Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan – Details, episodes & analysis

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Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan

Sequoia Capital

Business

Frequency: 1 episode/12d. Total Eps: 13

The CEO rulebook is getting rewritten. Brian Halligan, Sequoia partner and co-founder and longtime CEO of HubSpot, sits down with some of the CEOs who are defining the new one—from hypergrowth AI-native startups to 150-year-old behemoths. Whether you’re an early-stage founder or a scale-up CEO, Brian will be digging for advice you can use on the long strange trip of your own CEO journey.

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🇬🇧 Great Britain - business
04/04/2026
#100
🇨🇦 Canada - business
19/02/2026
#84
🇨🇦 Canada - business
18/02/2026
#76
🇨🇦 Canada - business
17/02/2026
#67

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https://www.youtube.com/sequoiacapital
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Score global : 58%

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Bayer’s Bill Anderson: Turning a 168 Year-Old Tanker Like a Speedboat

Thursday, February 12, 2026 • Duration 01:12:48

Bill Anderson runs Bayer, a 160-year-old pharmaceutical giant that had 100,000+ employees when Bill took the helm. In just two years after becoming CEO, he flattened 11 layers of management, expanded managers' direct reports from 6 to 90, and eliminated annual budgeting in favor of 90-day cycles. Bill offers up some gems on how to scale without becoming bureaucratic, explains why "professional managers" kill startups, why peer feedback beats manager reviews, and why bureaucracy isn’t a virus that infects healthy companies but rather something that grows from within the heart of your org chart. If you're scaling from 100 to 1,000 employees and want to avoid the death spiral that slows most growing companies, this is essential listening. Bill's created a playbook for organizational transformation that challenges what you think you know about building companies.

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The Wartime CEO: Vlad Tenev of Robinhood

Thursday, January 29, 2026 • Duration 43:24

In this episode, Vlad Tenev pulls back the curtain on what it takes to lead through the kind of crises that would break most CEOs. From waking up at 5 AM to raise $3 billion in a few hours during the GameStop frenzy to navigating a 90% stock price drop, Vlad shares how he stays unflappable when everything is falling apart. We go deep on why "it's always wartime" should be your default mindset, not the exception. Vlad breaks down how he maintains breakneck speed at scale, why he limits planning to days instead of weeks, and how product events create forcing functions that keep thousands of employees moving with startup urgency. He discusses the counterintuitive truth that, if you need something done fast, you should give it to your busiest person. We also explore the mechanics of rebuilding trust after very public failures, why co-CEOs might actually work better than investors think, and how Vlad stays connected to customers despite leading 15,000 employees. This conversation is essential listening for any founder trying to build resilience, any operator at a scaling company, or anyone who wants to understand what separates good CEOs from legendary ones.

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Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg: Why You Should Reinvent Yourself Every 4 Months

Thursday, January 15, 2026 • Duration 56:59

This might be my favorite episode yet. Harvey’s Winston Weinberg is the canonical 2026 hypergrowth CEO. He takes us inside what it's really like to scale from zero to $190M run rate in just a few years. What stands out? His obsessive intensity and willingness to do uncomfortable things on a weekly basis. Winston shares how he cold-messaged thousands of lawyers to land his first customers, why he deliberately chose the hardest enterprise law firms as his first target customers, and how he thinks about hiring and org structure when everything breaks every four months. We also explore his unconventional background - he wasn't a developer, was new to the legal industry, and figured out sales from scratch. It's raw, honest, and incredibly practical for any founder navigating (or hoping to navigate) the chaos of hypergrowth.

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Palo Alto Networks’ Nikesh Arora: Why Context Switching is a CEO’s Most Critical Superpower

Thursday, January 8, 2026 • Duration 01:04:38

Nikesh Arora is one of the most fascinating CEOs in tech. He didn’t come up through cybersecurity. He wasn’t a founder. And when he took over Palo Alto Networks, he openly admits he didn’t know what cybersecurity even meant. Today, under his leadership, Palo Alto has become one of the most successful platform companies in enterprise software. In this episode, Nikesh and I go deep on what it actually means to be a modern CEO. We talk about why founders should sometimes not listen to customers, why most M&A fails, and how Palo Alto built a multi-platform business by betting big (and early) on second acts. Nikesh breaks down his very unconventional approach to acquisitions, where founders run the acquiring company’s teams, not the other way around. He explains how platform companies are built one decisive product insight at a time, why “more features” is often a trap, and how great CEOs balance product obsession with go-to-market reality. We also spend time on leadership psychology: imposter syndrome, conviction, risk appetite, and how to project confidence while you’re still figuring things out, and how to remain physically and emotionally healthy while you do it. If you’re a founder, an operator, or an aspiring CEO thinking about second acts, platforms, or scaling yourself along with your company, this episode is a masterclass.

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Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon: What Startup Founders Get Wrong About the CEO Job

Thursday, December 18, 2025 • Duration 57:29

David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, says that no easy decisions reach the CEO’s desk - only “51/49” decisions. When I was leading HubSpot, I described the job as “choosing between two shitty options.” David discusses some of the tough calls he’s had to make in the CEO seat, including the difficult decision to wind down Goldman's consumer banking ambitions. His perspective coming from a 156-year old banking giant is a little different than the common Silicon Valley wisdom. Hear why he thinks experience is vastly underrated in Silicon Valley, why "smart enough" matters more than being the smartest person in the room, and why serendipity and timing play bigger roles in being a great CEO than people realize. David reflects on mentorship from Lloyd Blankfein and Hank Paulson and how he thinks apprenticeship culture will evolve with AI. There are some great, unexpected lessons here for founders who are scaling, confronting the messy reality of building enduring companies.

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Scaling AI Rocketships: ElevenLabs’ Mati Staniszewski & Lovable’s Anton Osika

Thursday, December 11, 2025 • Duration 57:10

This one’s a treat: two AI-native CEOs building some of the world’s fastest-growing startups from outside of Silicon Valley. Mati and Anton are navigating a world that’s moving 10X faster than it was when I was CEO of HubSpot. We dig into the realities of what it’s like scaling today: managing co-founder relationships when you're the only person you can complain to, delegating while staying in founder mode, building exec teams that blend experience with homegrown talent, and why lightweight planning rhythms are key when the AI tech stack changes every six months. Both share tactical advice on managing chaos, from email triage systems to no-meeting days. They open up on Europe's advantages (hungry talent, less competition) and disadvantages (thinner executive bench), the 9-9-6 work culture debate, and why the next generation of European founders could finally build trillion-dollar companies. I thought these guys shared an honest look at what it really takes to lead through hypergrowth these days.

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Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi’s Grown-Up CEO Playbook

Thursday, November 20, 2025 • Duration 49:20

When Intuit was born, the world ran on DOS. Forty years later it is a $180 billion powerhouse serving millions of small businesses, and Sasan Goodarzi has led its evolution from boxed software to an AI-driven platform. I’ve always admired Intuit’s track record with SMBs. I even had the chance to shadow one of its former CEOs, the legendary Brad Smith.In this episode, Sasan and I talk about what it takes to reinvent a legacy company, what he learned shadowing Amazon’s Andy Jassy, and why curiosity and grit matter more than raw talent. We talk about how to run a grown-up company without losing speed, from the mechanisms Intuit uses to challenge its own assumptions to the ways he stays close to customers through “follow-me-homes.” Sasan also shares his approach to winning in the SMB market, building effective channel partnerships, and creating second acts that actually succeed. He even tells the story of how Intuit was four years late to SaaS and still managed to come out stronger. Sasan shows that if you love the customer problem and keep disrupting yourself, you can stay young even after 40 years in business.

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Parker Conrad’s Revenge Fantasy

Thursday, November 13, 2025 • Duration 01:16:31

I didn’t think Parker Conrad would get up off the mat when he got ousted from his previous startup, Zenefits. No one in Silicon Valley did. Instead, Parker let his rage propel him into an all-consuming mission to prove the haters wrong and build Rippling, a $17 billion juggernaut that blows his prior success out of the water. Parker has advice for founders: from productively harnessing the chip on your shoulder, to maintaining fast operational velocity to why you need founder-minded people on your team instead of manager-minded people—even among your managers. And yes, he spills the dirt on Deel. Parker is one of the new greats who is tearing up the old CEO rulebook and writing his own. - Brian Halligan, Sequoia Capital

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Long Strange Trip hosted by Brian Halligan

Tuesday, November 11, 2025 • Duration 00:50

Brian Halligan–Sequoia partner and co-founder and longtime CEO of HubSpot—is on a quest to uncover the new rules of CEO-ing from the best CEOs in the world, from hypergrowth AI-native startups like Lovable and ElevenLabs to scaleup juggernauts like Robinhood and Rippling, to 150-year-old behemoths like Goldman Sachs.Watch at: https://www.youtube.com/sequoiacapital

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Jack Dorsey: Every Company Can Now Be a Mini-AGI

Thursday, April 2, 2026 • Duration 01:03:41

Jack Dorsey (Block CEO) and Roelof Botha (Sequoia partner and Block board member) join to discuss a bold claim they wrote about recently: the traditional corporate hierarchy isn't just inefficient — it's obsolete. Jack made one of the toughest calls in recent business history: cutting 40% of his workforce and rebuilding the company from the ground up around what he calls an AI "intelligence layer." We get into how that conversation went down, the math they used to land on a number, and why he's convinced that acting from a position of strength beats reacting from one of weakness. Jack breaks down his vision for simplifying into just three roles, and what it means to replace a pyramid org chart with a circle — AI at the center, and people at the edge. Roelof, who helped think through the restructuring, shares his perspective on how AI-native startups are building differently, and what CEO qualities are timeless. I've eliminated org charts before. I know how hard this is. But Jack is doing something I never had the tools to pull off. If you're a founder wondering whether your hierarchy is working for you or against you, this one will make you uncomfortable in the best way.

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Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

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Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Youtube1

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Youtube1

Apple Podcasts

Spotify