Guest: Giancarlo “GC” Lionetti, CRO of Zapier

“I live in a constant state of paranoia,” says Zapier CRO Giancarlo “GC” Lionetti, “which I guess is healthy and unhealthy.” A lifelong hard worker who shows up early and stays late, GC could have kept his job at team collaboration company Atlassian, which he joined before the company even offered stock options to employees. But his hunger for new experiences — and desire to learn things about new disciplines, like sales — took him away to unexpected new roles at Dropbox, Confluent and now Zapier. “If you asked me in every single experience what my next experience was gonna be ... I wouldn’t have guessed the one that I ended up doing,” he says.

In this episode, GC and Joubin discuss in-person retreats, the problem with “hybrid” cultures, in-office perks, dyslexia and ChatGPT, Atlassian as a “mini-MBA,” re-directing energy to find happiness, self-service businesses, “fitting the mold,” the space for meetings, and dinner at home with the kids.

In this episode, we cover:

• The Grit tip jar and being an “anti-remote” person at a fully remote company (00:47)
• How GC compensates for not being able to walk & talk around the office (06:13)
• The dying art of being early, and GC’s brand of hard work (09:03)
• His father’s exhausting work life, and his first summer job (16:18)
• Is GC a “pusher” or a “puller,” and some crucial advice from Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar (21:15)
• What he thought in the early days of Atlassian’s ride to the top (27:48)
• What Zapier does and how it has helped GC and his wife as parents (31:29)
• “It was hard to take advice, because nobody understood this world” (34:25)
• Why did GC leave Atlassian for Dropbox? (38:04)
• Passing on paranoia, and is balance required for happiness? (41:16)
• Marketing vs. sales, and the danger of re-running the same playbook in different companies (48:46)
• Fitting into a box, and learning from people with different backgrounds (56:28)
• Why GC doesn’t like traveling very much, and  the place of meetings in Zapier’s GTM organization (01:01:09)
• Separating the “church and state” of work and personal life (01:07:38)

Links:

• Connect with GC
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
• Connect with Joubin
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com 
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm