Between Two COO's with Michael Koenig

Holger Seim, co-founder, and CEO of Blinkist, speaks with Michael about how Blinkist emerged out of shifting consumption patterns, where the company may be headed in the future, and how to stay true to your long-term strategic vision while also incorporating the thoughts and ideas of other stakeholders. 

With an entrepreneurial spirit that emerged during his childhood in Germany, Holger’s journey has been guided by his unsatiated lo...

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 acknowledges and respects different cultures.  

A citizen of the globe, having spent time living in several countries outside his home c...

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 team,  how to approach each initiative with a Plan, Brief, Execute, and Debrief mentality, reverse engineering processes, and of course,...

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 focus on a co-creating mentality when approaching its workforce.   

Cathy is a strategic people leader, with an exceptional track record o...

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 challenges of raising VC capital as a woman and as a social impact co., and what it's like to pitch President Obama & being on th...

Jenny Lawton is the EVP at Bolster,  an on-demand executive talent marketplace that helps accelerate companies’ growth by connecting them with experienced, highly vetted executives for interim, fractional, advisory, project-based, or board roles. Prior to Bolster, Jenny served in a variety of C-Suite roles which include her time as the Chief Strategy Officer and then CEO of MakerBot, the leader in desktop 3D printing technology tha...

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 not on vision or mission; adding independent board members; deploying $100MMs in funding; the move from hiring generalists to speciali...

GoGuardian COO, Cyrus Mistry, spent 14 years at Google as the Director of Product Management for Chromebooks bringing computers to schools, before joining GoGuardian as COO right when they raised $200M in new funding from Tiger Global Management. Cyrus has a wealth of knowledge not only stemming from his four advanced degrees but also from his operating experience at Disney prior to Google. Have a listen to hear about his story and...

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 transformation, how COO is the most interesting job in the world, launching new products, what healthy friction looks like, how great operation...

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, integrating acquisitions remotely during covid, the impact of politics, and systems thinking.

Prior to Uplight, Angela was Chief S...

Ken Weary is the COO of Hotjar and joins to chat on running a fully remote 220 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, the impact of remote on the great resignation, and bringing the Houses from Harry Potter to the workplace.

Hotjar, is a European headquartered start-u...

Steve Taylor is an operating executive with experience building high-performing teams and scaling high-growth, category-defining companies. After spending the early part of his career flying E-2C Hawkeyes in the US Navy, he received a Masters of Policy Management from Georgetown University and spent five years as a management consultant. Steve joined Lyft in 2015 with just 220 employees, led two of the company's largest territo...

Joe is Founder & CEO of ExecThread, a VC-backed crowdsourcing platform and premium job-sharing network that enables professionals to access the “hidden job market”. ExecThread is the largest global aggregator of unpublished executive-level job opportunities.

Joe has been a successful start-up CEO and operating executive at high-growth tech companies including HopStop (acquired by Apple), Quigo (acquired by AOL) and eBay (EBAY) w...

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 plane while it's flying, making the implicit explicit, and evolution by design.

Nathaniel has a long career of founding and leading compa...

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 COO, and believing in wet paint.

Prior to co-founding Hatch, Dave was the CTO of BabyCenter, where he was responsible for software eng...

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" creates, and going from growth to survival mode and back again.

Valerie kicked off her career in the early days of the intern...

Catherine Stewart is the former Chief Operating Officer at Shippo and Chief Business Officer at Automattic (WordPress),  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 revenue generation and e-commerce through the acquisition of WooCommerce, the shift from Facebook to Automattic, b...

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-billion dollar company. Grafana Labs is the company behind the lead open source observability platform, Grafana, used by the likes of Sales...

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 70 to 400 net new employees in a mere 18 months. Grafana Labs is the company behind the lead open source observability platform, Grafan...