Billion Dollar Tech

"You probably can't overemphasize the importance of your co-founder relationship," says Noah Abelson-Gertler, founder coach and former public company CEO, explaining that 50% of startups and scaleups that fail do so due to co-founder relationships. Co-founders have an intimacy that is like marriage without the romance—you experience highs and lows, make major decisions together, you're dependent on each other, and can ...

"We're emotional beings that think, not thinking beings that feel," says Scott Walker, leadership coach, former Scotland Yard detective and one of the world's most experienced kidnap for ransom negotiators. Scott joins the podcast today to share what engaging in covert counterterrorism and kidnapping operations has taught him about communicating in life and in the corporate world. The process, Scott explains, is a matt...

"We started to feel like there was something bigger here, that this could be transformational," says Jason Radisson, co-founder and CEO of Sh1ft, which brings push button technology to blue collar and middle class work, and is transforming HR in the B2B spaces by implementing gig economy-style automation and efficiency. Sh1ft promises to eliminate 80 to 90 percent of a traditional HR employee's role by resolving issues...

"What if we could do it better than anyone else in the ecosystem?" Nathan McCauley asked himself while co-founding Anchorage Digital, a unicorn assets platform that provides instantly settled key storage and custody—holding investments on behalf of investors—for digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Before starting this venture, he worked at financial services platform Square, where he performed what he called "fin...

New York Times bestselling author Jonah Berger's cutting-edge research reveals how six types of words can increase your impact in every area of life: from persuading others and building stronger relationships, to boosting creativity and motivating teams. He labels them SPEACC ("speak," phonetically), and they are crucial to understanding if one wants to be a more effective and charismatic speaker. Meanwhile, Jonah expl...

"What drives me is the mission," says Tony Jamous, founder and CEO of Oyster HR, a business that, as Brendan puts it, is "stewarding the remote work revolution." Oyster, Tony's second unicorn company, works to allow businesses to hire anyone from around the world without restriction. With their needs fulfilled, companies can then focus on their growth. This starts with everyone establishing their mission, collectively ...

"I had one job, which was to get the data right. Why was that so freaking hard?" asked Barr Moses, co-founder and CEO of Monte Carlo, the world's first data observability platform, discussing what motivated her to create the product. Having worked with data for 15 years, she realized so many people across the industry couldn't seem to get it right, nor did they have a systematic, scalable way to make sure data was accu...

"Harness builds software for teams that build software," says Scott Sanchez, CMO of Harness. Scott and his team recognize that software developers at larger companies spend an increasing amount of time doing everything but coding. Harness provides a series of end to end products which ensure that that coding is high quality and delivered quickly and securely. He explains the importance of positioning and individuating ...

"We knew we wanted to address the pain of remote work," said Marcelo Lebre of the goal he and Job van der Voort shared when the two founded Remote.com in 2019. As it turns out, it was a worldwide pain. There were countless freelancers who were waiting to be matched with opportunities and vice versa. Remote.com scaled the problem on a global level so that the right talent could be pooled from anywhere...

"Too many founders have solutions, and are looking for problems," says Brendan on this solo episode of Billion Dollar Tech. Today Brendan goes over the five key takeaways from his conversation with Trisha Kotari founder and CEO of Unit 21. Trisha cold called over 300 potential buyers and spoke to 100 before getting an RFP from Ebay. The advice she returned to throughout the episode was the importan...

"Fundraising is mostly about failing. Success is really the wartime," says Trisha Kotari, founder and CEO of Unit 21, a risk and compliance infrastructure which helps companies and financial institutions combat fraud. In 2019, she started the business from scratch, cold calling potential investors and raising seed. She discusses the way she differentiated herself from a saturated market, and convince...

"It's just like being in a relationship," says Brendan on this solo episode of Billion Dollar Tech. Today, he discusses what happens to a lot of startups when they bring in an outside expert or salesperson to help them scale, but the outside party through laziness or even with the best intentions fails to get the business past the growth stage. He lists five things most founders skip at the beginning...

"I think, if you're doing business right, you're evolving every two or three years," says Bryan Clayton Co-Founder and CEO of GreenPal, an app that works like an Uber for lawn services, which bootstrapped $30 million. And that includes growing alongside your customer. The early days of GreenPal were spent putting brochures on door handles around Nashville until they eventually grew into a nationwide ...

"Most startups don't fail outright, they fail to gain meaningful traction," says Brendan on this solo episode of Billion Dollar Tech. He gets more specific with five reasons that contribute to the failure. The first reason is one that he has discussed many times, which is that companies go too wide at the start, and fail to specifically define their service and why it's necessary to their target audi...

"You have to be really agile and flexible, but also really stubborn about the problems you're going to solve," says Alan Chiu, co-founder of Boba and its contributing company Enya.ai, about the dual attributes successful founders must possess. Blockchain technology, similarly, is a balance of traits. On one hand, it  offers a number of opportunities. The open source format and permissionless entree a...

"It comes back to communication," says Brendan on this solo episode of Billion Dollar Tech, where he unpacks the five key takeaways from his recent interview with Iggy Bassi, founder and CEO of Cervest. Iggy founded this data platform, which recently raised 37 million in total funding, first and foremost by articulating his vision specifically, and Brendan expands on the importance of this. He also t...

"I want to spend my time solving problems," says Iggy Bassi, founder and CEO of Cervest, a platform that uses climate data, science expertise and data modeling to help companies predict their climate risk. It measures the potential damage a company's assets, like buildings, factories and property, could suffer from their surrounding weather conditions, and the  potential resulting financial loss. Wit...

"In a world where there's so much overwhelming noise, you've got to be specific," says Brendan in this solo episode of Billion Dollar Tech. This pertains to everything, from the benefit you're providing to how you're helping, to the language you're using, even the difference between your impression of what you're selling versus how other people view it. Too many people try to target multiple personas...

In this solo episode of Billion Dollar Tech, Brendan breaks down the highlights from his interview with Guy Tytunovich, founder of go to market security company Cheq.ai. Guy founded a unicorn company, and part of this discussion will focus on the unique challenges and considerations of this particular scenario. 

Much of the advice is invaluable to all entreprene...