Dani Grant is the co-founder and CEO of Jam.dev, a developer tool that allows for faster communication between product and engineering about bugs and fixes. While working at Cloudflare as a product manager, Dani and her eventual co-founder Mohd Irtefa dealt with frustrating debugging experiences first-hand, and came up with a product solution to help developers, engineers, designers and product managers can capture screenshots and development blocks in one click. Today, Jam has captured the hearts of huge clients like Unilever, Staples, T-Mobile, and Dell. Dani shares the importance of tracking user retention, iterating your way to total product market fit, and more.

Idan Tendler, Senior VP of Application Security at Palo Alto Networks and co-founder of Place-IL, shares his entrepreneurial journey. He reflects on lessons learned from past ventures, including navigating failures and achieving product-market fit. Idan discusses creating Checkov to make security enjoyable for developers and emphasizes community-building through open-source solutions. He also highlights his nonprofit work connecting immigrants to tech jobs in Israel, advocating for diversity in the industry.

Rich Waldron is the CEO and co-founder of Tray.io, a company he founded with his two best friends. This is the second time we're talking to Rich on Founder Real Talk, make sure to check out his episode from 2019! Software has been around for a long time, and in many different forms. On the waves of cloud adoption and digital transformation, it's more important than ever for companies to make technology accessible to their employees. Tray.io users in any department can use its automation platform to transform fragmented processes into powerful business outcomes. Rich talks about Tray's latest $40 million Series C extension, product and growth plans, and more.

Kishore Gopalakrishna, co-founder and CEO of StarTree, created a solution to a database problem with his co-worker and eventual co-founder Xiang Fu while working at LinkedIn. At the time, LinkedIn was debuting its now-popular feature called Who's Viewed Your Profile, which required the ability to slice and dice massive amounts of data in real time. Kishore and Xiang developed what they called Apache Pinot, a real-time distributed analytical processing data store used to deliver scalable real-time analytics with very low latency. The pair went on to found their open source company, StarTree, in 2019 to build a commercial version of Apache Pinot. The analytics provided by its technology are increasingly essential for all kinds of business decision makers, and the company's quickly emerged as a leader in serving up real-time user-facing analytics at very low latency—for millions. In this episode, Kishore talks about the solutions StarTree provides, its key relationship with the developer community and the roadmap for the company, which just announced a $47 million series B led by GGV, with participation from investor existing investors, Bain and CRV as well as new investor Sapphire Ventures.

Sid Sijbrandij is the CEO of GitLab Inc., the one DevOps platform that allows teams to collaborate, create, and deliver software in a single application. Before founding GitLab Inc. in 2012, he worked on recreational submarines and taught himself to code, going on to work at the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, where he did version control software around lawmaking. GitLab Inc. was founded on Sid’s love of programming and a desire to create an open-core company. Fully remote from day one, GitLab Inc. is one of the largest companies to operate this way, with more than 1,700 employees across 65 countries. In this episode, Sid talks about open source, his community, and company transparency, along with the GitLab Inc.’s recent IPO—and what it means for the future.

Nikita Shamgunov is the CEO of Neon, a new company building the next generation serverless Postgres database. Nikita got his PhD in St. Petersburg and worked as an engineer at Microsoft and Facebook before going on to co-found SingleStore, an analytical database company. At SingleStore, Nikita realized the massive size of the transaction databases market and the ubiquity of Postgres, the popular open-source database, all of which led him to found Neon. Neon separates the storage and compute functions to create a truly affordable and compelling cloud native Postgres. In this episode, Nikita talks to us about working with his co-founders Stas and Heikki, incubating Neon at Khosla Ventures (where Nikita is a partner), and the implications of separating compute and storage.

Ryan Johson is the co-founder and CEO of Culdesac, which is working to build the first car-free city in the United States. After turning down M.I.T. and dropping out of Harvard, he chose to learn from the executives at Opendoor before co-founding Culdesac in 2018. Ryan has traveled to over 60 countries, but after visiting pedestrian and cyclist-friendly cities like Budapest and Amsterdam, Ryan was inspired to create a new city from scratch. Culdesac's first neighborhood, Culdesac Tempe, is currently being built in Arizona. The neighborhood opens later this year and will have 1000 residents on 17 acres. Residents receive a suite of mobility benefits, including free access to light rail, street cars, and buses. In this episode, Ryan talks to us about building infrastructure from the ground up and how Culdesac provides people with life at their front door.

Bruce Felt is the CFO of Domo and a long-time friend of GGV Capital with a history that predates SaaS since he founded Renaissance Software in the late 1980s. With a well-rounded experience in finance, Bruce became the CFO for six companies, taking them through IPOs or M&As before bringing his expertise to the Domo team in 2014. Bruce faced his biggest challenge during his time as the CFO of SuccessFactors in 2007 during the financial crisis, and the company’s non-stop growth came to a grinding halt, share prices dropped, and cuts were made at the highest levels. Although SaaS was still new, Bruce convinced investors and analysts that SuccessFactors was poised to grow exponentially whenever the market was ready. He was right, and the company saw 10X growth over the next few quarters. Since joining Domo, Bruce has been able to pull from his playbook to successfully navigate the recent financial crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and is well-prepared for whatever may come next. Check out the chart on what a world-class financial organization should look like: https://bit.ly/3xYCvPe

Steve Harvey is the CEO of BitSight, the cyber security platform used by nearly a quarter of the Fortune 500 companies and multiple government agencies around the world. With a background in risk assessment, Steve spent 13 years at the Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and became the CEO of BitSight in 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic. Because so many businesses were forced to go digital and adopt the work-from-home model, cyber-attacks became more prevalent than ever. Steve certainly had his work cut out for him, but in two short years made multiple acquisitions and received a $250M investment from Moody’s. With over 2,400 customers, BitSight has quickly become the most widely used security ratings service in the world and is showing no signs of slowing down. GGV is an incredibly proud investor in BitSight, with our own Glenn Solomon sitting on the board since 2016. In this episode, Steve talks about removing disruption at the highest level and entering a well-established company at its tipping point.

Zeev Farbman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lightricks, which puts high-quality video and editing apps into the hands of average mobile phone users. Zeev immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union at the age of 12 and would go on to meet his future co-founders during his military service. He pursued a degree in computer science at the Hebrew University with the plan of becoming a tenured professor, but that quickly changed when Zeev and his new friends created their first app, Facetune, and founded Lightricks in 2013. While they set an initial goal of generating just $100,000 with their new app, Lightricks now has a $1.8B valuation. Facetune was released the same year the word “selfie” was added to the dictionary and became one of the most downloaded mobile apps almost overnight. Since then, Lightricks has pivoted to the content creator economy, building multiple app suites and toolkits, and recently found an equity partner in Tik Tok’s D’Amelio family. In this episode, Zeev walks us through his real-time decision-making and why we should all take “the shower test”.