Founder Real Talk

This is the fourth episode in our early stage series, a group of episodes that highlights younger companies to examine the issues and challenges these businesses uniquely face. Avi Shua is Co-founder and CEO of Orca Security, the cloud security company from Tel Aviv known for its proprietary SideScanning™ technology. After spending eight years in the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces), Avi worked at Check Point for over a decade before co-founding Orca in 2018. This episode covers Avi’s story, Orca’s meteoric rise and what sets them apart in the world of cloud security. This episode is co-hosted by GGV Investor, Oren Yunger.

Karthik Rau co-founded and served as CEO of SignalFX from inception in 2013 all the way through the company’s $1.05 billion acquisition by Splunk in 2019. Karthik is presently Vice President of Observability at Splunk and oversees the cross-functional strategy and execution of Splunk's application management, monitoring and observability efforts. SignalFx was founded to help operators of modern distributed applications perform real-time cloud monitoring and observability. Given Karthik’s position at SignalFX and now Splunk, this episode covers the transition to cloud, devops, modern application development and more.

Barr Moses, Co-founder & CEO of Monte Carlo, shares her journey from the Israeli Air Force to founding a data reliability company. She discusses the importance of naming and measuring data downtime, the impact of diversity and inclusion in the startup world, and the need for inspiring female founders.

This is the second episode in our early stage series, a group of episodes that highlights younger companies to examine the issues and challenges these businesses uniquely face. Streamlit is an open source product that has become extremely popular with data science teams growing to over 10,000 GitHub stars since launch in late 2019. Streamlit’s founders, Adrien, Amanda and Thiago, previously worked together at Google X. One thing led to another and now they’re back together empowering data scientists and machine learning engineers to create beautiful, performant apps quickly and easily. Streamlit is gaining traction fast and this conversation is a testament to the passion of the people behind it.

This episode kicks off our early stage series, a group of episodes that highlights younger companies to examine the issues and challenges these businesses uniquely face. Mike Fitzsimmons is the Co-founder and CEO of Crosschq, a SaaS company that has pioneered a new category for talent acquisition called “Human intelligence hiring.” Seeing as 40% of hires don’t make it through a year in their new job, Crosschq is solving a critical mis-hire problem by helping companies’ better source, match, and retain the best talent. In this episode, Mike discusses the importance of building a great product, the challenges of creating a brand new category, how to acquire early customers, and what to consider when fundraising.

Kris Beevers is the Co-founder and CEO of NS1, the leader in modern application and access networking. Kris is a recognized authority on global application delivery and DNS. He joins the show from his new, aptly named boat, Social Distance. Early on, when he was in the process of choosing his co-founders, Kris sought out people who he had a strong and respectful personal relationship with. As the business has grown, the roles of the leadership team have morphed, changed, and become better defined. Now as CEO, Kris considers his job to be hiring great people and letting them run. One thing he wishes he knew during his series A fundraise was that most investors are more interested in investing in the team rather than the product. They want to know you have a great team that will hustle for success. Glenn and Kris also discuss the important impact hiring a COO had on the business and Kris recommends hyper-communication and swift decision making as tools for success during these times.

Mitchell Hashimoto is the Co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, the leader in multi-cloud infrastructure automation software. In this episode, which was recorded during a GGV live webinar, we learn how Mitchell and his cofounder, Armon Dadgar, built HashiCorp into a 1000-person company valued at over $5B—all with a very distributed team since day one. For companies suddenly managing remote workforces, or for startups just beginning the journey toward growth, how can you scale and succeed far into the future with a fully distributed team? HashiCorp’s experiences scaling into a global enterprise software powerhouse without opening the usual array of offices are especially valuable today, now that so many companies have gone remote almost overnight.

Armon Dadgar is the Co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, a commercial open source company that provides the fundamental building blocks around infrastructure and automation that developers need to create scalable, secure, high-performance applications hosted in the cloud. Valued at over $5 billion and now with over 1,000 employees worldwide, HashiCorp started out life in 2010 as an open source project and since grown into the defacto standard for modern cloud-computing development. In this episode, which was recorded live at GGV’s annual Evolving Enterprise conference, we learn how Armon and his Co-founder, Mitchell Hashimoto, initially met, what it took to sell to the enterprise and how to hire the right people as a distributed company.

This is the fourth episode in the Founder Real Talk Israeli Entrepreneur Series, a group of episodes 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. This series is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger. Netanel (Nati) Davidi and Uri Alter are two of the Co-founders of VDOO, the only automated device security solution that is integrated across the entire product lifecycle, and a GGV portfolio company. Nati and Uri have had quite the journey together. They first met in the Israeli military service in 1999 and went on to co-found Cyvera, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2014. Their mission didn’t stop there. In 2017, with co-founder Asaf Karas, they started VDOO, a company born out of one of the biggest shortfalls of IOT. In this episode, we learn how Nati and Uri’s journey lead them to pioneer a way to scale security for connected devices.

This is the third episode in the Founder Real Talk Israeli Entrepreneur Series, a group of episodes 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. This series is co-hosted by GGV Capital Investor, Oren Yunger. Shlomi Ben Haim is Co-Founder and CEO of JFrog, provider of the world’s first universal artifact management platform that ushered in a completely new era in DevOps. Founded in 2008, JFrog has become the “database of DevOps” used by over 6000 customers worldwide including Amazon, Cisco, and Netflix. In this episode, we learn how Shlomi’s 12 years in the Israeli Air Force influenced his startup mentality, how the JFrog team has scaled an open source company, and what it takes to expand globally.