PODCAST · business
Billion Dollar Tech
by Brendan Dell
Advice & growth frameworks from three comma founders, VCs, and executives (and those on their way there.)
Episodes
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The Secret To Achieving Product-Market Fit - With Lama.ai Founder
"Something that doesn't slice the pie differently or steal someone else's breakfast, but something with a potential to grow the overall pie," is Omri Yacubovich's description of Lama.ai, of which he is co-founder and CEO. Lama.ai provides business lending to banks, credit unions, SaaS companies,...
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How to Develop Emotional Intelligence - Public Company CEO Shares
"You probably can't overemphasize the importance of your co-founder relationship," says Noah Abelson-Gertler, founder coach and former public company CEO, explaining that 50% of startups and scaleups that fail do so due to co-founder relationships. Co-founders have an intimacy that is like…
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Top Hostage Negotiator Teaches You How to Be a World-Class Communicator
"We're emotional beings that think, not thinking beings that feel," says Scott Walker, leadership coach, former Scotland Yard detective and one of the world's most experienced kidnap for ransom negotiators. Scott joins the podcast today to share what engaging in covert counterterrorism and...
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A Revolution in Blue Collar Jobs - How Sh1ft Creates 10X More Opportunity!
"We started to feel like there was something bigger here, that this could be transformational," says Jason Radisson, co-founder and CEO of Sh1ft, which brings push button technology to blue collar and middle class work, and is transforming HR in the B2B spaces by implementing gig economy-style...
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From $0 - $3B | Peek Inside Crypto Unicorn Anchorage Digital
"What if we could do it better than anyone else in the ecosystem?" Nathan McCauley asked himself while co-founding Anchorage Digital, a unicorn assets platform that provides instantly settled key storage and custody—holding investments on behalf of investors—for digital assets like Bitcoin and...
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Magic Words: Master the art of persuasion | NYT Best Seller Jonah Berger
New York Times bestselling author Jonah Berger's cutting-edge research reveals how six types of words can increase your impact in every area of life: from persuading others and building stronger relationships, to boosting creativity and motivating teams. He labels them SPEACC ("speak,"...
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The Entrepreneur Success Story of Tony Jamous [Secrets of Building Two Unicorn Companies]
"What drives me is the mission," says Tony Jamous, founder and CEO of Oyster HR, a business that, as Brendan puts it, is "stewarding the remote work revolution." Oyster, Tony's second unicorn company, works to allow businesses to hire anyone from around the world without restriction. With their...
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$1.6B CEO Reveals Secret to Identifying Undiscovered Niches
"I had one job, which was to get the data right. Why was that so freaking hard?" asked Barr Moses, co-founder and CEO of Monte Carlo, the world's first data observability platform, discussing what motivated her to create the product. Having worked with data for 15 years, she realized so many…
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Peel Back the Curtain! How To Build a $3.7B Technology Brand
"Harness builds software for teams that build software," says Scott Sanchez, CMO of Harness. Scott and his team recognize that software developers at larger companies spend an increasing amount of time doing everything but coding. Harness provides a series of end to end products which ensure that...
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From $0 to $3B Valuation - Marcelo Lebre, Co-Founder Remote.com
"We knew we wanted to address the pain of remote work," said Marcelo Lebre of the goal he and Job van der Voort shared when the two founded Remote.com in 2019. As it turns out, it was a worldwide pain. There were countless freelancers who were waiting to be matched with opportunities and vice...
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Lessons Learned from $95M in Venture Capital Raised
"Too many founders have solutions, and are looking for problems," says Brendan on this solo episode of Billion Dollar Tech. Today Brendan goes over the five key takeaways from his conversation with Trisha Kotari founder and CEO of Unit 21. Trisha cold called over 300 potential buyers and spoke to...
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Growing Unit 21 From $0 to $95M in Venture Funding
"Fundraising is mostly about failing. Success is really the wartime," says Trisha Kotari, founder and CEO of Unit 21, a risk and compliance infrastructure which helps companies and financial institutions combat fraud. In 2019, she started the business from scratch, cold calling potential…
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The 5 Keys To Scale Past the Founder-Led Sale
"It's just like being in a relationship," says Brendan on this solo episode of Billion Dollar Tech. Today, he discusses what happens to a lot of startups when they bring in an outside expert or salesperson to help them scale, but the outside party through laziness or even with the best intentions...
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How to Bootstrap a Software Business to $30M in Revenue
"I think, if you're doing business right, you're evolving every two or three years," says Bryan Clayton Co-Founder and CEO of GreenPal, an app that works like an Uber for lawn services, which bootstrapped $30 million. And that includes growing alongside your customer. The early days of GreenPal...
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Dissecting the Top 5 Reasons Why Start-Ups Fail
"Most startups don't fail outright, they fail to gain meaningful traction," says Brendan on this solo episode of Billion Dollar Tech. He gets more specific with five reasons that contribute to the failure. The first reason is one that he has discussed many times, which is that companies go too…
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How to Build a Successful Blockchain Start Up | Enya.Ai Founder
"You have to be really agile and flexible, but also really stubborn about the problems you're going to solve," says Alan Chiu, co-founder of Boba and its contributing company Enya.ai, about the dual attributes successful founders must possess. Blockchain technology, similarly, is a balance of...
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5 Lessons Learned From $37M in Venture Capital Raised
"It comes back to communication," says Brendan on this solo episode of Billion Dollar Tech, where he unpacks the five key takeaways from his recent interview with Iggy Bassi, founder and CEO of Cervest. Iggy founded this data platform, which recently raised 37 million in total funding, first and...
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How Climate Intelligence Will Save Your Business
"I want to spend my time solving problems," says Iggy Bassi, founder and CEO of Cervest, a platform that uses climate data, science expertise and data modeling to help companies predict their climate risk. It measures the potential damage a company's assets, like buildings, factories and…
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Start Up FAQs: How To Target Multiple Personas
"In a world where there's so much overwhelming noise, you've got to be specific," says Brendan in this solo episode of Billion Dollar Tech. This pertains to everything, from the benefit you're providing to how you're helping, to the language you're using, even the difference between your…
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6 Lessons from Building a $1B B2B Technology Company
In this solo episode of Billion Dollar Tech, Brendan breaks down the highlights from his interview with Guy Tytunovich, founder of go to market security company Cheq.ai. Guy founded a unicorn company, and part of this discussion will focus on the unique challenges and considerations of this...
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Growing Cheq.ai from $0 to $1B valuation
"Simply put, we protect the go-to-market worldwide," says Guy Tytunovich, Founder and CEO of Cheq.ai who created the category of go to market security. During his ten years working in government cybersecurity, Guy realized that there are attack factors and vulnerabilities that most people within...
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How to Build a $1B LinkedIn Ads Strategy
"It's the best place to target business buyers," says Brendan of LinkedIn Ads. In this episode he'll walk you through a set of tips to help you optimally utilize the platform, connect to your target audience, and get an optimal ROI. This starts with helping you to decide if you should be using it...
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Deconstructing the $1B psychedelics industry w/ VC Brom Rector
"I want to fund the company that's inventing the Tesla Model S of psychedelics," says Brom Rector, founder of Empath ventures, a venture capital firm investing in the future of psychedelic medicine. A consumer of psychedelics himself for over a decade, he saw there was an opening in the newly...
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Growing ActivSurgical from $0 to $162M (and beyond)
"We like to consider ourselves the Waze of surgery," says Todd Usen, CEO of ActivSurgical. Waze gathers and presents data from the road in real time, so that driver's can navigate their trip successfully and avoid problems before they occur. Similarly, ActivSurgical uses sensors and AI to...
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Should You Create a New Category?
"In the next five to seven minutes, I'm going to try to give you a very concise and declarative answer as to whether or not you should create your own category," says Brendan In this solo episode of Billion Dollar Tech. This is a question he receives from many entrepreneurs and executives, and…
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The Tech Career Toolkit - From MIT's Famed Career Accelerator Program
"Leadership isn't a single thing. It's a bunch of things together," says Mark Herschberg, the co-founder and one of the principal developers of MIT's famed Career Accelerator Program. The program teaches future tech leaders the soft skills like communication, networking and negotiating that they...
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How to Use AI to 10X Your Sales Pipeline
"Wouldn't you respond to someone that knows you like a friend better than someone who called like a robot that's just doing outreach?" asks Leena Joshi, Co-Founder and CEO of Closefactor, which applies machine learning, artificial intelligence and natural language processing to the go-to market...
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Growing TopHat from $0 - $130M & Founding a Crypto Fund
"Be perpetually paranoid and constantly thinking about how you're going to die," Mike Silagadze jokes about the mindset it takes to navigate the constant fluctuations and risks (and resulting stress) of founding a company, especially in the tech space. He has plenty of experience in the area. He...
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Growing Blockchain.com to $14B - The Story of Peter Smith
"Increasing human freedom and economic freedom around the world is just a mission that I'm really passionate about," says Peter Smith, Founder and CEO of Blockchain.com. That mission has remained at the heart of Blockchain since its inception in 2009. When still a graduate student at the London...
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Time Management Secrets for High Performers
"A lot of people mistake activity for progress," says Fineas Tatar, Co-CEO and Founder of Viva, "What matters is is working on priorities that actually move the needle forward." Many CEOs, particularly of startups, don't know what their priorities are and therefore what tasks to focus on and in...
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$30M Series B: How I Evaluated My First Venture Investment
"You've got to be willing to swing, which means, by definition, sometimes you're going to miss," Brendan says on this solo episode of Billion Dollar Tech, as he takes us step by step through the set of criteria he used to evaluate his first venture investment. Determining the risk versus reward...
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Billion Dollar Breakdown: Matt Kerbel of Lyft, MeUndies, Call of Duty
"Once people form an opinion it's almost impossible to change their minds even in the face of overwhelming evidence," Brendan explains. That's why it's so important to establish your brand's identity and make your market truly care about it. This is especially important in today's overcrowded...
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How to Build $1B Brand [Meundies, Lyft, Call of Duty]
"The purpose of marketing is to find that intersection between what's important to people, what they're looking to do and solve for in their lives, and how your company can uniquely help them achieve that," says Matt Kerbel, Director of Strategic Brand Planning at Turo. According to Matt, the…
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Billion Dollar Breakdown: SoftLedger
"Patience is just so overrated," Brendan says on this episode of the Billion Dollar Breakdown, where he comments on the key takeaways from his interview with SoftLedger co-founder Ben Taylor. Patience is a virtue that runs through much of Ben's founding story and Brendan's resulting advice, the...
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How to Take on $1B Incumbents
"Making things quicker is the theme for what we're working on," says Ben Taylor, founder of SoftLedger, accounting software that's disrupting the software space. After working in accounting for a number of years, Ben saw a need to eliminate the time-consuming and tedious tasks involved in keeping...
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The Future of AI (It's Closer Than You Think)
"We're going to have a number of paradigm shifts in the next five years, so it should be a fun time," says Michael Shuffett, co-founder and CEO of Compose.ai. "There's going to be a new way of creating all of that." This paradigm shift includes a major disruption across all content creation...
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Billion Dollar Breakdown: 3X's Founders Top 5 Lessons for Growing
"You almost can't be too narrow at the beginning," Brendan says to succinctly summarize one of the many important lessons extracted from his interview with Adam Honig, CEO of Spiro. Narrowing your focus is the main theme that ran through Adam's most useful advice, which Brendan expands upon in…
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How Adam Honig is Taking on the $54B CRM Industry
"We're going to build Scarlett Johansonn for Salesforce!" Adam Honig declared to his business partner after watching the Spike Jonez movie Her, starring the actress. Frustrated with Salesforce and other CRM services, he thought, why not have a virtual assistant, like the one voiced by Johansonn…
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Realizing the Unfulfilled Promise of Blockchain
"Block chains are basically an attempt to do a more efficient transaction by replacing trust with proof," explains Sam Bizri, founder and CEO of Zeconomy. Until recently, transactions were committed via a trust-based bureaucratic system where watchdogs like banks and accountants acted as…
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Billion Dollar Breakdown: Allstacks
"If you cannot clearly articulate the vision of the future that you are trying to create to your people and the market in a way that they care, you have a problem," Brendan says. Hersh Tapadia, co-founder of Allstacks and recent guest on the Billion Dollar Tech podcast, is an example of someone…
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How to Build a High-Impact Engineering Team with Allstacks CEO
"Think about it like you have two train tracks," explains Hersh Tapadia, co-founder and CEO of Allstacks, "with the engineering train and the business train. Occasionally they stop at the same station, and everyone gets excited, but for the most part they're running on these parallel tracks." In...
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Billion Dollar Breakdown | InEvent
"He's going to do a lot better not only in this business but in future businesses because he knows what it is to build a business and not just a product," says Brendan on this latest Billion Dollar Breakdown. He's speaking of Pedro Goes, founder and CEO of InEvent which creates software for...
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How to Create Kick Ass Events, Navigating YC, and More with InEvent Founder Pedro Goes
"We need to manage a 35,000 person meeting in real time where decisions will be made that will end up on the 7:00 PM news," says Pedro Goes, founder and CEO of InEvent. This software platform provides streamlined features such as video transitions, Q&A, polling, live music and the ability to…
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Billion Dollar Breakdown: Topia
"A lot of people, when they think of entrepreneurship, picture a CEO commanding an army, or a developer doing something very innovative, or a product genius," says Brendan on this latest Billion Dollar Breakdown. Actually, as he explains, the most important aspect of starting—and maintaining a...
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The Future of the Metaverse with Topia CEO Daniel Liebeskind
"For us, the Metaverse is a way to increase accessibility to communities," says Daniel Liebeskind, CEO of the platform Topia, part of the Metaverse that's taking the internet from asynchronous, static forms like email and forums, to synchronous, real-time interactions, sharing content with other...
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High-Impact B2B Product Strategy, Integrations, and Exits With a 2X Founder
"There is no more complex strategy game in the world that I know of than building companies," says Michael Zuerchner, CEO and Co-Founder of Prismatic. He would know. At age 19, he started a software company whose product integrated 600 tasks to be used in all aspects of law enforcement, such as...
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How to Build a Two-Sided Marketplace with Michelle Tinsley
"Gig work is upscaling and becoming more professional," says Michelle Tinsley, COO of Yellowbird. Yellowbird matches qualified professional Risk and Environmental Health and Safety workers with companies in demand of their skill sets. Environmental Health and Safety is a 5 billion-dollar industry...
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Lessons Learned From 500+ B2B Start-UPS with Sam Strasser
Sam Strasser founded Treasure Financial, a cash management platform that helps businesses transform idle cash into revenue. Many companies, even famous, large companies, make up to 80% of their revenue not from selling products or services but from taking money out of their treasury and investing...
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How to Make TV Ads Segmentable, Trackable Like Facebook Ads with Noah Palansky
"We make it so that TV commercials are as effective as a Facebook ad," is how Noah Palanksy describes the mission of his AI company Taiv. Having a drink at a bar one night, he watched as the TV played an ad for another bar down the street, and realized the potential for an establishment to…
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Start Up FAQS: What's the First Thing I Should Prioritize for Growth?
"What is the first thing I should prioritize when I'm trying to grow my business?" This is one of the most common questions Brendan gets from business founders. Here, in this mini-episode, he attempts to answer this and other frequently asked questions about growing a business. The very first…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Advice & growth frameworks from three comma founders, VCs, and executives (and those on their way there.)
HOSTED BY
Brendan Dell
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Billion Dollar Tech have?
Billion Dollar Tech currently has 100 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Billion Dollar Tech about?
Advice & growth frameworks from three comma founders, VCs, and executives (and those on their way there.)
How often does Billion Dollar Tech release new episodes?
Billion Dollar Tech has 100 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Billion Dollar Tech?
You can listen to Billion Dollar Tech on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Billion Dollar Tech?
Billion Dollar Tech is created and hosted by Brendan Dell.
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