seats at both companies, during hyper-growth. This episode, Part 1, focuses on people and culture: what goes into scaling from…
Before Micah Rosenbloom was a venture capitalist, he was the co-founder and COO of Brontes Technologies, which he sold to 3M. Micah and his business partner Eric then went on to found the VC firm, Founder Collective, which has made investments in companies like Uber, ThreadUp, Hotels Tonight, Venmo…
After doing $26B of M&A at Diageo, Marie Prokopets joined the startup world a cofounded Nira.com, a way to secure your company documents and access controls. As COO at Nira, Marie joins us to talk about pivoting from search to security, context switching, and what happens when vendors mess up acces…
Tucows (NDAQ: TCX) Chief Product Officer, Justin Reilly, joins as our first non-COO, and shares on your customer's best last experience, product designs influence on operations and AI's fit, Ting's amazing customer care, and how photos almost pushed a launch.
True Ventures Chief Operating Officer, Jim Stewart, joins us to discuss what it's like to take four companies public, what goes into the operations to run a venture capital firm, how to take calculated risks, and what to do when you realize that you've just violated US government export controls wh…
Allie Fleder discusses changing industries, how COO roles change throughout the life stage of a company, the blood sweat, and tears (literally) that go into building a startup, and maintaining clarity in the early days of a company.
Allie Fleder is the cofounder and COO of SimplyWise, an NYC-bas…
