Growth Journeys

In this episode of Growth Journeys, TCV General Partner Neil Tolaney speaks with Hotmart Co-Founder and CEO João Pedro (JP) Resende about the challenges (and opportunities) of bootstrapping a business in Brazil without any outside capital, how Hotmart is empowering today’s creators to pursue and monetize their passions, and the value that comes with building and nurturing an engaged creator community. Hotmart is one of the world’s leading digital enablement platforms with a diverse and fast-growing ecosystem of 35+ million creators and consumers. Its all-in-one, cloud-based technology platform integrates the features and functionalities that creators of all sizes need to build, run, manage, and grow their digital businesses.

Joining a founder-led fast-growth technology company as an outside CEO isn’t an easy task. While Steve Munford [https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-munford-2984261/] had prior experience in taking the helm at founder-led companies, he started his current role as CEO of global identity verification provider Trulioo [https://www.trulioo.com] just as countries were locking down at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Further complicating his new role was that when Steve joined, Trulioo was embarking on an effort to scale go-to-market and product distribution across multiple geographies. In today’s episode of Growth Journeys, Amol speaks with Steve about how he has approached global operations at Trulioo at a time of exponential growth. He takes us through Trulioo’s strategy for understanding the nuances of the various new end-markets that it serves as it scales, and how Trulioo’s customer base is integral to how the company prioritizes go-to-market channels. Steve also provides us his best practices for building trust, communication and preserving a culture across a rapidly-growing multi-geo organization. Steve shares how Trulioo leveraging its core mission of empowering all seven billion people on the planet to participate in the global economy as a north star for its growth journey.

Scaling a company can sometimes feel like a high-speed dash to the top, making it easy to prioritize activities that yield immediate growth. But it can also take time to educate the industries that a company is transforming with tech, and even more time to build trust with prospective customers. In this episode of Growth Journeys, Clio CEO and founder Jack Newton shares the slow and steady strategy Clio took to win market leadership in the legal tech industry with TCV principal and Clio board member Amol Halekar. Key takeaways include investing in market education and community building, and using a robust partnership strategy to build a moat around your business. Amol and Jack also discuss how Clio maintained investor excitement to continue fundraising later rounds, and the importance of mission for customers, partners, and employees.

Revenue is the lifeblood of any business, yet sales planning in the fast-moving tech world remains challenging. New competitors can launch into your markets more easily than ever, while SaaS business models are making it harder to land and expand enterprise-wide contracts. In this timely episode of Growth Journeys, long-time B2B sales leader Mark Smith (NetScreen, Infoblox, Arista, Rubrik) shares veteran advice on sales planning with Kunal Mehta, a principal on TCV’s Portfolio Operations team. Key takeaways include basing near-term forecasts on long-term fundamentals and applying the power of propensity models to predict sales success. Mark and Kunal also explore the secrets of hiring and motivating successful salespeople, why technology is changing the sales cycle, and how to think about 2021.

Newsela’s founders were educators who imagined the equivalent of Spotify or Netflix for educational content in schools. They designed their SaaS offering for the practical realities of classroom instruction, seeded it with teachers across the country, and then leveraged teacher advocacy to win district-level contracts. When it looked like their high growth could be derailed by school closings during the pandemic, they pivoted to giving content away to demonstrate solidarity with their customers – and reached two-thirds of all schools in the country. Now Newsela is firmly entrenched in the new normal for K-12 education. In this fast-moving conversation, TCV’s Dave Eichler joins Newsela co-founder and CEO Matthew Gross to unpack the secrets of the company’s success.