Founder Real Talk

Shay Banon is the Co-founder and CEO of Elastic, a search company that makes data usable in real time and at scale for enterprise search, observability, and security. The foundation for what became Elastic was laid in 2004 while Shay was building a recipe app for his wife. Shay built Elastic Search the product in 2009 and open sourced it in 2010. He co-founded the company Elastic Search with Steven Schuurman, Uri Boness, and Simon Willnauer in 2012 and the company quickly rose through the ranks, raising over $160M in funding before its successful IPO in 2018. In this episode, Shay dives into the 17 year evolution of the company and how the open source community and model has helped shape Elastic into what it is today.

Guy Podjarny is the Co-Founder, President, Chairman of the Board, and former CEO of Snyk, the leader in developer-first “cloud native” application security. Before co-founding Snyk in 2015, Guy helped develop AppScan and co-founded Blaze.io (acquired by Akamai in 2012). In 2020, Snyk won four Best Places to Work awards and was named a CNBC Disruptor in 2021. In this episode, Guy shares how he’s encouraged developers to embrace security, successfully built a company with a bottoms-up strategy, and the benefits of focusing on a community of builders. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.

Zvi Schreiber is the Founder and CEO of Freightos, the company on a mission to completely optimize and modernize the world of international freight shipping. Before founding Freightos in 2012, Zvi has had an extensive background as Founder and CEO of multiple companies including Unicorn Solutions, which was acquired by IBM in 2006. Founded in 2012 in Israel, Freightos has become a global company with offices around the world. In this episode, Zvi talks about why he took on the challenge of modernizing the complex and traditional industry of international freight shipping. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.

Ali Ghodsi is the CEO and Co-Founder of Databricks, an AI-enabled, open source data analytics platform company, valued today at more than $28 billion. Over 5,000 companies use the company’s open source-driven lakehouse architecture to process, engineer, and analyze their unstructured and semi-structured data. In this episode, Ali shares how an open source project he helped start as a researcher at UC Berkeley—where he still serves as an adjunct professor in the computer science department— turned into a multibillion-dollar company and lessons entrepreneurs can learn from his journey.

Amit Bendov is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gong, a revenue intelligence platform that analyzes the data of sales calls, emails, texts, and social media to create insights to optimize company sales. Founded in Tel Aviv in 2015, Gong is valued at over $2B today. With more people working from home, Gong has been able to establish itself as one of the top sales data providers on the market. In this episode, Amit talks about the importance of creating a compelling product and giving your team enough room to grow. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.

Thierry Schellenbach is the Co-founder and CEO of Stream, a scalable API platform that’s growing rapidly. After the acquisition of his previous company, Fashiolista, Thierry set out to help create a scalable API for chat and activity feeds that can keep up with company growth. Thierry founded Stream in 2014 in his home country of the Netherlands, but he’s now based in Boulder, Colorado. Stream gained attention in the US after participating in Techstars NYC in 2015. Thierry describes what it was like raising a round of funding remotely, managing a global team, and how he and his team are navigating the ever-changing landscape of APIs. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Investor, Tiffany Luck.

Dev Ittycheria is the President and CEO of MongoDB, the maker of the world’s most popular general purpose database. Built on open source, MongoDB has had an enviable run since its 2017 IPO. Dev joined MongoDB in 2014 and has steered the company through some of its highest-growth years. Before taking the helm of MongoDB, Dev founded and IPOed two companies—Breakaway Solutions, which went public in 1999 and was acquired by Verizon in 2001, and BladeLogic, which had one of the most successful IPOs of 2007 and was later acquired by BMC Software for $900 million. He has also invested in and served on the boards of many successful software companies including AppDynamics, Athenahealth, and Datadog. In this episode, Dev explains how he learned to be vulnerable as a CEO and galvanize the workforce to reset company goals and ultimately create the community-driven database that MongoDB is today.

Daniel Schreiber is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lemonade, the AI-powered insurance company with a commitment to making a positive social impact, that has risen to the top of the industry in less than five years. Founded in 2015, Daniel and his Co-founder, Shai Wininger set out to change the way we use insurance and instead present it as a 100% digital community resource meant to help those in their hour of need. With its Giveback program, successful 2020 IPO, and more than one million active users, Lemonade is paving the way for the future of insurance on a global scale. In this episode, Daniel talks about what makes a great founder and CEO, the importance of resilience in the tech industry, and more. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.

This is a crossover episode between Founder Real Talk and Evolving for the Next Billion and is co-hosted by GGV Managing Partners, Glenn Solomon and Hans Tung.Josh Silverman has been the CEO of Etsy since 2017. Etsy is an innovative online marketplace that connects millions of creative sellers and buyers around the world. Etsy’s mission is to“keep commerce human” and it’s become the global destination for unique and creative goods. The company has 3.1 million active sellers and 60.3 million active buyers from nearly every country. In 2019, 40% of Etsy sellers were located outside the US, 83% of sellers were women.Josh has two decades of leadership experience including growing consumer technology companies and scaling global marketplaces. Before Etsy, he served as president of consumer products and services at AMEX, CEO of Skype, and CEO of Shopping.com. He has also held various executive roles at eBay. Earlier in his career, Josh co-founded Evite, where he also served as the company's first CEO until its sale to IAC.

The Founder Real Talk Israeli Entrepreneur Series is back with a fifth episode. These episodes are dedicated to getting to know Israeli founders and their companies. Known as Startup Nation, Israel creates more companies per capita than any other country, with one startup for every 1,400 people. Read more about GGV’s commitment to funding and supporting the next generation of Israeli entrepreneurs: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/next-tech-wave-israel-global-company-creation-glenn-solomon/. This series is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger.Oren Kaniel is the Co-founder & CEO of AppsFlyer, the global attribution leader, trusted by more than 12,000 brands including Coca Cola, HBO, Walmart, Ebay and the list goes on. Oren founded AppsFlyer in 2011 to solve one of the major problems in the mobile apps market – mobile campaign analytics and attribution. Oren talks about his journey and what he is focused on as AppsFlyer has become one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies today.