Show Notes
I didn’t think Parker Conrad would get up off the mat when he got ousted from his previous startup, Zenefits. No one in Silicon Valley did. Instead, Parker let his rage propel him into an all-consuming mission to prove the haters wrong and build Rippling, a $17 billion juggernaut that blows his prior success out of the water. Parker has advice for founders: from productively harnessing the chip on your shoulder, to maintaining fast operational velocity to why you need founder-minded people on your team instead of manager-minded people—even among your managers. And yes, he spills the dirt on Deel.
Parker is one of the new greats who is tearing up the old CEO rulebook and writing his own.
- Brian Halligan, Sequoia Capital
More from Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
Luca Ferrari is co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, a serial acquirer of AOL, Vimeo and Evernote, Airtable, etc, that buys to hold forever, and whose only real edge is that it operates software companies better than almost anyone else.
Ali Ghodsi never wanted the CEO job. In 2015, Databricks had a wildly successful open source project, $1.5 million in revenue, and a board quietly interviewing other candidates behind his back. He got the seat as a trial run. They didn't even give him a CEO salary. When I had Ben Horowitz on this podcast and asked him who the best CEO in Silicon Valley is outside his own portfolio, he didn't hesitate. He said Ali.
I had Kareem Amin all wrong. When Clay first crossed my radar, I thought he was too laid-back: no chip on his shoulder, not the hungry founder I expected to win. Clay has since exploded.
Tarek Mansour calls himself a paranoid risk manager - the guy who can list 20 ways a hot air balloon will go down before it leaves the ground. Then he bet his entire company on suing its own regulator.
David Senra has spent a decade reading the biographies of 400+ founders for his podcast Founders - and lately he's started interviewing the living ones face to face. He joins me to share what all of them actually have in common, and it isn't what Silicon Valley thinks.