Office Hours with Spencer Rascoff

My friend, serial entrepreneur and legendary real estate coach, Tom Ferry, shares his career trajectory from sales to coaching phenom, the single biggest pitfall for work performance and his take on California’s business climate.

Chris Webb rejected attending college in favor of diving into a finance career at eighteen years old. Now, he’s the CEO and co-founder of ChowNow, an app and online ordering system for restaurants that doesn't charge the onerous fees required of other delivery services. Hear Chris share how his education steeped in Wall Street and his mother’s surprise restaurant investment came together to ultimately inspire ChowNow.

Shoeboxes full of invoices and receipts ignited the idea of Service Titan for Ara Mahdessian, the company’s CEO and cofounder. An Armenian immigrant from Iran, Ara came to the U.S. with his family as a young boy. He watched his parents assimilate to their new country while toiling into late hours of the night in order to give their family a good life. Their hard work paid off. Ara attended Stanford where he studied software engineering. He and his cofounder, Vahe Kuzoyan, also a software engineer, applied their knowledge to create automated software for home and commercial service businesses like plumbing and electrical. This includes scheduling, dispatching, payroll, recording, payments, invoicing, etc. Hear why Ara feels having an engineering background makes him a better leader, what to look for in investment partners and the values he emphasizes at Service Titan to ensure a high-quality, supportive and productive company culture.

Before PayPal, there was Bill Point, a company cofounded in the late 90s by Keith Richman, now cofounder of Boosted Commerce, which buys top-rated companies on Amazon and other e-commerce ecosystems and helps take them to their next level. Hear how the arc of his serial entrepreneurship follows the trajectory of the internet, what Boosted looks for in their acquisitions and what Boosted offers their companies to help them grow.

As a self-taught teenage computer programmer in Brazil, Henrique Dubugras launched his first company, Pagar.me at age 16. After he sold it, Henrique was accepted and enrolled at Stanford, but dropped out early to follow his entrepreneurial instincts. This led him to co-found Brex with Pedro Franceschi, a business-to-business fintech unicorn disrupting the century old industry of banking small businesses.

Birds were the first dwellers Austin Allison, CEO and co-founder of Pacaso, served with his boyhood bird-house business. Now, with Pacaso, the serial entrepreneur aims to democratize second home ownership by enabling people to co-own an amazing second home --- for 1/8 the cost. Hear his take on what it meant to have his first company acquired, his number one tip on how to keep his crew focused and how to best navigate what seems like weekly iterations of the start-up environment.

If there’s one thing to be learned from CEO and co-founder of Health-Ade, Daina Trout, it’s to pay attention to the opportunity in front of you and be prepared to pivot. Hear how Health-Ade Kombucha evolved from a hair-loss remedy to a huge brand of healthy drinks, learn about Daina and Spencer’s philosophy around hiring and gain insightful learnings around fundraising.

Hear from GOAT cofounder and CEO Eddy Lu about big, public and most importantly, resolved founder fights, insight on when to know it’s time to pivot or quit, how GOAT differentiates itself from other sneaker e-commerce sites -- and one of GOAT’s early and clever growth hacks to convince consumers the company had more merch than they actually did.

The burgeoning Los Angeles start-up and tech scene led to the founding of dot.LA one year ago. Today, we hear from its CEO and Spencer’s cofounder, Sam Adams, on how its mission both celebrates and holds accountable the burgeoning Los Angeles tech and start-up scene, how it’s baked DEI into its mission -- and why LA is the place for entrepreneurs to dig roots.

Ynon Kreiz served on the board of Mattel before stepping in as CEO in 2018. Hear about how Mattel is leverage its massive brand portfolio across multiple platforms, from toys to films, how Mattel is working towards environmental sustainability and the priority Mattel places on DEI. Also, hear the answer to a burning UNO game question hotly debated in Spencer’s family.