The Founder Formula

How do you know when you’ve built a winning culture? More importantly, how do you know when you’ve succeeded in instilling your core values across the entire company?

We’re talking this week to Ian Tien, CEO at Mattermost, an enterprise messaging workspace for teams to collaborate securely and effectively. His career has taken him through various areas of the entertainment industry including founding Spinpunch, an independent game studio.

Our conversation on this episode centered all around:

• Building a company to address a customer need when YOUR company is the customer
• Listening to the market
• Building open source platforms and why they’re so beneficial
• The 5 core pillars of culture at Mattermost and why each one is crucial to their success
  

Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or our website.

Last Episode we spoke with a man who has been called the Father of Video Games. Silicon Valley legend Nolan Bushnell. If you haven’t listened to that interview, make sure you go back and do so, because we talked all about his career up through his time at Atari, and ultimately the sale of Atari to Warner Media. So again, if you haven’t listened to that episode, make sure to go back and do that.

In part 2 of our interview with Nolan, we’re covering the second half of his career. With someone as storied and experienced as Nolan is, he wasn’t content to just sell Atari and fade into the background.

The second part of our conversation centered around:

• Nolan’s first adventure after leaving Atari
• His fascinating relationship with the iconic Steve Jobs
• Why Chuck E Cheese was more of an arcade business than a restaurant business
• The technology that he sold that became the bedrock of Pixar
• Did Steve actually solicit help from his Buddy Steve Wozniak
• How would Nolan describe their relationship?
• What percentage of Apple did Steve offer Nolan when seeking investment?
• Why did Nolan turn him down?

Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or our website.

When was the last time you or your company made a product video?

If you’re not using video to communicate your message, odds are that you’re missing a huge array of potential investors, consumers, and users. And before you make excuses about your company not being exciting, or your product not sexy enough for video, take a listen to this episode of The Founder Formula.

We’re talking this week to Evan Macmillan, CEO and Co-F ounder at Gridspace, an AI-driven, voice automation company. Evan has an incredibly rich background. He was born in Silicon Valley, and his dad worked at Sun Microsystems and rubbed shoulders with legends like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Evan went on to Stanford University at the same time as another famous alumni, Mark Zuckerberg. Evan even spent some time at Stanford's version of the Harvard Lampoon called the Stanford Chaparral

• Our conversation on this episode centered all around:
• What Silicon Valley USED to be like before it became the tech playground that it is today.
• What he learned from Product Design
• Seeing a problem that needed solving... Better voice based customer service
• leveraging video as a MUST for your company and your product
• What it looks like to scale, and the hardest part of scaling effectively
• lessons learned from his previous successful start-up

Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or our website.

For the 25th episode of The Founder Formula, we thought we’d pull out all the stops, and invite one of the most famous founders in Silicon Valley history on the show for a two part extravaganza. If you spent any amount of time in the 1970’s & 1980’s playing Atari, you have our guest, Nolan Bushnell to thank.

Nolan founded Atari, and brought video games to the home user, selling over 30 million units. As if changing the video game industry wasn’t enough, Nolan also went on to found Chuck E. Cheese, which at the height of its popularity, had over 200 locations. Not to mention the countless boards he sits on, advisory roles he’s taken, and incubators he’s founded.

The first part of our conversation centered around:

- The history of Atari and what led to it’s founding

- The concept of “eat your babies” (Don’t worry, it’s not what it sounds like)

- Straddling the line between leading a company and inventing forward at the same time

- How the University of Utah & Silicon Valley had equal impact on his career

Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or our website

Big tech companies have their pros and cons; but compared to the freedom found in startups, the choice was a no-brainer for Armon.

In this episode, we interview Armon Dadgar, Co-founder and CTO at HashiCorp, about how his company gained success through a balanced relationship with the co-founder, seed money from trusted investors, and changing hats as the CTO to best fit the specific concerns of the quarter.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Armon’s journey to startups & HashiCorp’s origin
• Startup success & funding through friendship
• Changing hats as a founder
• The HashiCorp Employee Exchange and COVID-19 epiphanies
• Building an open source business vs. open source project
  

Check out the resources below:

• Shout out to HashiCorp Co-founder and best friend to Armon, Mitchell Hashimoto
  

Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes at Apple Podcasts , Spotify, or our website .

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