Episoder
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Coming up with a viable business idea is hard.
Coming up with the right type of business that aligns with your personality and vision such that you canât sleep at night is even harder.
We call that âfounder-market fitâ and when you find it, you increase your chances of building a truly transformative company.
Thatâs because having founder-market fit keeps you 100% focused on the problem with an obsessive, almost maniacal commitment.
So much so that it may make your product best-in-class.
A perfect example is our guest this week on First Pitches, Sid Viswanathan, co-founder of Truepill, a startup revolutionizing the healthcare patient experience.
Think Shopify for healthcare.
Before Truepill, Sid was the co-founder of CardMunch, a business-card scanning app acquired by LinkedIn in 2011. Under Sidâs leadership at LinkedIn, CardMunch was named one of Time Magazineâs Best Apps of 2012
But after four years at LinkedIn, Sid had a founderâs itch to scratch. The problem? He didnât know what to do next.
And thatâs when a random encounter with a LinkedIn status update changed Sidâs life forever.
Youâre gonna have to listen to find out how what happens next.
Get tactical tips on how to master your first pitch. Sign up for our newsletter at www.firstpitches.com
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Founders are a rare breed and thatâs because It takes a certain kind of person to create a startup.
Not everyone can stomach the financial risk that comes with being a founder, the responsibility of managing employees with an uncertain future, and the constant self-doubt when nothing is going right.
But when you believe you have a truly world-changing startup, it becomes a calling that you canât ignore.
Our guest this week on First Pitches, Cindy Gallop, has just that. Cindy is the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, a startup making money by changing how the world has sex.
Cindy is also a sought-after speaker on marketing, business innovation, and gender issues and was also voted Advertising Woman of the Year in 2003.
But over 10 years ago, it was a different story.
As accomplished as Cindy was, she could not get a single investor to invest in MakeLoveNotPorn; not because they didnât believe in Cindy or the business, but because they were worried, âwhat others might think.â
At one point she almost gave up, but the flood of public emails thanking her for breaking taboos inspired her to carry on.
And in 2018, she was able to raise 2M to continue MakeLoveNotPornâs mission of disrupting social media by socializing sex and improving our sex lives for the better.
Listen to find out how Cindy is changing the world to fit her mission.
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According to author Angela Ducksworth, the secret to success is not talent but a special blend of passion and persistence she calls âgrit.â
In short, itâs the ability to persist in the face of hardship to achieve your goals no matter how long it takes.
When you have this type of grit you become a force to be reckoned with, much like our guest on this weekâs episode of First Pitches.
Weâre talking about Arlan Hamilton, founder of Backstage Capital.
You may have seen Arlan before as sheâs graced the cover of Fast Company as the first black businesswoman and is the author of an Amazon Best Seller: Itâs About Damn Time.
She also happens to be friends with the cast of the daytime soap show, General Hospital.
But just five years ago, it was a different story. She was just another underestimated founder.
In 2015, Arlan was quickly judged as being: an LGBT black female; non-college-educated, and at one point, homeless--sleeping at SFO airport while she raised money.
Since then, sheâs managed to hustle her way through all these headwinds and raised a combined $12 million for Backstage Capital and the ArlanWasHere Investments fund.
And through these vehicles, Arlan has invested in over 130 underestimated founders.
Interested in learning how Arlan developed her grit? Listen to find out how.
Get tactical tips on how to master your first pitch. Sign up for our newsletter at www.firstpitches.com
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How do you define the American dream?
For most, itâs the belief that anyone, regardless of where they were born or what class they were born into, can attain their own version of success in a society where upward mobility is possible for everyone.
But for others, itâs a pipe dream, a fairy tale, a false hope.
Because no matter how hard they work or how much time and effort they put into something, it is virtually impossible for them to achieve success.
And thatâs due to the country and societal class they were born into; there are too many barriers for upward mobility.
But the silver lining in all this is that it builds grit, and when grit meets opportunity, well, youâve got a force of nature.
On this episode of First Pitches, we talk with an entrepreneur who became just that.
Elias Torres is the co-founder and CTO of Drift, a conversational marketing platform valued at over 360M dollars.
Elias arrives in the United States in 1993 as a poor 17-year-old from Nicaragua; his family home was destroyed the year before.
But with this new opportunity, he hustles his way into a college scholarship, works at IBM, and at the start of the great recession--upends his security to follow his dream of starting a startup.
And even then, success isnât guaranteed. He fails again and again until he finally lands on an idea that would become Drift.
Drift and Eliasâs overnight success has been 10 years in the making, and his story will leave you speechless.
Listen to find out why.
Get tactical tips on how to master your first pitch. Sign up for our newsletter at www.firstpitches.com
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They say timing is everything but if thatâs true, then whatâs the value of being able to predict the future?
Millions? Try billions because, on this episode of First Pitches, we talk with Aaron Levie, co-founder, and CEO of Box, an enterprise software company with a market cap of nearly 3 billion dollars.
What started off as a college dorm room project, Aaron and his co-founders built Box into the company it is today by identifying key future trends and building a business on top of them.
But building a successful company isnât just about innovation; you need to be disruptive. You have to make it such that the incumbent in your market canât copy you because it isnât attractive to their business model.
And if you can do that, well you might be on your way to building a billion-dollar business.
Want to learn how to predict the future like Aaron? Take a listen and find out how.
Get tactical tips on how to master your first pitch. Sign up for our newsletter at www.firstpitches.com
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In a Harvard Business School commencement speech, Sheryl Sandberg famously said, âIf youâre offered a seat on a rocket ship, donât ask what seat. Just get on.â
This was advice given to her by Googleâs then-CEO Eric Schmidt when Sheryl was contemplating taking a job offer at Google. This advice would hold true 6 years later, when Sheryl left Google to become Facebookâs COO.
While it sounds like a no brainer now, can you imagine being offered a seat on a rocketship and turning it down?
Thatâs exactly what our guest on First Pitches, Michelle Zatlyn, did. Michelle is the co-founder and COO of Cloudflare, a cybersecurity company with a mission to help build a better Internet.
While in business school, Michelle was given an offer to join LinkedIn pre-IPO. But instead, she turned it down to go build Cloudflare with her co-founders. Not only did she turn down a seat on a rocket ship, but she did so to start a business during an economic downturn.
While most people would see this as extremely risky, Michelle trusted her instincts, and today she is in a very small club of female executives who have founded public companies and the only one running one worth over $10 billion today.
Youâll have to listen to find out how the rest of the story unfolds.
Want tactical tips on how to master your first pitch? Sign up for our newsletter at www.firstpitches.com
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First Pitches is a podcast series, where famous founders share the first version of their pitch.
No founder starts his or her journey with the perfect pitch; the beginning of every journey is fraught with self-doubt and lack of support.
This show was created to demonstrate that every founder, even the most well known today, had to go through the humbling experience of getting started with an imperfect pitch.
In this show, weâll travel back in time to when our guests made their first pitch. Weâll listen to their actual first pitch and discuss the experience.
And in the process of exploring the first pitch, weâll draw out vulnerability, honesty, and leave the listener with tactical advice on improving their own pitches.
Each interview is going to be cringe-worthy, hilarious, and profound.
