7 Startup Founder Podcasts – Perseverance Pays Off

While entrepreneurs have followed very different paths while building their successful startups, there are striking qualities shared by those able to persevere through the ups and downs of the journey. Have a listen to the following 30-minute podcast interviews with this eclectic group of startup founders. You will be inspired by their shared resilience, determination, and willingness to learn new things.

Fred Luddy, Founder of ServiceNow – ServiceNow is 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!”

Therese Tucker, Founder and CEO of BlackLine – Therese 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.

Eric Frenkiel, Co-founder and CEO of MemSQL – Eric discusses his journey from pre-IPO Facebook to YCombinator to a thriving In-Memory database company that has successfully navigated a fat startup path.

Greg Gianforte, Founder and CEO of RightNow Technologies – Greg took his company public, and later sold it to Oracle for $1.5 billion. He made an unorthodox choice of building the company mainly in Montana. Today, RightNow (now Oracle) is one of Montana’s largest employers.

Heidi Jannenga, Co-founder and President, WebPT – Heidi is yet another scrappy entrepreneur who managed to bootstrap to over $1M ARR and THEN raised the first million in angel funding.

Nevin Shetty, CEO of Blueprint Registry – He did TechStars last year, and we discuss some strategies for getting into YCombinator and TechStars, the two high quality seed fund accelerators that are worth going through. Note, there are very few among the 7,500+ accelerators out there that are worth parting with 7-10% equity for.

Caleb Sima, Security Expert – Caleb is a serial entrepreneur who was working on his security startup, BlueBox Security (acquired by Lookout in 2016), at the time of this discussion. If security is your interest, this is a great session to listen to.