Growthcap Insights

Welcome to the GrowthCap podcast where we chat with CEOs, investors and other key industry leaders to uncover insights and strategies for accelerating growth and succeeding in business. I am your host RJ Lumba. In this episode we chat with Gina Bianchini, the CEO and Co-Founder of Mighty Networks, which is a SaaS platform for creators and brands to start and grow communities. Gina shares her insights into the mission of Mighty Networks, the value of good investors and her entrepreneurial journey. The company is backed by Owl Ventures, Intel Capital, Sierra Wasatch Capital and others. We hope you enjoy the show.

Those working in financial markets see what’s coming, it’s the democratization of private investing.  Higher return opportunities in private equity are currently only available to sophisticated institutional and quasi-institutional investors, but that’s changing. Alex Robinson founded Juniper Square in 2014, to transform private equity with innovative software and solutions.  Today, the company is trusted by over 1,200 GPs to manage more than 200,000 investors and $1.5 trillion in assets.  Juniper Square has quickly become the leading provider of investment management solutions for commercial real estate, the company’s entry point into private equity. Alex shares with us his insights on real estate private equity and how his company offers an elegant solution to a once complicated problem.  Juniper Square has raised over $100 million and is backed by Redpoint, Ribbit Capital and Felicis Ventures. We hope you enjoy the show.

Mike Teti never planned on becoming an Olympian, never mind becoming one of the most dominant athletes and coaches U.S. rowing has ever seen.  His story, in many ways, exemplifies an American dream.  From humble beginnings in the city of Philadelphia, Mike took up rowing, a then unknown sport to him, through a friend’s suggestion.   It turned out that Mike had a real knack for rowing and through consistent hard work and gradual improvement he eventually found himself competing at national and international stages.  Mike never had visions of grandeur, he simply wanted to get better.  That simple philosophy took him to the pinnacle of success in a sport well-known for being one of the most grueling to excel in.   For nearly four decades, he led U.S. rowing and brought that community great success and great pride. Yet what’s most important to Mike Teti is not what he has achieved; it’s about the experience of being part of a team and helping that team build strength and character and ultimately win.   We hope

The war on talent did not really happen until now, the current year 2021, when millions of people left the labor force.  Now, more than ever in American history, companies are having to figure out how to effectively retain their top performers. Enter ClearCompany, the fastest-growing talent management system, which focuses on the specific problem of talent engagement and retention.  We chat with the company’s CEO Andre Lavoie, an entrepreneur and executive with deep experience building and scaling businesses.   He shares his keen insights on the talent market, how ClearCompany is different from other HR solutions, and the value of his capital partners, among other insights.  We hope you enjoy the show.  

Nigel Verdon is a three time FinTech founder - in 1996, he founded Evolution (now part of BAE Systems), in 2007, he started Currency Cloud, and in 2016, he began building his latest venture - Railsbank. Railsbank is a global Banking as a Service (BaaS) business that enables any company or brand to become a FinTech. The Railsbank platform enables marketers, product managers, developers, CEOs and founders to prototype, launch and scale financial products super fast through using an open finance platform, operations, regulatory licensing and rich set of simple APIs. Railsbank has raised over $120 million from leading investors including Anthos and Middlegame Ventures. We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode we chat with Peter Brodsky, Co-Founder and CEO of Hyperscience, a company which has transformed the way organizations ingest and parse data.   Peter shares with us his various insights on data technology, business and leadership.  He’s a cerebral CEO who has approached scaling in his own unique and effective way. We chat about the value of a great early investor, striving for an authentic culture and leadership style, and how perseverance is most often the secret to success. Hyperscience has raised over $190 million  from investors including Tiger Global, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark. We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode we chat with Innovaccer Co-founder and CEO, Abhinav Shashank, who shares his insights on how he built a global company from scratch, the power of having access to India’s engineering talent, and how his investors have played a key role in helping the company scale.   Innovaccer simplifies complex data from all points of care.  It streamlines information helping healthcare organizations make better decisions based on key data insights and predictions. The company’s solutions have been deployed across more than 1,000 care settings in the U.S., enabling more than 37,000 providers to transform care delivery and work collaboratively with payers and life sciences companies. We hope you enjoy the show.

When you’ve been around the block as much as Dimitri has, you start to notice things. Dimitri is a three time entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of BigID, a company that provides a complete solution for businesses seeking to connect to and manage all of its data regardless of the form the data is in or where it resides. Dimitri shares with us what it truly means to Know Your Data (KYD), his focus on the sales organization, and the importance of commitment and engagement to company culture. BigID has raised nearly $250 million of funding. Its investors include Advent International, Tiger Global, and Bessemer Venture Partners, among others. We hope you enjoy the show.

When Dean Sysman discovered that companies had no way of tracking the devices on its network, he knew it was a big problem that needed to be solved. Dean founded Axonius to make comprehensive and efficient cybersecurity asset management a reality for businesses around the world. Today, Axonius is one of the fastest growing cybersecurity companies and to date he’s raised nearly $200 million. Dean shares with us his entrepreneurial path and vision, insights on the Axonius asset management platform, and his leadership philosophy centered on growth. We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode we chat with the CEO of WebPT, Nancy Ham, whose clarity in leadership philosophy has served her well through many notable executive positions she’s held throughout her career. It’s her clarity and way of shining a light on key business levers that make her a CEO that some of today’s best investors seek to partner with. WebPT, the leading rehab therapy platform for enhancing patient care and fueling business growth, is currently backed by Warburg Pincus. We chat about the company’s maniacal focus on product and purpose, how private equity has helped her scale the company, the decision to go 100% remote, and who she thinks is the best CEO. Nancy also shares with us three valuable leadership insights: amnesty on the past, the ‘What’ vs the ‘So What’, and a relentless focus on the ‘Why’. We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode we chat with Dr. Yu Xu, who has been building TigerGraph, a platform for advanced analytics and machine learning on connected data, for nearly a decade.   After being in stealth mode for several years, Yu emerged to attract not only some of the largest and most sophisticated corporate clients but also some of the biggest and best investors. He’s raised nearly $200 million in just a few years from the likes of Tiger Global and Softbank and this is just the beginning.  His graphing technology is dramatically reducing the time it takes companies to analyze data and has an estimated market size of $100 billion. We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode Dwolla CEO Brady Harris and I chat about the FinTech space and how Dwolla saves businesses a tremendous amount of money by lowering transaction fees.  We also chat about his experience working with private equity and venture capital investors and who he thinks is the smartest person in FinTech. I particularly liked his insights on leadership and today’s best CEO. Before joining Dwolla, Brady was the President of Payscape, a FinTech company offering dynamic payment solutions to 50,000+ businesses with over $25 billion in payment volume.  Prior to Payscape, he was the President of Eliot Management Group, a business payments solutions provider.   I am your host RJ Lumba.  We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode, we chat with Mike Tuchen, the CEO of Onfido, which is the new standard for digital access. The company digitally proves a user’s real identity using artificial intelligence (AI), by verifying a photo ID and comparing it to the person’s facial biometrics. The company is backed by TPG Growth, Salesforce Ventures and other notable investors. Mike’s track record as a CEO is outstanding. He built the new leader in data integration and data integrity with Talend. He grew revenue by 5x and ARR by 6x to $250M in 6+ years, taking the company public in 2016. He also built the strongest team in its category of network security at Rapid7, delivering by far the fastest growth relative to its competitors and creating the leading company by new sales. He grew revenue by 10x in 4.5 years to $50M. In our conversation we cover some of his secrets to success. We hope you enjoy the show.  

In this episode we chat with Myles Anderson, Founder and CEO of BrightLocal, a marketing technology company whose suite of local SEO tools are used by over 90,000 customers. Myles shares with us his keen insights on how he built this now 190 person company from scratch and with very limited capital. He’s been able to scale consistently and profitably each year and puts people first in his approach to business. We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode we chat with Bill Martin, who has a long track record as a successful entrepreneur and investor, with a particular focus on financial technology and software businesses. Bill is currently the Chairman and Chief Investment Officer of Raging Capital Management, a private investment partnership primarily focused on public equities that he founded in 2006. Raging Capital Management is well-regarded for its small-cap and activist investments, substantial alpha generation on the short-side, and private investments. As an entrepreneur, Bill co-founded several successful financial technology companies, including Raging Bull and InsiderScore. He also co-founded and is a Senior Advisor to Princeton Equity Group (formerly Princeton Ventures), a provider of growth equity to private companies. We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode we chat with Aaron Klein, Co-founder and CEO of Riskalyze.  Riskalyze invented the Risk Number, which enables financial advisors to use data to construct portfolios most suitable for their clients risk profile.  Advisors, broker-dealers, RIAs and asset managers use the Riskalyze platform to create alignment between clients and portfolios, leverage sophisticated analytics to increase the quality of their advice, automate trading and client account management, and access world-class models and research. We discuss why today’s financial advisors often lack the necessary tools to adequately serve their clients, the methodology behind the riskalyze platform, and Aaron’s key tenets to scaling his company among many other topics. We hope you enjoy the show.  

In this episode with chat with Rick Wilson, the CEO of Miva, a leading comprehensive ecommerce platform.  With over 25 years of executive-level experience, Rick has a unique vantage point on the business shift to ecommerce, asserting that business society is still very early in the transition to ecommerce, with only about 18% of retail transactions currently conducted online. With comprehensive solutions for all facets of online selling, Miva delivers modern omnichannel ecommerce for every customer and every industry.  It has processed more than 100 billion dollars in orders. We hope you enjoy the show

In this episode we speak with Zack Rosen, the CEO and co-founder of Pantheon. We chat about how Zach’s curiosity and early experiences at the intersection of society and technology eventually led to building the leading WebOps (Website Operations) platform - one that empowers marketing and development teams to take control of their websites, while giving them the agility to win in the dynamic world of digital marketing. Pantheon powers over 300,000 sites and is trusted by thousands of marketing and development teams around the world. The company is backed by $100M of venture investment from Sageview Capital (Avalara, Demandbase), Scale Venture Partners (ExactTarget, Box, DocuSign, Bill.com), Foundry Group (SendGrid, Mapbox), as well as Baseline Ventures, First Round Capital, and Floodgate. We hope you enjoy the show

In this episode we speak with Aircall co-founder and CEO Olivier Pailhes. After a career in strategy consulting with BCG and corporate development with multinational company ArcelorMittal, Olivier embarked on an entrepreneurial journey. He co-founded Aircall, which was built to make phone systems as easy to manage as any other business workflow. He wanted to make it accessible, transparent, and collaborative. The company was founded in 2014, has raised over $100 million and has offices in New York, Paris, Madrid, Berlin and Sydney. At the time of the company’s founding, phone technology was not in vogue with investors, however the requisite tech infrastructure had just been developed to make improving phone systems a reality and Olivier jumped at the opportunity. We hope you enjoy the show.

In this episode we speak with Mike Morini, a 30-year software veteran experienced in growing and scaling enterprise software companies. Mike is the CEO of WorkForce Software, a cloud-based labor management platform that empowers employees and managers to digitize time and labor processes, optimize demand-driven scheduling, simplify absence management and enable strategic business insight. When approached about joining WorkForce Software, Mike saw an opportunity for the company to scale globally and attack a $20 billion market. More importantly, he saw a path to becoming number one. We hope you enjoy the show.