i was a very technical ceo like i was, but still had commit access to the code base. The process of building an enterprise, a cyre cune company, was really an incredible one. I learned all kinds of lessons on hiring leadership. And then we made the consumer service free. We always kept it. Because all of the data we ended up building a security research team and a security lab. All the data from the free users, which wildly outnumbered the enterprise users, provided us a huge amount of data to do real security research and analysis.
This week, we have a special crossover episode from June 2021: Joel Beasley, host of the Modern CTO podcast, interviews a16z general partner David Ulevitch about David’s journey from working at an ISP and Dot Com company mp3.com in high school; to starting, running, and selling his own enterprise security company, OpenDNS; to becoming an investor at a16z. They also discuss the value of product marketing for enterprise, David’s philosophy around pricing enterprise products how to survive and lead through hard times, new trends in startup investing, and more.
This is part of our occasional series where we feature relevant episodes from like-minded shows on the a16z Podcast, to surface other shows you might be interested in. The Modern CTO podcast is by and for CTOs and other technical leaders at places like Microsoft, NASA, Reddit, Launch Darkly, and more, all sharing how to build strong companies and organizations. It’s hosted by Joel Beasley, CTO of Leaderbits and author of the book, The Modern CTO. Check out more episodes of this show wherever you get your podcast.
And for more on how to grow from a technical to product to Sales CEO, check out David’s previous episode on this podcast called “What Time Is It”.