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It's been about 9 months since we first conducted this interview with Naveen Jain.  If you haven't listened to Naveen's story yet, it has been one of our most downloaded podcasts of all-time, so it's worth a listen.  If you have listened, we've reproduced it, adding in some segments that were not in the first episode, so it's worth a second listen!Naveen grew up in India where he and his family had to relocate every 6 months due to dealing with poverty.  Resources were so scarce that Naveen remembers school being outdoors and not having proper utensils and tools to write/learn.  As he talks about in the episode, the love and care he received from his family outweighed all the difficult times.After college, Naveen came to the United States with just $5 in his pockets in search for a better future.  He worked at several Silicon Valley startups before joining Microsoft as a program manager.  After working for Microsoft for 7 years, he decided to quit and start an internet company called InfoSpace, which eventually led him to becoming a billionaire.Since then, Naveen has started 7 other businesses including most recently Viome, where he currently serves as the CEO.  Viome was founded on the question: "What really causes diseases/illnesses, and why can't we make diseases/illnesses a matter of choice?"  He has also co-founded Moon Express, which was founded on the question: "Why can't humans travel and live on the moon?"Today, Naveen is still one of just a few people on earth to own a private space company.

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This week, we have a  quick announcement to make!

Today's guest is Spencer Rascoff. If you're reading this you probably know who Spencer is, but in case you don't, he most known for co-founding Zillow Group and was the CEO for a long time before stepping down in 2019 to focus on his new ventures dot.LA and Pacaso. In his first startup experience, Spencer co-founded an online travel company called Hotwire which later sold to Expedia in 2003. After working at Expedia for some time he felt the need for a change and started Zillow with other ex-Expedia employees. He is the co-author of "Zillow Talk: Rewriting the rules of real estate" and the host of two podcasts "Office Hours" and "Dad I have a question." In this conversation we take you through Spencer's entire career journey including the highs and lows, and learning lessons along the way.

Today’s guest is the famous Dave Asprey: As seen on Bloomberg, The New York Times, Business Insider, Fast Company, CNN, Men’s Health, Rolling Stone, Vogue, Forbes and many more!He sold the first product EVER over the internet, was a top 100 influencer in cloud computing for 20-years, and is the father of what is called, biohacking.  You’ll want to be sure to stick around until the end to hear what Dave’s secret to success was at such a young age was. Throughout most of Dave’s early life, he was poor and that was a driving factor for his motivation to make money when he was really young.  He went to school for computer science, and worked in cloud-computing for 20-years before discovering his true passion.  Helping people hack their biology to tap into the unlimited potential of being human.  Today, he runs multiple businesses, but he is most focused on Bulletproof, the hundred-million-dollar venture-backed company that was started as a blog in 2011, and now reaches tens of millions of consumers with unique food products, award-winning podcasts, and best-selling books.

Joel is the Former CEO of SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment, one of the largest public entertainment companies in the world, Former CEO of Herschend Family Entertainment, one of the largest private entertainment companies in the world, the Former CEO of Saab Automobile, AND most importantly, the Author of one of the best books I have ever read called “Love Works: Seven Timeless Principles for Effective Leaders”, endorsed by Bill Haslam, Governor of Tenessee, Dan Cathy, President of Chick-fil-A, and congressman John Campbell.If you'd like to get Joel's book, please visit his website at www.joelmanby.com 

You'll want to listen in to this to hear how a girl who grew up in a household with 5 older brothers in Southern California went from not knowing what she was going to be when she grew up, to volunteering to work at a company that had a terribly negative culture, to writing a very convincing letter to the CEO of then a small company called Tableau Software, to scaling Tableau from being a $5 million company to a $1 billion company as the Chief Marketing Officer.

Today’s guest is Jim Lico, the CEO of Fortive Corporation, it’s the Fortune 500 company based in Washington that you probably haven’t heard of before, well, until now of course!  Fortive has 18 subsidiaries including notable brands like Fluke and Tektronix. You’ll want to stick around for the entire episode to get a peek into what Jim’s childhood was like growing up in Detroit when General Motors was the biggest company in the world, you will hear Jim share some valuable experiences early in his career that he hadn’t shared before, and Jim shares with us that we should know if we aspire to be business leaders. In 2016, while Jim was working at Danaher, the executives at Danaher made a strategic decision to spin off Fortive as a separate company, and the reasoning behind it was that Danaher’s business was focused on life sciences and innovation in the medical space, while Fortive’s business was focused on technologies for industrial applications.  Since they had two distinct end consumers, they decided it was best to separate the entities.  Now, when that happened, Jim was asked to be the CEO of Fortive, and he would now be running a billion-dollar publicly traded business with 25,000 employees, something he admits, he wasn’t necessarily prepared for.  Today, Fortive has a market cap of almost 24 billion dollars!

You’ll want to listen to the entire episode to hear how Sarah went from being a pregnant 16-year-old, to graduating law school and becoming an unintentionally great negotiator, to quitting her job at a law firm based on, literally, a dream, to successfully scaling the number one SEO marketing software on the planet. 

Today’s guest is Gautam Gupta, Founder and former CEO of Naturebox, and current Partner at M13, a venture capital firm based in Santa Monica.  You’ll want to be sure to stick around, because Gautam shares a story about how he landed his first internship – and it has nothing to do with resumes or cover letters, he shares the story behind a company taking a chance on him to start a branch, and he shares the struggles of starting a business if you’re thinking about making a leap and taking the risk!

Christy grew up on the San Juan Island, a very small community of people in a town that actually had no street lights!After college, Christy got her first job at the wall street journal in advertising.  She knew she eventually wanted to go to graduate school, so she chose a company that would support that in the future.  During her time at the wall street journal, one male executive at the company discouraged her from attending graduate school.  Feeling unsure, Christy turned to her mentors and colleagues at work who were women.  That’s when she learned the importance of having peers at work who are eager to help you.A few years into her career, Christy went on to work for Claritas, a marketing company that helps businesses make data-driven business decisions.  She was looking for a job, and heard about the company through one of her friends who referred her and invited her to interview.  She was there for 8 years and one of the biggest learning lessons she describes was a time she realized she didn’t' need to rely on anyone for validation.After finishing her MBA in 1997, Christy when on to work for a several companies in marketing, then eventually landed at SAP Concur in 2013.  She would work her way up to becoming the Chief Marketing Officer there.Today, Christy is the Chief Marketing Officer of Pantheon Platform, a website operations platform for Drupal and WordPress, backed by a $100 million venture investment.

Dr. Dawn Graham holds a PhD in counseling psychology and is currently the Director of Career Management at the Wharton School of Business, the world's #1 business school in the world.She authored the book "Switchers" - How smart professionals change careers and seize success.If you are currently frustrated with the current methods of job-searching and looking for a new approach, visit our website at www.executalks.com and get in touch with us!

You’ll want to be sure to stick around for the entire episode, because Kelly dives deep into important career skills like storytelling, listening to other people’s stories, and how to strategically think about your next career move. Kelly Wright is the former Tableau Executive Vice President of Sales, and was actually the first sales person at Tableau.

You’ll want to be sure to stick around for the entire episode to hear how a kid that grew up in Morocco ended up in Gig Harbor selling coffee out of a van, then going broke and foreclosing on his home while he had a family, to accidentally starting a photo booth company that generates over $3 million in annual revenue and got placed on the Inc. 500 list, and how they were able to survive through the pandemic, being an events-based business.Almost a year ago, our country and our world completely changed with the pandemic changing our lives.  Sam’s livelihood relied on in-person events.  If there were no in-person events, how was he going to make a living? On March 11th 2020, Sam stayed up all night generating ideas of how he could somehow make money to keep his employees employed and how he was going to survive.  Within days, he launched “keep your city smiling,” a company that creates corporate gift boxes and care packages to support small businesses, something completely different from Snapbar, but something that would generate some kind of cashflow to keep Snapbar afloat.  It gave Snapbar just enough time to develop a virtual photo-booth software that they now use to make money and keep their employees employed.

Adam was born & raised in Marysville, WA, a town one hour north of Seattle.   His father was an entrepreneur and football coach, and his mother was a principal at a local high school.Adam always had an interest for math & science, so he pursued a degree in computer science from Portland State University, and after college, he landed a job working for a company that helped manufacturing facilities upgrade their electronics & software to help them be more effective.  He started to make observations about technology and it’s advancements. New technology in general like smartphones are constantly being innovated and updated.  Think about it, you probably get a smartphone upgrade every 2-3 years.  He realized that this was not the case in manufacturing.  There were (and still are) places he would visit where the technology hadn’t been updated for over a decade.  He realized there was a real opportunity to start advancing the technology in the manufacturing industry. Customers began asking Adam and his company if they could somehow relay information from the new machines they were installing back to their computers through the internet.  Adam and one of the business owners at his company went on a quest to validate the market.  So, they began interviewing potential customers all over the country asking them if this is something they also wanted.  Eventually, they decided to spin this “idea” out as a separate business, called Elevat IOT.  Elevat IOT helps manufacturing facilities connect their devices through the internet and makes sure information is being relayed in real time so that all employees in the facility understand what’s happening. 

Today’s guest is Vinay Bhagat, Founder & CEO of Trust Radius.  You’ll want to be sure to listen to this episode to hear how Vinay’s experience with racism growing up shaped him to be more empathetic, how Vinay addressed racial bias issues in the workplace, and ultimately, how being fired from a job was the best thing that ever happened to him.Vinay was born & raised in London and was the child of immigrants.  His mother was a teacher and his father was a car designer, and his parents loved to travel and camp at lots of different places.  Back when Vinay was growing up in London, there was still a great deal of racism, and he remembers being verbally abused and physically bullied very often in school.  He attended the University of Cambridge, and wanted to work for a big consulting firm after college.  Due to the ongoing racism during the time, Vinay couldn’t even land a first-round interview even though he was near the top of his class.  Since he did so well in school, he was able to get into Standford to pursue a master’s degree in engineering economic systems.  During his time at Stanford, he was approached by the same consulting firms to interview with them, the same ones that he couldn’t get a first-round interview with after graduating in London.  Vinay would not take this lightly – after he was hired on at Bain & Company, he worked hard to demonstrate how there was a racial bias in their recruiting process. After  Vinay got his MBA from the Harvard School of Business, he ended up at a computer software company in Austin, TX, as their director of e-commerce.  Before finishing his first year, Vinay openly disagreed with the CEO, and was fired because of it.  That would be the turning point for Vinay.  He says that was the best thing that could’ve happened to him, because he was now able to finally satisfy the entrepreneurial bug that had always been itching inside of him.  The first company he started was an online fundraising solution for nonprofits, making it easier for nonprofits to raise money. 

Taylor was born & raised here in the PNW.  He received his undergraduate degree in accounting from the UW, then went to go work for Blue Origin, which is where he found his passion for space travel.  Even though his job was in accounting for the company, he felt passionate about the mission of the company.After 3 years at Blue Origin, Taylor decided he would leave and join a startup in Texas that was working on building rocket-powered aircrafts to fly into space.  After the company had gone through financial struggles, which Taylor admits was one of the best experiences in his life, he decided he would move back to the PNW, and ended up at Systima Technologies. Today, Taylor is the CFO of Systima Technologies, a multi-million-dollar aerospace & defense company.

Tushar was born & raised in India to a stay-at-home mom and a father who was an engineer working for the government.  After high school, Tushar got his computer science degree from the Indian Institute of Technology.  During his time in college, he became fascinated with machine learning, so he started asking around his school to see if anyone was offering research-based internships in machine learning.  He got connected to a professor in Italy that was offering an internship.  After a while in Italy, his professor suggested he go to the U.S. and work for her twin sister who was also a professor at the University of Minnesota to pursue his PhD.  That's how Tushar landed in the U.S.He then went on to move to the pacific northwest to work for Microsoft.  Eventually, he became Chief of Staff before leaving to go back and get an MBA from Northwestern.  One of his classmates and good friends, Steve Lane, suggested they start a business around helping homeowners save energy in their homes.  They conducted some research and realized that the reason people don’t make investments to save energy in their homes is because it takes too long to recoup the energy upgrades.  They did find another problem though, and that problem would be the beginning of Flyhomes.  The typical homebuyer doesn’t have much transparency and ease with buying a home, so Flyhomes gives homebuyers more transparency and helps people buy homes much more easily through machine learning and technology. Today, Flyhomes has over 200 employees and has raised over $140 million to disrupt the home-buying process.

Bridget’s career journey begins when she was 5 years old. When her father brought home this brand-new piece of technology called, an apple computer ("apple 2e")  She was fascinated with how it worked and her curiosity for computers would continuously grow as she grew older.She went on to study computer science at Harvard University, and did her first job out of college was at this startup called Plumtree Software, where she would be given lots of responsibility early on in her career, and where she developed many meaningful relationships.  One of the people at Plumtree was Glenn Kelman, who was then Plumtree's co-founder, and now is Redfin's CEO (we've had him on the show before as well).9 years after leaving Plumtree, Bridget joined Redfin after working several different jobs at different companies.  During her childhood, Bridget had moved around a lot growing up, so she has a strong connection to Redfin’s mission of helping regular people buy and sell homes.  Ever since she joined Redfin in 2011, she constantly feels like she’s working on new and exciting projects that she finds meaning in. Today, Bridget manages a team of more than 200 engineers at Redfin, serves on the board of Premera Blue Cross, has been awarded many awards, some of which include: 50 Most Powerful Women in Tech (National Diversity Council), Women of Valor 2018 (awarded by U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell), Inman Real Estate Influencers of 2017, 40 under 40 (Puget Sound Business Journal), Leadership in Innovation and Technology: Innovator Award (Puget Sound Business Journal).

Nick was born & raised in Seattle, and after graduating from WSU, Nick had trouble finding a job that paid well, so he ended up working for a small company where he earned half of the average starting salary out of college at the time.  He credits a lot of his success to what he learned while working for a small company, saying that because he had to wear so many different hats early in his career, he learned so much about business than the average person even though he was paid less. Eventually, Nick started his first company "Konnects, Inc." that ended up failing and as he was looking around for a job, his wife told him she was pregnant.  As he was decluttering his house, he struggled to find a way to get rid of all kinds of stuff.  Then one day, he pitched the idea to his wife, and she would be the first “believer” in OfferUp.  She would encourage Nick to start this idea up and even though he had a baby on the way and wasn’t secure financially, he took a leap of faith in 2010, and never looked back. Today, OfferUp has been dowloaded almost 100 million times, has raised almost $400 million, and according to Pitchbook, is valued at $1.4 billion.