Recruit Rockstars Podcast

You don’t find many attorneys running VC-backed tech startups. But here’s one. Jacob Babcock is Founder & CEO of NuCurrent, which recently raised another $11M. With over 100 patents, NuCurrent is the leading developer of high-efficiency wireless power solutions. They work closely with electronic device OEMs & integrators to determine the best implementation of wireless power for their product. Jacob’s timing couldn’t be better, as wireless is all the rage. With a team of 40 & growing, he’s raised capital from IU Ventures, Purple Arch Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, HBS Angels Chicago, and Independence Equity. In this 20-min conversation, Jacob reveals how he hires, including the importance of crafting a Scorecard for each position.  

Even if you don’t live in his hometown of Chicago, you should know Chris Gladwin. Because he’s a 6-time Founder… including at least one Unicorn. Chris is CEO & Co-Founder of Ocient, which has created the leading high-performance database & analytics platform for the world’s largest datasets. Ocient’s database handles datasets in the petabyte to exabyte range. It’s designed to hold quadrillions of rows of data, ingress at speeds of billions of rows per second, and compute results at rates of trillions of rows per second. To put that into perspective: Caltech researcher Roy Williams suggested that “all words ever spoken by human beings” could be stored in 5 exabytes of data. To scale Ocient, Chris raised venture capital from OCA Ventures & In-Q-Tel. He also serves as Co Chair of P33, the ambitious initiative to boost Chicago’s tech economy. Prior, he founded Cleversafe, the object storage software & systems developer which IBM acquired for $1.3 billion. In this 20-minute conversation, Chris reveals how he hires Rockstars, what he looks for, and why he does it.  

Your luck is about to change. And after 2020, we could all use some of that. But it doesn’t just happen… You need to make it happen. Even the most successful business leaders will tell you that luck & serendipity played a huge role in their ride. Warren Buffett famously said that much of his success is due to winning the lottery of being born in the United States at the right time in its evolution. So how do you change your luck? I wanted to find the answers from an expert. Christian Busch is author of the fascinating new book The Serendipity Mindset: The Art & Science of Creating Good Luck Christian is a brilliant guy. He’s Director of NYU’s Global Economy Program where he teaches purpose-driven leadership, entrepreneurship, and (social) innovation He’s also visiting professor at London School of Economics. In this 20-minute conversation, Christian reveals how to change your luck in 2021.  

Humble. Soft-spoken. Not your typical tech CEO. That’s Mike Gamson, CEO of Relativity and one of Chicago’s most seasoned tech executives & investors. Relativity’s software helps users organize data, discover the truth, and act on it. Its e-discovery platform is used by thousands of organizations to manage large volumes of data and quickly identify key issues during litigation, internal investigations, and compliance projects. Relativity has over 180,000 users in 40 countries including the U.S. Department of Justice and 75 of the Fortune 100 companies. Its investors include ICONIQ Capital. Mike knows a thing or two about scaling teams: In his former role at LinkedIn, he oversaw LinkedIn’s Global Solutions Organization. Mike led a salesforce that grew from a handful of people to more than 5,000 employees in 36 cities, generating more than $6 billion in revenue. In this 20-minute conversation, Mike reveals what he looks for in a Rockstar and how he scales companies by putting people first.  

Talk about a rocketship… Fishtown Analytics, named for Philly’s hip namesake neighborhood, started this year with 16 employees. Next year, it’ll have over 100. I wanted to find out how CEO Tristan Handy is doing it. He Co-Founded Fishtown, which created the open-source data engineering platform named dbt (“data build tool”) that’s used by thousands of data analysts & engineers. dbt enables the modern analytics workflow by organizing, cleansing, and aggregating data so that it’s ready for analysis. It’s a big vision. So, it’s backed by tens of millions in Venture Capital by Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Amplify Partners. In this 20-minute conversation, Tristan reveals how he’s scaling the team 6x this year. And how you can do the same.

Here’s the perfectly-named & ideally-timed company of 2020: Remote. Its CEO & Co-Founder, Job van der Voort, is based in Portugal. And he just raised $35M in Venture Capital so that You can hire the best people remotely in just an hour… Even across the globe. The pandemic has been rough on the work world. But the silver lining: you’re no longer limited to hiring the best people in your town. Now you can hire the best from the world. This opens up a new chapter in hiring. But if you’re going to do it, you need to abide by the rules & regulations of the states & countries of your new hire. And that can be super complex. But it doesn’t need to be. Job’s company Remote handles everything … Payroll, benefits, compliance when you hire internationally. (You don’t need to be an expert on Liechtenstein’s labor laws.) Before starting Remote, Job was VP Product for GitLab a distributed company… so he’s been doing this for long before the pandemic. His investors include Sequoia Capital, Two Sigma Ventures, Index Ventures, General Catalyst In this 20-minute conversation, Job reveals how he’s scaled his own team. And how he can help scale yours. Even in Liechtenstein.  

Hopefully you haven’t had to deal with it. I’m talking about employee ethics breaches. Not fun. But unfortunately, one day you will. So I tracked down J Rollins, CEO & Founder of Ethix360, to take a look. Based in Charlotte NC, its software manages employee ethics issues, breaches, and compliance. Clients include global leaders in insurance, package delivery, retail, tech, and energy. J is a veteran CEO who’s worked in startups & large companies alike. He’s an expert on the topic. And in this 20-minute conversation, he shares how he’s successfully scaled his team.

During 2020, the majority of companies began working remotely or virtually. But Evan Walden, CEO of Getro, was one step ahead. Because he’s been doing it since before we’d heard the word Covid. Based in NYC, but with a widely distributed team, Getro help companies & talent do work that matters. They match the two together, by creating talent networks for VC firms, PE firms, and Accelerators. Getro itself successfully completed the Techstars program. In this 20-minute conversation, Evan shares the keys to leading a team across time zones. And the gotchas that can hold you back.  

Startup Grind is the legendary community of 600 Chapters in 125 countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. Since 2012, it has hosted 10,000 events for over 250,000 entrepreneurs. And I just had the chance to interview its Founder Derek Andersen, based in Silicon Valley. He’s spent the past 10 years building communities. Derek is also co-founder & CEO of Bevy, the Customer-to-Customer SaaS platform that helps Salesforce, Atlassian, and Slack scale their event communities. His investors include Accel & Upfront Ventures. So he knows a thing or two about building communities, scaling startups, and hiring Rockstars. In this 20-minute conversation, we cover all three.