PODCAST · business
Unicorn Builders
by FrontLines.io
Learn from GTM journeys of B2B tech founders who’ve built companies worth more than $1 billion. This show is brought to you by FrontLines.io
Episodes
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Why Omni called itself a BI company in a market trying to forget BI | Colin Zima
Omni builds business intelligence software that puts exploratory analysis and governed dashboards in a single platform. In a recent episode of UNICORN BUILDERS, we sat down with Colin Zima, Co-Founder of Omni, to learn how the company navigated 18 months to real product-market fit, lost all five…
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The Magic That Made General Magic w/ Marc Porat
General Magic pursued a vision Marc Porat developed in 1988: a personal handheld computer combining computing, wireless communication, and content. Backed by founding partners including Apple, Sony, and Motorola, the company went public through what Porat describes as a “concept IPO.” In the...
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From $150 Trackers to $100M ARR: The Tive Story
Tive makes IoT trackers that tell companies exactly where their shipments are and what condition they are in as they move through the global supply chain. The company tracks temperature, humidity, shock, light, and location across 2G through 5G networks, inside trailers, containers, and pallets.…
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Why the CMO sits in the room and asks the questions nobody else will | Shai Alani
HUD is building a runtime intelligence sensor for developers -- a tool that helps engineering teams understand what happens in production in real time and solve problems using AI. The company is well funded and sells to developers. In a recent episode of Unicorn Marketers, we sat down with Shai...
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The fixer behind Uber, FanDuel, Ro & CLEAR | Bradley Tusk
Bradley Tusk has spent his career building the argument that wins, not just the argument that's true. Before founding Tusk Holdings, which now spans Tusk Strategies, Tusk Ventures, Tusk Venture Partners, and Tusk Philanthropies, he ran political strategy for Uber starting in 2011, and the…
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Behind Zeta Global’s big (and early) AI bet | David Steinberg
Zeta Global is an AI-native marketing platform processing trillions of consumer signals for Fortune 2000 companies. The company went public on the NYSE in June 2021 and is projecting close to $1.8 billion in net revenue for 2026 — on the back of four consecutive years of 30%+ organic compounded...
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How HighLevel built the second largest CRM on Earth | Shaun Clark
HighLevel is the second largest CRM by users on the planet — behind only Salesforce — with 2,000 employees and millions of customers worldwide. They got there without venture capital, without an enterprise sales motion, and without ever running an unprofitable growth model. When HighLevel...
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How Backstory AI sequenced a three-step company transformation using the strategy diamond framework | Jason Ambrose
Backstory AI — formerly People AI — is building what CEO & Board Member Jason Ambrose calls the "revenue reasoning layer." Even with full CRM visibility, leaders still go ask a person, that person comes back with an answer, and there are ten more questions about how they got it. That trust gap...
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How Peregrine embedded inside police departments to build their first product | Ben Rudolph
Peregrine Technologies unifies fragmented government data systems into a single, current, complete data asset — then gives agencies the tools to build operational workflows on top of it. In a recent episode of Unicorn Builders, we sat down with Ben Rudolph, Co-Founder of Peregrine, to learn how…
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Why Oyster's founder initiated his own CEO replacement | Tony Jamous & Hadi Moussa
Oyster is a global employment platform built on one core premise: make hiring across borders as easy as hiring locally. Rather than racing competitors toward all-in-one HR stacks, Oyster stayed deliberately narrow — owning the cross-border employment use case in a $30 billion market. In this...
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How Illumio sold enterprise cybersecurity for 8+ years without a Gartner Magic Quadrant | Andrew Rubin, Illumio
Illumio is the cybersecurity company that bet on a thesis the market wasn't ready for: stopping bad actors from getting in is necessary, but no longer sufficient. The real problem is what happens after they're already inside. Founded on that conviction, Illumio spent nearly a decade building,...
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The use-case-first sales motion ZoomInfo runs to sell into any new vertical | Henry Schuck
Henry Schuck built DiscoverOrg on a $25,000 credit card in Columbus, Ohio, bootstrapped to $30M ARR before taking venture capital, acquired ZoomInfo in 2019, and took the combined company public in June 2020. In this episode, Henry shares the exact sequencing decisions — niche selection,...
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Why Kin spent $100M on direct response last year | Sean Harper
Kin is reimagining how homeowners insurance is bought, priced, and delivered — stripping out the 400,000-agent distribution layer that legacy carriers depend on and replacing it with algorithms, aerial imagery, and address-level direct response marketing. In a recent episode of Unicorn Builders…
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How Chapter achieved 10x revenue growth while keeping corporate headcount flat for 2 years | Cobi Gantz
Chapter is building what CEO Cobi Gantz calls "the trust layer between seniors and AI" in Medicare navigation. After testifying before the Senate and helping pass regulations protecting seniors from data resale to cold-callers, Gantz scaled Chapter by abandoning direct-to-consumer advertising for...
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How Eve transitioned from founder-led sales to repeatable motion with 600+ customers | Jayanth Madheswaran
Eve reached unicorn valuation by identifying a structural market asymmetry: plaintiff attorneys operate on contingency fees with severe resource constraints while defending against well-funded corporate legal teams billing by the hour. In a recent episode of Unicorn Builders, we sat down with...
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Building StackAdapt: how three founders turned failure into a 1,600-person company | Vitaly Pecherskiy
StackAdapt scaled from three co-founders in a studio apartment kitchen to a 1,600-person organization operating across 20 markets. In this episode of BUILDERS, Vitaly Pecherskiy, CEO and Co-Founder of StackAdapt, walks through the reality of building a programmatic advertising platform over ten...
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How Zocdoc survived near death, increased prices up to 100x, and turned around the company | Oliver Kharraz
Zocdoc has transformed healthcare access in America, powering one in three new doctor-patient relationships in New York City alone. Founded 18 years ago by physician Oliver Kharraz, the company nearly died 10 years in when it was growing just 1% annually and losing money on every customer. The...
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How Augment Code achieved 80%+ win rates | Matt McClernan
Augment Code is pioneering AI tooling for professional software developers in enterprise environments. The company has built infrastructure that understands complex codebases better than individual developers, targeting a massive market undergoing fundamental transformation. In this episode of...
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How Fireflies to Scaled to 700K organizations without touching any Series A Money | Krish Ramineni
Fireflies.ai reached unicorn status through a tender offer in 2024 — without raising primary capital since their Series A five years earlier. The company serves 700,000 organizations and reaches tens of millions of users monthly through meeting bot distribution. In this episode of Unicorn…
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How Octane scaled to $400M revenue using small marketing teams that support partner brands instead of building their own
Octane Lending operates in what most VCs would consider an "unfundable" market - powersports financing for motorcycles, ATVs, and UTVs. Yet Jason Guss and his team have built a profitable unicorn that originated over $6.5 billion since inception, is on pace for $2.2 billion in originations this...
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How Dataiku serves 700+ enterprise customers by becoming the AI governance layer | Florian Douetteau
Florian Douetteau founded Dataiku in 2013 with a contrarian thesis: enterprise AI transformation must come from business operators, not centralized data science teams. While Silicon Valley built for tech companies, Dataiku built the translation layer between fragmented IT infrastructure and the...
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Inside the Race to Build AI Infrastructure w/ Sheldon Kimber
Intersect is solving AI's fundamental constraint: gigawatt-scale power delivered outside traditional grid infrastructure. The company builds behind-the-meter renewable and gas generation paired directly with data centers in locations like West Texas, bypassing the Balkanized regulatory system…
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Why Cart.com spent $5 million on a domain name as their first marketing strategy | Omair Tariq
Cart.com achieved unicorn status in less than three years by pioneering a radically different approach to building a commerce enablement company. Rather than starting from scratch, founder Omair Tariq began with strategic acquisitions - nine companies in the first 14 months - to rapidly assemble...
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How ClickUp survived the 2021 growth at all costs era and came out stronger ($300M ARR)
ClickUp is redefining workplace productivity by converging multiple software categories into one flexible platform. With over $400 million raised and a valuation exceeding $4 billion, ClickUp has grown from a bootstrapped internal tool to serving millions of users globally. In this episode of...
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How Intercom survived by cannibalizing their own business model before competitors could | Des Traynor
Intercom is a pioneer in customer communication platforms, with $241 million in funding and serving thousands of customers worldwide. After 15 years of building horizontal messaging tools, the company made a dramatic strategic pivot in 2022 to focus entirely on AI-powered customer support. In…
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What happens when you outgrow your messaging? (But still hit $200M ARR) w/ Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan
Huntress has transformed from a scrappy startup to a cybersecurity powerhouse, approaching $200M ARR while protecting over 175,000 businesses. In this return appearance on Unicorn Builders, Kyle Hanslovan, CEO & Co-Founder of Huntress, shares the brutal realities of scaling from 200 to 550...
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How Upgrade built 6 billion-dollar products by designing for multi-product from day one | Renaud Laplanche
Upgrade is revolutionizing consumer financial services through their multi-product platform that helps customers improve their credit while saving money. With over 7 million customers, Upgrade has scaled rapidly since its founding in 2017. In this episode of Unicorn Builders, we sat down with...
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The power (and importance) of being founder-led w/ NinjaOne's Sal Sferlazza ($5B)
NinjaOne has emerged as a dominant force in IT endpoint management, recently raising $500 million and positioning itself to become one of the largest IT software companies globally. The company serves two distinct buyer personas: internal IT departments at companies with 100-100,000 endpoints…
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Waseem Daher: The tech-enabled services model that investors hated: How Pilot combined software and humans when everyone wanted pure SaaS | Waseem Daher (Pilot.com)
Pilot has transformed how startups and SMBs handle their financial back office operations, combining technology with human expertise to deliver end-to-end accounting and tax services. As a tech-enabled services company serving thousands of businesses, Pilot represents a new category of back…
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How Gusto scaled to 400,000+ customers without traditional sales: The consumer-first B2B playbook ($9.5B Valuation)
Gusto has taken a radically different approach to B2B software for small businesses. While most companies serving SMBs treat them as a stepping stone to enterprise markets, Gusto has made small businesses their forever home. Founded in 2012 as ZenPayroll, the company now serves over 400,000...
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The wild GTM story behind Metropolis raising $2B to take a company private and get their tech adopted faster | Alex Israel
Metropolis is transforming the century-old parking industry through AI-powered computer vision technology and an aggressive acquisition strategy. With over $2 billion in funding, the company has become the largest parking operator in the United States, serving over 4,600 locations across 400+...
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Dave Link: How ScienceLogic Used Partnerships to Build a $100M+ ARR AIOps Platform
ScienceLogic is transforming IT operations through its innovative AI ops and observability platform. With over $140 million in funding and a 22-year journey, ScienceLogic has evolved from a bootstrapped startup to an industry leader competing successfully against tech giants like IBM, HP, and...
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Andrew Farah: Density's Enterprise Hardware Playbook - When Great Product Becomes Great Marketing ($1B+ Valuation)
Density began with a simple problem: wanting to know how busy a coffee shop was before trekking through the snow. Eleven years later, it has evolved into a company measuring human occupancy across some of the world's most valuable real estate. In this episode of Unicorn Builders, Andrew Farah...
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Sean Henry: How Stord Built a Commerce Enablement Platform ($1B+ Valuation) That Rivals Amazon's Logistics Network
Sean Henry founded Stord at just 18 years old to solve a critical pain point for e-commerce brands: competing with Amazon's logistics capabilities. What began as a network of third-party warehouses has evolved into a comprehensive commerce enablement platform that helps brands deliver Amazon-like...
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The Long Road to IPO: Randy Lipps' 30-Year Journey Building Omnicell
Omnicell pioneered automation technology in healthcare, transforming from a startup in Randy's house to a publicly traded company worth over $3B. In today's Unicorn Builders episode, Randy shares his journey from identifying a critical need in healthcare while his daughter was in the ICU, to...
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Joshua Motta: How Coalition Created the "Active Insurance" Category ($5B Valuation)
Coalition has revolutionized the cyber insurance industry by creating an entirely new category called "active insurance." From its founding in 2017, Coalition has grown to become North America's largest cyber insurance provider, surpassing incumbents who had been in the market for over 20 years.…
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Oren Kaniel: The GTM Story of AppsFlyer ($400M in ARR)
Welcome to another episode of Unicorn Builders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Oren Kaniel, CEO & Co-Founder of AppsFlyer, a mobile attribution and marketing analytics platform that has raised over $300 Million in funding. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation:...
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Satyen Sangani: The GTM Story of Alation ($1.7 Billion Valuation)
Welcome to another episode of Unicorn Builders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Satyen Sangani, CEO & Co-Founder of Alation, a data intelligence platform that has raised over $340 Million in funding. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation: Category Creation Challenges:...
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Robert Nishihara: The GTM Story of Anyscale ($1+ Billion Valuation)
Welcome to another episode of Unicorn Builders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Robert Nishihara, Co-Founder of Anyscale, an AI compute platform that has raised over $250 Million in funding. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation: Anyscale's Origin Story: The company...
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Dimitri Sirota: The GTM Story of BigID ($1.25 Billion Valuation)
Welcome to another episode of Unicorn Builders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Dimitri Sirota, CEO & Co-Founder of BigID, a data security and compliance platform that's raised $350 Million in funding. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation: BigID's Origin Story…
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Doug Winter: The GTM Story of Seismic (Nearly $400M ARR)
Welcome to another episode of Unicorn Builders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Doug Winter, CEO & Co-Founder of Seismic, a sales enablement platform that has raised $450 Million in funding. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation: Early Vision of Sales Enablement: Doug...
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Jason Zintak: The GTM Story of 6sense ($5.2 Billion Valuation)
Welcome to another episode of Unicorn Builders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Jason Zintak, CEO of 6sense, the world's leading revenue AI platform that has raised over $500 in funding. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation: Evolution from Predictive Scoring to…
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Rich Liu: The GTM Story of Navan ($9 Billion Valuation)
Welcome to another episode of Unicorn Builders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Rich Liu, CEO of Navan Travel, part of Navan, a global travel and expense management platform that's raised over $1.5 Billion in funding. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation: Company...
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John Kim: The GTM Story of Sendbird ($1+ Billion Valuation)
Welcome to another episode of Unicorn Builders. In today's episode, we're speaking with John Kim, CEO & Co-founder of Sendbird, a customer communications platform that has raised $220 Million in funding. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation: Founding Journey: John co-founded...
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Chen Amit: The GTM Story of Tipalti ($8.3 Billion Valuation)
Welcome to another episode of Unicorn Builders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Chen Amit, CEO & Co-Founder of Tipalti, a finance automation platform that has raised over $8 Billion in funding. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation: Founding Journey: Chen founded...
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Philip Cutler: The GTM Story of Paper ($1.5B Valuation)
Welcome to another episode of Unicorn Builders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Philip Cutler, CEO and Founder of Paper, an edtech company that has raised $390 Million in funding. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation: Transition from Educator to Entrepreneur: Philip...
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Mohit Aron: The GTM Story of Cohesity ($1.3 Billion in ARR)
Welcome to another episode of Unicorn Builders! Today, our unicorn builder is Mohit Aron, founder of Cohesity, a data security and management platform that's raised over $955 million in funding. Mohit shares the journey of building Cohesity from a focused VMware backup solution to a comprehensive...
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Henry Kim: The GTM Story of Swiftly ($1B+ Valuation)
Welcome to another episode of Unicorn Builders — Centaur edition. In this episode, I chat with Henry Kim, Co-founder and CEO of Swiftly, a retail technology platform that has raised over $200 million in funding. Key Topics Discussed: Swiftly's mission to empower brick-and-mortar retailers with...
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Ariel Katz: The GTM Story of Sisense ($150M+ ARR)
Welcome to another episode of Unicorn Builders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Ariel Katz, CEO of Sisense, an embedded analytics platform that's raised over $275 Million in funding. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation: Microsoft Journey: Ariel spent 21 years at...
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Steffen Tjerrild: The GTM Story of Synthesia ($1 Billion Valuation)
Welcome to another episode of Unicorn Builders. In today's episode, we're speaking with Steffen Tjerrild, Co-Founder, CFO & COO of Synthesia, an AI video platform that has raised over $150 Million in funding. Here are the most interesting points from our conversation: Early AI Eureka Moment:...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Learn from GTM journeys of B2B tech founders who’ve built companies worth more than $1 billion. This show is brought to you by FrontLines.io
HOSTED BY
FrontLines.io
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Unicorn Builders have?
Unicorn Builders currently has 82 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Unicorn Builders about?
Learn from GTM journeys of B2B tech founders who’ve built companies worth more than $1 billion. This show is brought to you by FrontLines.io
How often does Unicorn Builders release new episodes?
Unicorn Builders has 82 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Unicorn Builders?
You can listen to Unicorn Builders 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 Unicorn Builders?
Unicorn Builders is created and hosted by FrontLines.io.
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