The Operators – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Many founders and investors talk about being mission-driven, but Eren Bali truly walks the walk. He's created two separate companies that have had a dramatic impact on increasing access to vital services. He co-founded and served as the CEO of Udemy, a $3B+ online education company, before creating Carbon Health. Carbon Health makes world-class healthcare personal and accessible by bringing technology into the workflow of digital and in-person primary care.

Carbon Health just recently closed on a Series C funding of $100 million after expanding from seven states to twenty-seven states in under twelve months. In this episode, Eren shares his journey from an underprivileged upbringing in the mountains of Turkey to creating leading Silicon Valley companies expanding access to education with Udemy and healthcare with Carbon Health. Don't miss it!

Ruben Harris wants you to succeed. Like other guests on The Operators, he left behind a successful career in finance to build a company that helps people. For Ruben, this came in the form of Career Karma, the #1 destination for career advice, and the easiest way to find a job training program. Bridging the gap between education programs that need candidates and prospective students that don't know where to start, Career Karma makes education accessible practically and effectively.

Ruben is also the host of the wildly successful podcast Breaking Into Startups, a show about getting into tech from non-traditional backgrounds. 

In this episode, he gets into the details of who to pitch, how to talk about your startup, and how Career Karma has raised each of its financings, including getting into YCombinator and raising a Series A from Initialized Capital.

In this episode, you’ll hear from Sam Parr, the co-founder and CEO of The Hustle, one of the fastest-growing email newsletters, along with Rich Jaroslavsky, the Vice President of Content and Chief Journalist at SmartNews, a news aggregation startup that recently achieved a unicorn valuation.  

Our discussion touched on some of the most important questions in digital media:

• What opportunities are there for new media entrants
• How it is impossible to start a successful media company today without having a strong grasp of how technology can be leveraged
• How the hardest problems in media today center around distribution and monetization
• Why content creation is actually one of the easier problems to address
• How increasingly the medium is the message: the iPhone changed media consumption and increasingly it looks like how we consume audio is changing the delivery of media, consumption, and monetization
• An analysis on the current state of media and their predictions on where media is headed

Rich Jaroslavsky began his media career as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal before becoming the national political editor as a White House correspondent. He was instrumental in bringing the Wall Street Journal online years ago. For the past 25 years, Rich has been involved in digital news at wsj.com and Bloomberg and is currently at Smart News, where he is Chief Journalist and the VP of Content.

Sam Parr is the co-founder and CEO of The Hustle, a beloved and rapidly growing newsletter, conference convener, and broadening digital media business.

In this episode, we’re talking about growth. Growth means different things at different companies, but correctly identifying avenues for sustainable and scalable growth is a priority for almost all companies. On this topic, we’ll cover:

1. Defining growth and being good at it
2. Managing growth without losing sight of the big picture
3. How companies should approach growth

To learn more, we spoke with two experts in the field of growth:

Isaac Silverman began his career as an entrepreneur before joining the team at Zynga to work on growth development. At Zynga, Isaac focused on some of the most cutting-edge approaches to growth and development. He then moved to Postmates where he focused on growth product and is now the head of rider growth at Uber.

Matias Honorato is currently a senior manager on the growth team at Tally, a growth-stage tech company, and also brings his own entrepreneurial roots and experience at companies like Earnest and Tradecraft.

If you're considering a career in growth or building a company,  you can't afford to miss this episode!

In this episode, we’re talking about hiring and recruiting, including why people take the risk of working at early-stage startups, when and how to work with recruiters, and how to make your first hires. 

A company’s first hires are often the hardest. Money is usually too tight to pay competitive salaries. There’s no recognizable brand or reputation yet, and people more often want to work at a company that their friends and family have heard of before. There’s also fair presumption of risk and unviability. Who wants to take a job that might not be around in a year?

Startup founders overcome these odds on a regular basis. To figure out how, we spoke with two experts, Farah and Kelly. Farah Sharghi-Dolatabadi began her career as a software developer and a financial advisor before moving into recruiting. She’s been a recruiter at startups in addition to companies like Google and Lyft. She’s currently a senior technical recruiter at Uber and an active career coach at HireClub. Kelly Kinnard is the Vice President of Talent at Battery Ventures, where she’s worked with startups like Wag, Coupa, Fastly, and Gainsight. She also has experience at top recruiting firms and in executive search at Oracle.

If you're going to be doing any hiring in the near future, you can't miss this episode!

In this episode, we’re talking about the vast world of communications. Early on, most founders and investors focus on driving positive coverage in the press. If they’re unfortunate or mess up, mitigating negative coverage may end being a goal too. But communications also includes more broadly considering how and what information to share what inside and outside of the company. It touches on domains like management, recruiting, marketing, and business development. It’s basically everywhere. It’s also a highly optimizable domain in that the difference between using the right words and the wrong words can be the difference between dramatic success and catastrophic failure. We spoke with three communications experts to learn more:

Sean Garrett was the first VP of Communications at Twitter. He previously worked for Governor Pete Wilson of California and has also co-founded two separate communications firms, with clients including Slack, Cisco, and Disney. He’s currently the Managing Partner at Pramana Collective.

Faryl Ury is a former reporter, with experience at NPR and the Associated Press. Her communications experience also began in government, working for a US Senator, before moving to Square, Uber, and then Dropbox for a marketing role. She’s now the Director of Communications at Aurora, a leading autonomous vehicle company, with investors including Sequoia Capital, Amazon, and Hyundai.

Adi Raval served as a journalist at both ABC News and the BBC, covering 9/11, the Iraq War, and the White House before moving into government. He was first a diplomat for the State Department, serving in Afghanistan, and then a spokesperson and Director of Communications at USAID. After leaving government, Adi was the top communications executive for the Bechtel Corporation, and most recently Head of Comms and PR for TaskRabbit. He’s also a term member for the Council on Foreign Relations.

Hear from two finance experts with experience from Calm, AdRoll, Morgan Stanley, Change.org, Zeus Living, and Duda as we unpack how to build a career in finance at a tech startup and how founders should be thinking about hiring and managing this function. 

Our guests for this episode are:

Stephanie Hsiung is the CFO of Duda, a new and exciting enterprise website builder. Prior to taking the CFO role at Duda, Stephanie served as the VP of Finance at Calm, the leading meditation and mental wellness app and recent unicorn. She was also previously the VP of Finance at Change.org, and was at AdRoll before that.

Mark Kang is the Head of Finance at Zeus Living, which is one of the fastest-growing providers of furnished housing for business travelers. He brings experience from venture capital, banking at Morgan Stanley, where he managed IPOs, and also spent time at Barclays.

This week’s episode features AirBnB's Global Product Director of Customer and Community Support Platform Products, Andy Yasutake, and Carta's Head of Enterprise Relationship Management, Jared Thomas.

AirBnB, one of the most valuable private tech companies in the world, has millions of hosts who trust strangers (guests) to come into their homes and hundreds of millions of guests who trust strangers (hosts) to provide a roof over their head.  

Carta, a $1 Billion+ company formerly known as eShares, is the leading provider of cap table management and valuation software, with thousands of customers and almost a million individual shareholders as users. Customers and users entrust Carta to manage their investments, a very serious responsibility requiring trust and security.

This week’s edition features Christiana Rattazzi, Head of Technology Marketing at WeWork, the leading coworking company with a valuation of $47 Billion and a rumored impending IPO after almost $8 billion in financing. Also joining the show is Elenitsa Staykova, VP of Marketing at Brex, another fast growing unicorn that is the leading provider of credit cards to startups and tech companies. 

In this episode, Christiana and Elinitsa explain how marketing works, how to get into and succeed in a marketing career, and how founders should think about hiring and managing the marketing function. With their experiences at two of tech’s biggest and most innovative marketers, WeWork and Brex, this episode is packed with broad perspectives and deep insights. 

This week’s edition features Gülay Birand, UX Lead and Product Design Manager at Facebook, and Tim Rechin, Head of Design at Edmodo, the leading education technology company. Gülay and Tim share their experiences and explain design, UI/UX, how to build a career in these fields, and how entrepreneurs should think about them.

Gülay and Tim bring experience from other great companies beyond just Facebook and Edmodo, including the likes of Google, Amazon, Mint, and SAP. Having seen and grown in their disciplines from across a variety of companies and customer types, they share both broad and deep insights from the tech industry.