Founder Real Talk

Shay Banon is the Co-founder and CEO of Elastic, a search company that makes data usable in real time and at scale for enterprise search, observability, and security. The foundation for what became Elastic was laid in 2004 while Shay was building a recipe app for his wife. Shay built Elastic Search the product in 2009 and open sourced it in 2010. He co-founded the company Elastic Search with Steven Schuurman, Uri Boness, and Simon Willnauer in 2012 and the company quickly rose through the ranks, raising over $160M in funding before its successful IPO in 2018. In this episode, Shay dives into the 17 year evolution of the company and how the open source community and model has helped shape Elastic into what it is today.

Guy Podjarny is the Co-Founder, President, Chairman of the Board, and former CEO of Snyk, the leader in developer-first “cloud native” application security. Before co-founding Snyk in 2015, Guy helped develop AppScan and co-founded Blaze.io (acquired by Akamai in 2012). In 2020, Snyk won four Best Places to Work awards and was named a CNBC Disruptor in 2021. In this episode, Guy shares how he’s encouraged developers to embrace security, successfully built a company with a bottoms-up strategy, and the benefits of focusing on a community of builders. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.

Zvi Schreiber is the Founder and CEO of Freightos, the company on a mission to completely optimize and modernize the world of international freight shipping. Before founding Freightos in 2012, Zvi has had an extensive background as Founder and CEO of multiple companies including Unicorn Solutions, which was acquired by IBM in 2006. Founded in 2012 in Israel, Freightos has become a global company with offices around the world. In this episode, Zvi talks about why he took on the challenge of modernizing the complex and traditional industry of international freight shipping. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.

Ali Ghodsi is the CEO and Co-Founder of Databricks, an AI-enabled, open source data analytics platform company, valued today at more than $28 billion. Over 5,000 companies use the company’s open source-driven lakehouse architecture to process, engineer, and analyze their unstructured and semi-structured data. In this episode, Ali shares how an open source project he helped start as a researcher at UC Berkeley—where he still serves as an adjunct professor in the computer science department— turned into a multibillion-dollar company and lessons entrepreneurs can learn from his journey.

Amit Bendov is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gong, a revenue intelligence platform that analyzes the data of sales calls, emails, texts, and social media to create insights to optimize company sales. Founded in Tel Aviv in 2015, Gong is valued at over $2B today. With more people working from home, Gong has been able to establish itself as one of the top sales data providers on the market. In this episode, Amit talks about the importance of creating a compelling product and giving your team enough room to grow. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.

Thierry Schellenbach is the Co-founder and CEO of Stream, a scalable API platform that’s growing rapidly. After the acquisition of his previous company, Fashiolista, Thierry set out to help create a scalable API for chat and activity feeds that can keep up with company growth. Thierry founded Stream in 2014 in his home country of the Netherlands, but he’s now based in Boulder, Colorado. Stream gained attention in the US after participating in Techstars NYC in 2015. Thierry describes what it was like raising a round of funding remotely, managing a global team, and how he and his team are navigating the ever-changing landscape of APIs. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Investor, Tiffany Luck.

Dev Ittycheria is the President and CEO of MongoDB, the maker of the world’s most popular general purpose database. Built on open source, MongoDB has had an enviable run since its 2017 IPO. Dev joined MongoDB in 2014 and has steered the company through some of its highest-growth years. Before taking the helm of MongoDB, Dev founded and IPOed two companies—Breakaway Solutions, which went public in 1999 and was acquired by Verizon in 2001, and BladeLogic, which had one of the most successful IPOs of 2007 and was later acquired by BMC Software for $900 million. He has also invested in and served on the boards of many successful software companies including AppDynamics, Athenahealth, and Datadog. In this episode, Dev explains how he learned to be vulnerable as a CEO and galvanize the workforce to reset company goals and ultimately create the community-driven database that MongoDB is today.

Daniel Schreiber is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lemonade, the AI-powered insurance company with a commitment to making a positive social impact, that has risen to the top of the industry in less than five years. Founded in 2015, Daniel and his Co-founder, Shai Wininger set out to change the way we use insurance and instead present it as a 100% digital community resource meant to help those in their hour of need. With its Giveback program, successful 2020 IPO, and more than one million active users, Lemonade is paving the way for the future of insurance on a global scale. In this episode, Daniel talks about what makes a great founder and CEO, the importance of resilience in the tech industry, and more. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.

This is a crossover episode between Founder Real Talk and Evolving for the Next Billion and is co-hosted by GGV Managing Partners, Glenn Solomon and Hans Tung.Josh Silverman has been the CEO of Etsy since 2017. Etsy is an innovative online marketplace that connects millions of creative sellers and buyers around the world. Etsy’s mission is to“keep commerce human” and it’s become the global destination for unique and creative goods. The company has 3.1 million active sellers and 60.3 million active buyers from nearly every country. In 2019, 40% of Etsy sellers were located outside the US, 83% of sellers were women.Josh has two decades of leadership experience including growing consumer technology companies and scaling global marketplaces. Before Etsy, he served as president of consumer products and services at AMEX, CEO of Skype, and CEO of Shopping.com. He has also held various executive roles at eBay. Earlier in his career, Josh co-founded Evite, where he also served as the company's first CEO until its

The Founder Real Talk Israeli Entrepreneur Series is back with a fifth episode. These episodes are dedicated to getting to know Israeli founders and their companies. Known as Startup Nation, Israel creates more companies per capita than any other country, with one startup for every 1,400 people. Read more about GGV’s commitment to funding and supporting the next generation of Israeli entrepreneurs: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/next-tech-wave-israel-global-company-creation-glenn-solomon/. This series is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.Oren Kaniel is the Co-founder & CEO of AppsFlyer, the global attribution leader, trusted by more than 12,000 brands including Coca Cola, HBO, Walmart, Ebay and the list goes on. Oren founded AppsFlyer in 2011 to solve one of the major problems in the mobile apps market – mobile campaign analytics and attribution. Oren talks about his journey and what he is focused on as AppsFlyer has become one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies today.

Susan St. Ledger is the President of Worldwide Field Operations at Splunk, where she built a SaaS, multi-product go-to-market organization and helped grow the business from nearly $700 million in revenue to almost $2.5 billion today. Susan recently announced her departure from Splunk and shared the exciting news that she will join Okta as President of Worldwide Field Operations shortly. In this episode, Susan shares her insights on making career pivots, the importance of mentorship and sponsorship, and adopting a growth mindset in any career.

This is the fourth episode in our early stage series, a group of episodes that highlights younger companies to examine the issues and challenges these businesses uniquely face. Avi Shua is Co-founder and CEO of Orca Security, the cloud security company from Tel Aviv known for its proprietary SideScanning™ technology. After spending eight years in the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces), Avi worked at Check Point for over a decade before co-founding Orca in 2018. This episode covers Avi’s story, Orca’s meteoric rise and what sets them apart in the world of cloud security. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Investor, Oren Yunger.

Karthik Rau co-founded and served as CEO of SignalFX from inception in 2013 all the way through the company’s $1.05 billion acquisition by Splunk in 2019. Karthik is presently Vice President of Observability at Splunk and oversees the cross-functional strategy and execution of Splunk's application management, monitoring and observability efforts. SignalFx was founded to help operators of modern distributed applications perform real-time cloud monitoring and observability. Given Karthik’s position at SignalFX and now Splunk, this episode covers the transition to cloud, devops, modern application development and more.

This is the third episode in our early stage series, a group of episodes that highlights younger companies to examine the issues and challenges these businesses uniquely face. Barr Moses is the Co-founder & CEO of Monte Carlo, a company on a mission to accelerate the world’s adoption of data by improving data reliability and reducing data downtime. Prior to founding Monte Carlo, Barr built the customer data and analytics team at Gainsight, where she helped grow the company 10x in revenue. From a silent retreat to building a robust community of data leaders, Barr is setting an impressive example for aspiring founders. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.

This is the second episode in our early stage series, a group of episodes that highlights younger companies to examine the issues and challenges these businesses uniquely face. Streamlit is an open source product that has become extremely popular with data science teams growing to over 10,000 GitHub stars since launch in late 2019. Streamlit’s founders, Adrien, Amanda and Thiago, previously worked together at Google X. One thing led to another and now they’re back together empowering data scientists and machine learning engineers to create beautiful, performant apps quickly and easily. Streamlit is gaining traction fast and this conversation is a testament to the passion of the people behind it.

This episode kicks off our early stage series, a group of episodes that highlights younger companies to examine the issues and challenges these businesses uniquely face. Mike Fitzsimmons is the Co-founder and CEO of Crosschq, a SaaS company that has pioneered a new category for talent acquisition called “Human intelligence hiring.” Seeing as 40% of hires don’t make it through a year in their new job, Crosschq is solving a critical mis-hire problem by helping companies’ better source, match, and retain the best talent. In this episode, Mike discusses the importance of building a great product, the challenges of creating a brand new category, how to acquire early customers, and what to consider when fundraising.

Kris Beevers is the Co-founder and CEO of NS1, the leader in modern application and access networking. Kris is a recognized authority on global application delivery and DNS. He joins the show from his new, aptly named boat, Social Distance. Early on, when he was in the process of choosing his co-founders, Kris sought out people who he had a strong and respectful personal relationship with. As the business has grown, the roles of the leadership team have morphed, changed, and become better defined. Now as CEO, Kris considers his job to be hiring great people and letting them run. One thing he wishes he knew during his series A fundraise was that most investors are more interested in investing in the team rather than the product. They want to know you have a great team that will hustle for success. Glenn and Kris also discuss the important impact hiring a COO had on the business and Kris recommends hyper-communication and swift decision making as tools for success during these times.

Armon Dadgar is the Co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, a commercial open source company that provides the fundamental building blocks around infrastructure and automation that developers need to create scalable, secure, high-performance applications hosted in the cloud. Valued at over $5 billion and now with over 1,000 employees worldwide, HashiCorp started out life in 2010 as an open source project and since grown into the defacto standard for modern cloud-computing development. In this episode, which was recorded live at GGV’s annual Evolving Enterprise conference, we learn how Armon and his Co-founder, Mitchell Hashimoto, initially met, what it took to sell to the enterprise and how to hire the right people as a distributed company.

Mitchell Hashimoto is the Co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, the leader in multi-cloud infrastructure automation software. In this episode, which was recorded during a GGV live webinar, we learn how Mitchell and his cofounder, Armon Dadgar, built HashiCorp into a 1000-person company valued at over $5B—all with a very distributed team since day one. For companies suddenly managing remote workforces, or for startups just beginning the journey toward growth, how can you scale and succeed far into the future with a fully distributed team? HashiCorp’s experiences scaling into a global enterprise software powerhouse without opening the usual array of offices are especially valuable today, now that so many companies have gone remote almost overnight.

This is the fourth episode in the Founder Real Talk Israeli Entrepreneur Series, a group of episodes dedicated to getting to know Israeli founders and their companies. Known as Startup Nation, Israel creates more companies per capita than any other country, with one startup for every 1,400 people. Read more about GGV’s commitment to funding and supporting the next generation of Israeli entrepreneurs. This series is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger. Netanel (Nati) Davidi and Uri Alter are two of the Co-founders of VDOO, the only automated device security solution that is integrated across the entire product lifecycle, and a GGV portfolio company. Nati and Uri have had quite the journey together. They first met in the Israeli military service in 1999 and went on to co-found Cyvera, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2014. Their mission didn’t stop there. In 2017, with co-founder Asaf Karas, they started VDOO, a company born out of one of the biggest shortfalls of IOT. In this episode, we