Founder Chats

A Holistic Approach to Financial Forecasting with Bijan Moallemi

About Bijan Moallemi: A graduate of UCSD, Bijan Moallemi has nearly a decade of experience building and leading finance functions at companies like Qualcomm and Palantir. He knew CFOs deserved access to better tools, so he co-founded Mosaic Finance to build the next generation of finance software for CFOs and their teams. Today, Mosaic has achieved a 3.5x increase in customer base, raised $18.5 million in funding with investors like General Catalyst and Founders Fund, and is deployed by the fastest-growing technology companies worldwide. About Mosaic Finance: Mosaic is a compass for business leaders, providing a real-time Analytics and Planning platform that helps teams get from data to decision — faster. Historically finance teams have spent the majority of their efforts in reactive mode, wrangling data to unlock basic facts about the past. A Strategic Finance Platform like Mosaic breaks that cycle by integrating data, automating analytics, and connecting teams so they can focus on the future. Show Notes: 01:00 start of Bijan Moallemi’s entrepreneurial journey 05:00 making the move to fast-growing tech sphere in the Bay area: facing new business challenges 14:00 the importance of building good financial foundations and structures 25:00 the iterative process of choosing a model for financial forecasting: testing and adjusting forecasting over the first couple of years 38:00 troubleshooting and dealing with the fallout of inaccurate financial models 47:00 attracting first customers early on and building the product around them to make sure that what you’re building matches their needs

Escaping the Analysis Paralysis of Managing Personal Finances with Will Peng

About Will Peng: Will Peng is the CEO and Co-Founder of Northstar, a financial wellness and benefits platform. Prior to founding Northstar, Will worked in Venture Capital and his firm was an early investor in Coinbase, Guideline, Even, and Oscar. Inspired by the positive change fintech can have on people’s lives, Will set out to solve the inequality of financial guidance. About Northstar: Northstar’s financial wellness program helps employees make the most of their total compensation, and helps companies support their teams at scale through onboarding, open enrollment, equity events, and more. Northstar has raised more than $10M from investors including M13, Foundation Capital, Workday Ventures, and Parade Ventures. Our employer customers include Zoom, Snap, NerdWallet, Superhuman, Virgin Orbit, and more. Show Notes: 1:30 Will Peng’s entrepreneurial journey 9:00 starting a career as a VC analyst 14:30 demonstrating proactivity when looking to switch careers 26:00 finding the right career direction through intuition and self-driven learning 30:00 most financial advice online is too broad to be effective - personal financial advice should begin with thinking through an individual problem as a case by case 34:00 the importance of having difficult conversations 44:00 developing an interest in FinTech infrastructure as an Asian-American immigrant 45:00 combating the culture of shame around personal finances 49:00 understanding how to handle stock options and making other large financial decisions

Ownership Mentality: How to Tackle Problems Proactively as a Growing Team with Jon Penland

About Jon Penland: With 6+ years of experience working remotely in the technology space, and 10+ years working with customer-facing teams across multiple industries, Jon stepped into the role of Chief Operating Officer at Kinsta, where his responsibilities include hiring and onboarding as Kinsta has grown from a team of 4 to a team of more than 250 worldwide. While he didn't write his first line of HTML until he was 25 years old, within 3 years Jon was working full-time in technology, first as a freelance writer for technical websites and eventually as a Support Engineer at Kinsta. From there, he moved into management roles, initially as Chief Customer Officer and now as the COO. When he's not driving company-wide strategy and finding ways to help our distributed team stay connected, Jon can be found in rural Georgia with his wife and five kids. You can find him at @jonrichpen [https://twitter.com/jonrichpen] on Twitter. About Kinsta: Kinsta is a premium managed WordPress hosting provider that makes running your site simple. Our services are powered by cutting-edge technology like Google Cloud Platform and Cloudflare, and we take support seriously.  Whether you run a website, online shop, agency, or enterprise, Kinsta’s premium hosting offers top performance. At our core, we're a group of WordPress experts on a mission to make the best hosting platform the world has ever seen. Join the growing club of 23,000+companies who made the switch to better, faster hosting at kinsta.com [http://kinsta.com/].

The Advantages of Open Source Platforms with Douwe Mann

About Douwe Mann: Born and raised in the Netherlands, Douwe Maan was introduced to computers early by his father, and picked up programming at the age of nine. While studying at Utrecht University, Douwe co-founded a SaaS startup that grew to $150k in ARR, which led to him joining GitLab in 2015 as employee number 10 after landing the parents of its CEO as customers. After graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Douwe spent six months traveling the world, visiting and working with 49 colleagues in 14 countries on 5 continents. In early 2020, Douwe took over as the General Manager of GitLab's internal Meltano project, which quickly gained traction and spun out of GitLab in early 2021 to become an independent startup under Douwe's leadership. Douwe currently lives in Mexico City with his wife, who he met while traveling the world, and their two cats. About Meltano: Meltano is an open source data operations platform that supports data integration connectors for over 300 sources and destinations. Originally an internal project within GitLab, Meltano spun out in early 2020 to become an independent startup with $4.2 million in seed funding from investors, led by Alphabet's GV. Today, Meltano has thousands of active monthly projects and is looking to bring the benefits of open source data integration and DataOps to a wider audience.

Cutting Time Wasters and Using Resources Efficiently with Bryan Clayton

About Bryan Clayton: Bryan is CEO and co-founder of GreenPal, an online marketplace that connects homeowners with local lawn care professionals. GreenPal has been called the “Uber for lawn care” by Entrepreneur magazine and has over 200,000 active users completing thousands of transactions per day. Before starting GreenPal, Bryan Clayton founded Peachtree Inc. which had a $10 million annual revenue before it was acquired by Lusa holdings in 2013. In 2020 GreenPal generated $20 million in annual revenue. About GreenPal: GreenPal is an online marketplace connecting homeowners with lawn mowing professionals that want their business. Get 5 bids in minutes, pick the pro you want, and schedule and pay all online or with the mobile app. Founded by landscaping professionals to make the lawn care industry easier and more efficient for homeowners and vendors. Show Notes: 01:15 Growing a high school job into a highly successful medium-size business 5:45 Hiring the right number of employees 6:30 Developing methods to minimize wasting time and other resources 10:30 Calculating how much profit every employee adds, and what the diminishing margin of return for manpower is 11:10 Working in the business vs. working on the business – making time for strategizing 13:20 Applying blue-collar business learnings to tech entrepreneurship 15:00 Triaging problems and focusing 100% of resources on the current major issues, one at a time 16:30 Doubling down on what’s already working, rather than fixing what’s not working, especially when it comes to customer acquisition 19:20 Inviting frictionless feedback and doing customer support yourself as a founder: closing the gap between customer logic and founder logic 20:20 Thinking about what you can be the best in the world at, and focusing all business resources on that one thing 25:20 Understanding your value to your customers: sometimes it’s less about the actual service itself, and more about selling people back their time 27:30 As a business that connects customers to contractors, catering to both sets of needs: customers want easy access to services, vendors want a sticky platform that enables fast payments, repeat business, marketing automation etc 29:15 Creating incentives for vendors to perform well starts with accountability: providing performance metrics such as number of repeat bookings, reliability and quality ratings etc 36:20 Identifying business problems and development goals, and implementing weekly strategies for success 44:30 Creating one or two highly specific goals and getting your whole team to commit to them