The Room Podcast

In this episode of The Room, Claudia and Madison kick off the new season with Amy Chang, Co-Founder of Accompany, an AI-driven relationship intelligence platform acquired by Cisco in 2018 for $270 million. we hear from a first-time founder and long term product guru on the ups and downs of transitioning from big tech to founding a company. Listen here to learn about the power of early career decisions, battling anxiety and uncertainty, and the right reasons to sell your company.

And that’s a wrap on Season 1! Thank you so much to all of our listeners for joining us on The Room! We have big plans for Season 2, launching Tuesday, Feb.9, but before we enter the room where it happened with a whole new slew of entrepreneurs, we take a look back on Season 1, its guests, and our biggest takeaways.

Claudia and Madison close out The Room’s first season with guest Amit Sharma, CEO, and founder of Narvar. Madison first met Amit in Narvar’s offices back in 2019, as a customer at Gap Inc. If you’ve ever received an email about your tracking update or returned something online, odds are you’ve interacted with Narvar’s core products. Narvar is a post-purchase customer engagement platform helping over 650 retailers streamline their customer communication, returns, and exchanges. Founded in 2012, Amit saw what others did not, post-purchase is a powerful mechanism for e-commerce customer loyalty, retention, and satisfaction. Rather than “ghosting” your customers, retailers needed to handhold customers every step of the way from the “complete purchase button” to the ring of the doorbell. As we learn in today’s episode, this wasn’t Amit’s first try at start-up. Listen to the episode to hear about his journey from India, the first start-up with unfortunate market timing, his time working at multiple large retailers, and ultimately taking the plunge to start Narvar.

Alexa Buckley is the Co-Founder of Margaux - a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand of insanely comfortable and beautiful shoes. If you pay attention to Instagram posts from influencers wearing handcrafted ballet flats in every color of the rainbow, then you’ve probably seen a Margaux shoe. Alexa started the shoe line during her senior year at Harvard. Alongside co-founder, Sarah Pierson, the two women realized the pervasive shoe shuffle, where working women would have to swap their walking shoes with their office shoes under their desks due to a lack of style in the former and comfort in the latter. Why wasn’t it possible to have both? It was time to take a leap of faith and disrupt the shoe industry. Landing on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 and nailing a Vogue spread, Alexa and the story of Margaux inspires us all to Guax for it!

This week, we sat down with Amy Nelson, CEO and founder of The Riveter, a digital and physical community for women. Spending 10 plus years in corporate law, Amy never thought she'd be a founder. However, after the 2016 election, she took a closer look at what mattered most to her - The Riveter was born. While it's been a challenging year for physical spaces, Amy has gallantly persevered by building a growing digital space proving our belief that "the room" is more than four walls. In today's episode, we'll explore insights and themes such as how political and venture fundraising have more in common than you might think, motherhood in the workplace, and core product pivots. Let's open the door.

This week on The Room, we interview Shishir Mehrotra, founder and CEO of Coda. Coda is a venture-backed workflow tool recently valued at over $600 million dollars. With Coda, docs are now as powerful as applications. Although Coda was started in 2014, Coda is more relevant now than ever as a key player in 2020’s “future of work.” Coda is redefining what it means to stay organized, engaged, and effective during COVID-19’s acceleration of a remote-first culture. In today’s episode, we explore Shishir’s path to building one of the world’s most powerful work tools- where the flexibility of a doc is combined with the power of a spreadsheet and application. We’ll explore insights and themes such as prioritizing opportunities that foster personal growth, the benefits of building a company in stealth, and scaling a distributed workforce and culture well. Let’s open the door.

This week on The Room, we interview Jessica Lessin, founder of The Information. In Silicon Valley, whenever there is a breaking story, The source that founders, funders, and technologists turn to to get the inside scoop is the subscription-based news-source that Jessica founded in 2013. Jessica has created a platform the tech world can’t get enough of in a world crowded by media coverage and ad-blockers. In today’s episode, we explore her path to disrupting journalism and how information is consumed in the tech world. We’ll explore insights and themes such as knowing what’s valuable and not giving it away, sustainable growth, and dealing with the hard stuff, like controversy.

This week on The Room, we interview Hope Cochran, managing director at Madrona Venture Group. It's probably easier to ask, what hasn't Hope done? Music and economics at Stanford. Founder and CFO of SkillsVillage, bought by Peoplesoft in 2001. CFO of Clearwire and King Digital. Board member of three public companies, Hasboro, Mongo DB, and New Relic. Today we explore colorful stories of her time in C-suites and boardrooms discussing insights and themes such as advocating for yourself at work, what makes a good board, and the little moments that matter.

This week on The Room, we interview Coral Chung, the CEO, and co-founder of Senreve. Sitting down with Coral to hear about the start of her luxury D2C brand, we learned about the early days of founding an accessories brand in Silicon Valley, her global expansion plans, and a bit about juggling the hats of CEO and mother.

In this episode of The Room podcast, Madison and Claudia spend some time diving into the history of Silicon Valley power couple; Matt Rogers and Swati Mylavarapu - founders of Venture Capital business - Incite. Previously to Incite, Matt Rogers was the co-founder of Nest. They go into detail about how they have been able to juggle the highs and lows of building a business together while pursuing their own individual passions - all while taking care of each other as a married couple and their growing family. In this episode, they share their passion for building innovative businesses, developing entrepreneurs and non-profits as well as helping to fund political candidates. These passions played a profound role in shaping the way they built Incite.