focal podcast
Pivotal early lessons of today's best startups. Welcome to the focal podcast where we go deep with some of today's best founders and operators on ONE crucial lessons from their early days. This podcast is not the usual "highlight reel" startup podcast that goes one inch deep across 20+ topics. Rather, we ask the questions you’d ask if you were sitting across from them. No fluff, just the real, actionable insights you’d get if these founders were mentoring you 1on1. We cover topics including: - What worked and why. - Costly mistakes and how they fixed them. - Frameworks that truly made a difference. - Tactics to move faster. - What they wish they’d known sooner. - And much more! "Only a fool learns from their own mistakes. The wise learn from the mistakes of others."
Episodes
Don Muir turned down his dream job at Apollo to build the AI-powered bank Arc.
This episode goes through the exact playbook the former BCG consultant and private equity investor used to de-risk his leap into entrepreneurship - including his 3-point checklist that allowed him to say no to Apollo. Don shares hard-won lessons about finding product-market fit, recruiting world-class talent, and why it took 190 rejections to get...
In this episode, we dive deep into startup sales hiring with Anis Bennaceur, a masterful talent scout who's cracked the code on building exceptional early-stage teams. You'll discover why most founders hire wrong, how to spot founder-DNA in candidates, and the brutal interview techniques that filter out B-players before they contaminate your culture.
Anis Bennaceur is the co-founder and CEO of Attention, a startup building ...
Most founders get sales rep productivity wrong - and it kills their growth.
If you’re thinking about hiring your first sellers - or wondering why the ones you hired are struggling to hit their numbers - this one is for you!
In this week’s focal podcast, I unpack in detail how to build a repeatable sales playbook that actually works with Russ Thau who drops the sales productivity formula he used to scale multiple companies pa...
What got you here won't get you there - the brutal truth about scaling from $1M to $50M in revenue.
If you keep doing what you were doing to get to $1M ARR, you won’t get to $3M ARR. What got you to $3M won’t get you to $10M, what got you to $10M won’t get you to $20M, and so on. The hard truth about rocket ship startup growth is that you have to reinvent yourself at every major revenue milestone you reach. But unfortunatel...
How to nail partnerships from Day 1
Get insights into the counterintuitive playbook that defies conventional wisdom about when startups should pursue partnerships with Natasha Ratanshi-Stein, Founder and CEO Surfboard, who nailed partnerships as their main GTM channel almost from Day 1 and eventually generated 55% of revenue through partners.
Surfboard is a workforce management platform for customer service teams. After rai...
Most startups die between $1M-$10M ARR because they try to reinvent the wheel.
A lot is written about the $0 to $1M ARR journey. A lot less about the $1M to $10M journey - even though that’s where lots of promising companies die. Most of what it takes to get to $10M ARR follows established patterns. Yet, too many startups try to reinvent the wheel and die as a consequence.
In this episode, Guillaume Jacquet walks us through...
From cold LinkedIn DMs to nailing customer discovery and design partnerships to eventually raising $23M from Tier 1 venture firms.
Learn why most startups do customer discovery so poorly, why they fail at design partnerships and how Pocus CEO Alexa Grabell cracked the code by embracing skeptics over enthusiasts. Learn the counterintuitive approach that led to building a category-defining product in the crowded sales tech sp...
Mastering the pivot playbook after 14 months of chewing on glass.
Han Wang, Co-Founder and CEO of Mintlify, knows pivoting better than pretty much anyone. Mintlify pivoted 8 times during their first 14 months before finding Product-Market-Fit and eventually raising > $20M from a16z, Bain Capital Ventures, and YC.
While those 14 months felt like “chewing on glass”, Han learned a lot of valuable lessons he shared with me du...
Most founders waste months validating ideas with pats on the back instead of credit cards.
Our guest, Santiago Suárez Ordóñez reveals how he went from zero sales experience to closing over 100 customers by treating revenue—not compliments—as the only signal that matters. This episode breaks down the exact playbook for transitioning from "advice calls" to actual sales.
Santiago Suárez Ordóñez is the CEO and co-founder of Mome...
Austin Hughes is the co-founder and CEO of Unify GTM, a platform powering warm outbound for growth, marketing and sales teams. Previously, Austin was an early growth leader at Ramp, where he helped scale from a few hundred to over 12,000 customers in just two years. Unify GTM has raised over $30 million from investors including OpenAI, Thrive Capital, and Emergence Capital, as well as founders from Ramp, Flexport, Box, and...
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