If you were to go back at some point in your career to being an exec instead of a CEO, in what ways do you think you would behave differently or operate differently having been in the CEO seat? I think it gets back to that first statement. It's maybe a popular word these days is empathy, but just having an understanding of the number of demands and the breadth of things that you have to consider in this role. If anything, it's probably knowing that there's things going on that you probably don't have visibility into that may be driving the behavior of the CEO.
Today’s episode is with Eric Berg, CEO of Fauna, which is an adaptive operational database platform. In joining Fauna as its CEO in the summer of 2020, he brought a wealth of experience as a product leader. Most recently, he was the Chief Product Officer at Okta, scaling the company from 10 employees and zero customers to its eventual IPO in 2017. He started his career in product at Intel, working under the legendary Andy Grove, as well as a five-year stint as a product leader at Microsoft.
In today’s conversation, he opens up his executive playbook as he weaves together each of those experiences — and covers a lot of ground along the way. He starts by talking about early go-to-market lessons and the keys to honing in on an ICP to get Okta off the ground. He also dives into the often-maligned “messy middle,” particularly when it comes to moving upmarket and developing a pricing and packaging model that, when done well, takes a company to new heights.
We then switch gears and discuss more broadly about team building and company building — particularly the cultural lessons that stick with him from his tenure at each stop in his career. His biggest learnings include hiring folks up and down the org chart with the right ego to talent ratio and the tactical steps he takes to implement a “disagree and commit’ value so it’s not just a long-forgotten team motto. Finally, we touch on the biggest surprises as he approaches one year of sitting in the CEO seat.
Today’s conversation is a must-listen particularly for product folks, as well as others who want to more deeply understand the trade-offs that nearly every great company faces on the path to scale.
You can follow Eric on Twitter at @ericberg.
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