Who Got Me Here

Jeff Epstein is an Operating Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, a global firm with $4 billion under management that invests in early-stage and hyper-growth startups, partnering closely with entrepreneurs to build durable businesses including innovative companies like Pinterest, Twilio, Box, LinkedIn, Shopify, Yelp, and Skype. Formerly, Jeff was the executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Oracle, one of the world’...

Magdalena Yesil was the first investor and founding board member at Salesforce, a company that now has a $200 billion market cap. She is the Founder of Broadway Angles and serves on the SoFi, Smartsheet, and Zuora board. In a conversation with Annie, Magdalena shares her experience breaking into Silicon Valley, including stories about how Steve Jobs and Marc Benioff shaped her career. She describes how persistence and resilience le...

Nick Mehta is the CEO at Gainsight, a company with 1,200+ global employees and 20k growing customers. Their mission is to be living proof that you can win in business while being human first. 99% of the reviewers on Glassdoor approve of their CEO. So what’s Nick’s secret to success? In a conversation with Annie, Nick talks about breaking into the customer success industry, standing out through the details, utilizing LinkedIn as a c...

Kicking off a job search can feel overwhelming. It takes motivation to put yourself out there, and it’s emotionally draining when you don’t know where to go next. The good news is there are simple techniques to surface new opportunities and set yourself apart from all the other applicants. Who Got Me Here is a podcast about connections, career building, and relationships. In this episode, Annie and Jamie will share advice on tappin...

April Underwood is the former Chief Product Officer at Slack. She was early at Twitter and made great friends at Google. As she describes in the podcast, the collection of people from companies A, B, and C is the foundation of one's network. April picked companies where she loved the product and knew these were people (Stewart Butterfield, Dick Costolo) she'd love building with. At this point in her career, April is an early-stage ...

Pejman is the co-founder and managing director of Pear VC, one of the most successful investment firms in Silicon Valley. Over the past two decades, he has been a seed investor in some of the most iconic tech companies including Doordash, Dropbox, Applovin, Gusto, and many more. An Iranian immigrant, Pejman took an unconventional career path, building up his network while working as a rug salesman in Palo Alto. Hear him share incre...

Bob Metcalfe, the godfather of ethernet and namesake of Metcalfe’s Law, knows a bit about networking. His perspective on how connected nodes come together to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts is well-earned after a 50+ year career stretching back to the salad days of Xerox PARC. Hear Bob offer timeless advice on building relationships, making connections, and the value of helping others succeed.

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“I was late to this, ...

As Global Head of Recruiting at Notion, Kate has an interesting vantage point on tech career journeys. But her own path is a powerful example of how growth is a jungle gym, not a ladder. Kate launched her career with a cold email to Marc Benioff (at a point when Salesforce had 4,000 employees!) and spent years in sales roles at Salesforce, Dropbox, and Notion, where she rose to become Head of SMB revenue before making a leap into p...

Veere has been recognized numerous times as one of the top interior designers in the world by leading magazines and tastemakers. At the helm of his eponymous firm, Veere has designed interiors across the globe and seen his own homes featured in World of Interiors and Architectural Digest and Vouge, among others. Veere built his career slowly but organically, combining a relentless drive to follow his passions with a strong work eth...

Michael Jaconi is the CEO of Button, with a long career including executive roles at Rakuten and a stint as a presidential campaign aide to John McCain. Authentic, meaningful relationships have been a throughline across his expansive career—and he offers a load of helpful tips on how to build them. Check out this episode for nuggets including the best jobs to get out of college, the three strongest paths to connecting with a VC, an...

Molly Graham  is a technology executive, advisor, and board member whose resume includes helping both Google and Facebook navigate periods of intense scaling, serving as COO of Lambda School, leading operations at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and more. Molly credits relationships for opening doors and catapulting her career forward. Her story is packed with lessons on the outsized power of being a friend, how curiosity can forge...

As a 2x CEO with a $640 million exit and early investments in unicorns AppLovin and Chime on his resume, relationships have been essential to Tod’s success. But for him, “networking” isn’t the right word to describe his strategy. It’s all about genuine, meaningful connections, built by bringing people together around shared interests and passions. Our conversation with Tod was packed with insights about the value of being a host, w...