Episode 51: Peter Wang- Being a CTO
Peter is the Chief Technology Officer at Buzzfeed, overseeing Product Management, Engineering, Design, and Data teams across all portfolio brands. Peter has built both consumer and enterprise products and fundraised from a diverse range of investors across industries—health (The Mighty, backed by GGVC, Upfront, and WPP Health), SaaS (Buddy Media, backed by Greylock, acquired by Salesforce), media & e-commerce (Refinery29, backed by Stripes, WPP, Scripps).
Peter, in this conversation, talks about his journey as a CTO, leadership vs management, and his delegation mechanism, which Keith Rabois outlined in his essay How to be an effective executive and what has been learnt as an angel investor.
Episode 49: Sidu Ponnappa- Lessons from entrepreneurship & investing
Sidu Ponnappa is a serial entrepreneur and an angel investor. His most recent startup C42 Engineering was acquired by GO-JEK in 2015, with C42's founding team joining GO-JEK's board of directors. GO-JEK grew 900X in 18 months and became Indonesia's first unicorn in 2017. Sidu has experienced building and scaling businesses as a founder, CEO, and head of engineering, sales, marketing and HR.
Episode 46: James Keyes- Leadership through adversity
James served as the Chief Executive Officer of 7-Eleven and chairman and CEO of Blockbuster. James graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor's degree from the College of the Holy Cross. He also obtained an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1980. James is the founder of the 'Education is Freedom' foundation
Episode 45: Sourjyendu Medda: DealShare- Building a social e-commerce unicorn for Bharat
Sourjyendu is the founder and Chief Business Officer at DealShare.
After spending 15+ years with leading Retail and FMCG organisations such as Metro, Raymond and Britannia, Sourjyendu kicked off his startup journey at the age of 40 to build Bharat's first social e-commerce unicorn.
Episode 44: Taru Kapoor: Tinder- Solving a Hard Problem
Taru Kapoor is the general manager of Tinder and Match Group in India. In her previous stints, she has worked with Sequoia Capital and The Boston Consulting Group. Taru graduated from IIT Delhi with a B.Tech and M.Tech in Chemical Engineering and received an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School.
Episode 43: Shrishti Sahu- Investing in early-stage founders
Shrishti is the Managing Partner at SSV. SSV is a sector-agnostic family-office investing in early-stage companies. Through SSV, she has invested in 30 companies such as Plum, Kutumb, Chingari, Rupifi, Jar and 10Club.
Episode 32: Miten Sampat- How to build and scale tech ventures?
Miten is an engineer, inventor, investor and operator.He kicked off his career in Silicon Valley, then headed strategy for Times Internet, India’s largest digital products company with 600 million monthly users and is now building CRED, one of India’s fastest growing payments apps. He is also a graduate of Virginia Tech.