Founder Chats

About Bijan Moallemi:

A graduate of UCSD, Bijan Moallemi has nearly a decade of experience building and leading finance functions at companies like Qualcomm and Palantir. He knew CFOs deserved access to better tools, so he co-founded Mosaic Finance to build the next generation of finance software for CFOs and their teams. Today, Mosaic has achieved a 3.5x increase in customer base, raised $18.5 million in funding with investors like General Catalyst and Founders Fund, and is deployed by the fastest-growing technology companies worldwide.

About Mosaic Finance:

Mosaic is a compass for business leaders, providing a real-time Analytics and Planning platform that helps teams get from data to decision — faster. Historically finance teams have spent the majority of their efforts in reactive mode, wrangling data to unlock basic facts about the past. A Strategic Finance Platform like Mosaic breaks that cycle by integrating data, automating analytics, and connecting teams so they can focus on the future.

Show Notes:

01:00 start of Bijan Moallemi’s entrepreneurial journey

05:00 making the move to fast-growing tech sphere in the Bay area: facing new business challenges

14:00 the importance of building good financial foundations and structures

25:00 the iterative process of choosing a model for financial forecasting: testing and adjusting forecasting over the first couple of years

38:00 troubleshooting and dealing with the fallout of inaccurate financial models

47:00 attracting first customers early on and building the product around them to make sure that what you’re building matches their needs

About Will Peng:

Will Peng is the CEO and Co-Founder of Northstar, a financial wellness and benefits platform. Prior to founding Northstar, Will worked in Venture Capital and his firm was an early investor in Coinbase, Guideline, Even, and Oscar. Inspired by the positive change fintech can have on people’s lives, Will set out to solve the inequality of financial guidance.

About Northstar:

Northstar’s financial wellness program helps employees make the most of their total compensation, and helps companies support their teams at scale through onboarding, open enrollment, equity events, and more. 

Northstar has raised more than $10M from investors including M13, Foundation Capital, Workday Ventures, and Parade Ventures. Our employer customers include Zoom, Snap, NerdWallet, Superhuman, Virgin Orbit, and more.

Show Notes:

1:30 Will Peng’s entrepreneurial journey

9:00 starting a career as a VC analyst

14:30 demonstrating proactivity when looking to switch careers

26:00 finding the right career direction through intuition and self-driven learning

30:00 most financial advice online is too broad to be effective - personal financial advice should begin with thinking through an individual problem as a case by case

34:00 the importance of having difficult conversations

44:00 developing an interest in FinTech infrastructure as an Asian-American immigrant

45:00 combating the culture of shame around personal finances

49:00 understanding how to handle stock options and making other large financial decisions

About Jon Penland:

With 6+ years of experience working remotely in the technology space, and 10+ years working with customer-facing teams across multiple industries, Jon stepped into the role of Chief Operating Officer at Kinsta, where his responsibilities include hiring and onboarding as Kinsta has grown from a team of 4 to a team of more than 250 worldwide. While he didn't write his first line of HTML until he was 25 years old, within 3 years Jon was working full-time in technology, first as a freelance writer for technical websites and eventually as a Support Engineer at Kinsta. From there, he moved into management roles, initially as Chief Customer Officer and now as the COO. When he's not driving company-wide strategy and finding ways to help our distributed team stay connected, Jon can be found in rural Georgia with his wife and five kids. You can find him at @jonrichpen on Twitter.

About Kinsta:

Kinsta is a premium managed WordPress hosting provider that makes running your site simple. Our services are powered by cutting-edge technology like Google Cloud Platform and Cloudflare, and we take support seriously.  Whether you run a website, online shop, agency, or enterprise, Kinsta’s premium hosting offers top performance. At our core, we're a group of WordPress experts on a mission to make the best hosting platform the world has ever seen. Join the growing club of 23,000+companies who made the switch to better, faster hosting at kinsta.com.

About Douwe Mann:

Born and raised in the Netherlands, Douwe Maan was introduced to computers early by his father, and picked up programming at the age of nine. While studying at Utrecht University, Douwe co-founded a SaaS startup that grew to $150k in ARR, which led to him joining GitLab in 2015 as employee number 10 after landing the parents of its CEO as customers. After graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Douwe spent six months traveling the world, visiting and working with 49 colleagues in 14 countries on 5 continents. In early 2020, Douwe took over as the General Manager of GitLab's internal Meltano project, which quickly gained traction and spun out of GitLab in early 2021 to become an independent startup under Douwe's leadership. Douwe currently lives in Mexico City with his wife, who he met while traveling the world, and their two cats.

About Meltano:

Meltano is an open source data operations platform that supports data integration connectors for over 300 sources and destinations. Originally an internal project within GitLab, Meltano spun out in early 2020 to become an independent startup with $4.2 million in seed funding from investors, led by Alphabet's GV. Today, Meltano has thousands of active monthly projects and is looking to bring the benefits of open source data integration and DataOps to a wider audience.

About Bryan Clayton:

Bryan is CEO and co-founder of GreenPal, an online marketplace that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. GreenPal has been called the “Uber for lawn care” by Entrepreneur magazine and has over 200,000 active users completing thousands of transactions per day. Before starting GreenPal, Bryan Clayton founded Peachtree Inc. which had a $10 million annual revenue before it was acquired by Lusa holdings in 2013. In 2020 GreenPal generated $20 million in annual revenue.

About GreenPal:

GreenPal is an online marketplace connecting homeowners with lawn mowing professionals that want their business. Get 5 bids in minutes, pick the pro you want, and schedule and pay all online or with the mobile app. Founded by landscaping professionals to make the lawn care industry easier and more efficient for homeowners and vendors.

Show Notes:

01:15 Growing a high school job into a highly successful medium-size business

5:45 Hiring the right number of employees

6:30 Developing methods to minimize wasting time and other resources

10:30 Calculating how much profit every employee adds, and what the diminishing margin of return for manpower is

11:10 Working in the business vs. working on the business – making time for strategizing

13:20 Applying blue-collar business learnings to tech entrepreneurship

15:00 Triaging problems and focusing 100% of resources on the current major issues, one at a time

16:30 Doubling down on what’s already working, rather than fixing what’s not working, especially when it comes to customer acquisition

19:20 Inviting frictionless feedback and doing customer support yourself as a founder: closing the gap between customer logic and founder logic

20:20 Thinking about what you can be the best in the world at, and focusing all business resources on that one thing

25:20 Understanding your value to your customers: sometimes it’s less about the actual service itself, and more about selling people back their time

27:30 As a business that connects customers to contractors, catering to both sets of needs: customers want easy access to services, vendors want a sticky platform that enables fast payments, repeat business, marketing automation etc

29:15 Creating incentives for vendors to perform well starts with accountability: providing performance metrics such as number of repeat bookings, reliability and quality ratings etc

36:20 Identifying business problems and development goals, and implementing weekly strategies for success

44:30 Creating one or two highly specific goals and getting your whole team to commit to them

About Aran:

Aran Khanna has been labeled many things. Thought leader. Innovator. And (at times) troublemaker. Now, in his search to give technological control back to developers and business leaders, he’s added cloud management entrepreneur to that list as the Co-Founder & CEO of Archera, a company that helps organizations find cloud solutions that fit their companies.
 

About Archera:

Archera uses machine learning to help organizations automate & de-risk their cloud strategies. The company's goal is to put control back into the hands of developers and business leaders so they can use the resources they need when they need them, without hemorrhaging time and money.
 

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Show Notes:

00:46 Starting your first business

03:30 As a company, how do you provide value to your employees? Is offering high commissions sustainable?

06:30 Losing a business isn’t the end of the world, there’s no shame in taking a job while you regroup

09:20 Outsourcing labor in the days before Upwork etc

11:25 Getting the mojo back: starting a second business after the first one failed

13:30 Discovering a market for listing online businesses

14:55 Collaborative team sales vs. individual sales - sharing sales commissions across the whole team

16:00 How do you incentivize your team to act in the best interest of your company?

18:35 Using equity and open strategy meetings to encourage all employees to work towards your company’s long-term success

28:45 How to effectively implement sales goals: top down vs. bottom up approach

32:20 Forecasting problems of the future to discover a new market niche

34:00 Know what kind of entrepreneur you are and build a team with complementary skill sets and interests

36:00 Challenges of working with a remote team based across the globe

40:55 The value of community - sharing successes and failures with trusted business peers

48:55 Making decisions on data vs. on gut

52:10 Taking over an established business with an established team

53:30 Differences between a founder-led business vs. a private equity-led business

59:45 When to sell a SaaS business, why, and how

About Matija Kovač:

Matija Kovač is the co-founder and head of development at Taia Translations, a company that bridges the gap between language barriers with the help of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.

About Taia Translations:

Taia Translations is a modern translation platform, where we help companies translate their documents, websites, and other content with AI-assisted, human-perfected translations. If advanced neural machine translation is good enough, you can get your files translated, with formatting intact, in just a few seconds. But when you need a professional touch, you can order from a range of services, right inside the app.

About Reed-McGinley-Stempel:

Reed is the Co-Founder and CEO of Stytch, a platform for passwordless authentication that makes it simple for apps and websites to retire the password.

Before founding Stytch, Reed joined Plaid as one of their first 100 employees. He remained with them until they grew to a $5B+ valuation.

With a selection of new products about to hit the market, Stytch is prepped to spearhead the transition to a passwordless future.

About Stytch:

Stytch improves security and user experience with passwordless authentication. Stytch is building the developer platform for authentication to enable teams to easily build experiences that delight their users.

About Benn Stancil: Benn Stancil is co­founder and Chief Analyst at Mode Analytics, a company building collaborative tools for data scientists and analysts. Benn is responsible for overseeing Mode's internal analytics efforts, and is also an active contributor to the data science community. In addition, Benn provides strategic oversight and guidance to Mode's product direction as a member of the product leadership team.

To stay up to date with Benn's writing on the modern data experience, check out his substack.

About Mode: Mode helps businesses grow faster by speeding up answers to complex business problems and making the process more collaborative, so that everyone can build on the work of data analysts.  The Mode platform combines the best elements of Business Intelligence (ABI), Data Science (DS) and Machine Learning (ML) to empower data teams to answer impactful questions and collaborate on analysis across a range of business functions. In 2021, Mode has added a number of premiere enterprise companies to its customer base, which now includes Anheuser Busch, Bloomberg, Capital One, Conde Nast, Doordash, Lyft, Meredith Publishing, VMWare, and Zillow, among others.  At this point, 52% of the Forbes 500 have turned to Mode for help with data-driven decision making.