Growth Investor with GrowthCap‘s RJ Lumba

In this episode we speak with Zack Rosen, the CEO and co-founder of Pantheon. We chat about how Zach’s curiosity and early experiences at the intersection of society and technology eventually led to building the leading WebOps (Website Operations) platform - one that empowers marketing and development teams to take control of their websites, while giving them the agility to win in the dynamic world of digital marketing. Pantheon powers over 300,000 sites and is trusted by thousands of marketing and development teams around the world. The company is backed by $100M of venture investment from Sageview Capital (Avalara, Demandbase), Scale Venture Partners (ExactTarget, Box, DocuSign, Bill.com), Foundry Group (SendGrid, Mapbox), as well as Baseline Ventures, First Round Capital, and Floodgate. We hope you enjoy the show

In this episode we speak with Aircall co-founder and CEO Olivier Pailhes. After a career in strategy consulting with BCG and corporate development with multinational company ArcelorMittal, Olivier embarked on an entrepreneurial journey. He co-founded Aircall, which was built to make phone systems as easy to manage as any other business workflow. He wanted to make it accessible, transparent, and collaborative. The company was founded in 2014, has raised over $100 million and has offices in New York, Paris, Madrid, Berlin and Sydney. At the time of the company’s founding, phone technology was not in vogue with investors, however the requisite tech infrastructure had just been developed to make improving phone systems a reality and Olivier jumped at the opportunity. We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode we speak with Mike Morini, a 30-year software veteran experienced in growing and scaling enterprise software companies. Mike is the CEO of WorkForce Software, a cloud-based labor management platform that empowers employees and managers to digitize time and labor processes, optimize demand-driven scheduling, simplify absence management and enable strategic business insight. When approached about joining WorkForce Software, Mike saw an opportunity for the company to scale globally and attack a $20 billion market. More importantly, he saw a path to becoming number one. We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode, we chat with Dr. Vipin Garg, the President and CEO of Altimmune, a biotech company pioneering the development of intranasal vaccines and therapeutics, including ones that can prevent the transmission of and treat COVID. He has more than three decades of experience in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries with a successful track record building and leading notable private and publicly traded companies. Dr. Garg was named a Top 25 Biotech CEO of 2021 by The Healthcare Technology Report.  He received his PhD in Biochemistry in 1982 from the University of Adelaide, Australia, and his Master of Science degree from IARI Nuclear Research. We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode, we speak with Sunil Thomas, the CEO and cofounder of CleverTap, which is the leading customer engagement and retention platform that helps brands maximize user lifetime value. Consumer brands around the world representing over 8,000 apps—including Vodafone, Star, Sony, Discovery, Fandango LATAM, Carousell, and Gojek—trust CleverTap to help them improve user engagement and retention thereby growing long term revenue. CleverTap is backed by leading venture capital firms including Sequoia India, Tiger Global Management, Accel, and Recruit Holdings, and operates out of San Francisco, Seattle, London, Singapore, and Mumbai. We chat with Sunil about how CleverTap is helping companies optimize the mobile experience for its users as well as his experience building the company. We hope you enjoy the show.

When it comes to growth equity, Jon Korngold, Global Head of Blackstone Growth, is as good as it gets. Perhaps he can be considered one of the few who sets today’s bar in the asset class. His rapid rise began at Goldman Sachs and General Atlantic, but maybe it began even earlier, maybe it began with a piece of advice his father gave him when he was growing up. Blackstone recently announced the final close of Blackstone Growth (BXG), its inaugural growth equity fund. BXG was oversubscribed and closed at its hard cap of $4.5 billion – with third-party capital commitments from a wide range of family offices, entrepreneurs, endowments, strategic institutional investors, pension funds, high-net-worth individuals, and other investors – making it the largest first-time growth equity private fund raised in history. We cover a lot of ground in our conversation from Blackstone Growth’s approach to growth equity to its unique platform capabilities to the importance of ESG. We hope you enjoy the show.

At over $100 million in annual recurring revenue, Amplitude has consistently scaled each year since its founding in 2012. The Company provides a product intelligence platform that enables businesses to optimize digital product innovation. It serves over 30,000 teams at companies like Walmart, Ford, Inbev, Atlassian, Microsoft, Twitter, Hubspot, and Procter & Gamble. Amplitude’s cerebral yet highly attuned founder and CEO, Spenser Skates, is largely to thank for the company’s rapid rise. He is not only a highly skilled entrepreneur, he is a global thinker and proactive leader stepping up in areas for the betterment of society. We cover a wide range of topics spanning Spenser’s source of inspiration, his early beginnings as an entrepreneur and his disciplined approach to consistent scaling. The company is backed by Benchmark, Battery, IVP, Sequoia and GIC. We hope you enjoy the show.

I’ve spoken to hundreds of private equity investors over the years, and after spending time with Nic, you can’t help but come away feeling that he would make for a great capital partner. Nic Humphries is the Senior Partner and Executive Chairman of Hg and Head of the Saturn fund. Hg, the leading european private equity firm focused on software and services, has over $30 billion under management and is supported by an investment team of over 140 people, plus a portfolio team of more than 35 operators. The firm is based in London, Munich and New York. Nic has led or co-led more than 30 investments over the last 27 years. He started his investing career in 1990 and has focused exclusively on technology and software since 1994. He joined Hg in 2001 as founder of the firm’s Technology Team. We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode, we chat with Peter Holt, the CEO of The Joint Chiropractic, the largest franchised network of Chiropractic clinics in the world with approximately 600 clinics system wide. The Joint is a publicly traded company on NASDAQ based in Scottsdale, AZ. Previously, Peter was President and Chief Executive Officer for Tasti D-Lite where he transformed the NYC based licensed outlets into a complete business format franchise system.. He has been active in the franchise community for more than 30 years, helping iconic companies such as Mail Boxes Etc. (now The UPS Store), Tasti D Lite and Planet Smoothie manage their franchise systems in both domestic and overseas markets. We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode, we chat with Matthew Safaii, the Founder and Managing Partner of Arrowroot Capital Management, a growth equity firm based in Marina Del Ray, California. The firm invests in growing and healthy, recurring revenue, software-as-a-service and internet-based businesses. Recently, Matthew launched Arrowroot Acquisition, a $250 million SPAC which focuses on enterprise software. Matthew was named a Top 25 Software Investor of 2020 by GrowthCap. He began his investing career at Platinum Equity and subsequently TA Associates in the Boston and London offices. He also served as a managing director and head of acquisitions at Actua. Matthew graduated from Boston College and holds an MBA from The Wharton School. We hope you enjoy the show.