We sat down with Cockroach Labs’ (last valued at $5B)  Spencer Kimball to talk about the value of the CEO coach to a startup founder, the key factors making this relationship effective, and why being honest with your team is critical for the company’s success.

Cockroach Labs is the creator of CockroachDB, the most highly evolved, cloud-native, distributed SQL database on the planet. Helping companies of all sizes — and the apps they develop — to scale fast, survive failures, and thrive everywhere. CockroachDB is in use at some of the world’s largest enterprises across all industries, including some of the most recognized companies in banking, media & entertainment, retail, and technology. Headquartered in New York City, Cockroach Labs is backed by Altimeter, Benchmark, Greenoaks, GV, Firstmark, Index Ventures, Lone Pine, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, and Workbench. 

Web: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cockroach-labs/

CEO Pod: https://www.venwise.com/

CEO coach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markteitell/

We sat down with Patricia Thaine to talk about the current state of the privacy space, identifying PII with high accuracy, generating synthetic personal information, and what’s the right culture for building a privacy-focused company.

Patricia is the co-founder and CEO of Private AI. Started by privacy and machine learning experts from the University of Toronto, Private AI’s mission is to build the privacy layer for software. 

0:00 - The state of data privacy

2:16 - Private AI approach to remove private information

11:48 - Generating synthetic personal information

14:00 - Case studies

20:30 - Optimizing NLP models to run efficiently and annotating data

23:57 - Starting Private AI, recruiting customers, raising funds

34:20 - Acquiring the initial dataset to train the models

36:50 - The culture for the privacy-focussed company

42:30 - The future of the privacy space

Links:

Web: https://www.private-ai.com

Blog: https://www.private-ai.com/blog/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/private-ai/

At Dawn we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com   

Contact us at forward@dawn-gv.com 

We sat down with Jiminny’s Tom Lavery to talk about building a product loved by customers (Jiminny is rated 4.7), applying AI to analyze sales calls, customer success as a key differentiator, mortgaging a home to fund the business, and why it makes sense for the CEO to spend 60% of your time talking with your customers.

Tom is the CEO and founder of Jiminny. Jiminny is the conversation intelligence platform that records, transcribes, and analyzes sales calls to help teams coach at scale, win more deals and smash targets. With Jiminny, teams take the next step toward quicker ramp-up time, enhanced pipeline visibility, higher win rates, and ultimately more revenue for the business. Jiminny raised $19M to date.

The audio version is available everywhere you listen to podcasts. 

https://anchor.fm/forward-by-dawn/

0:00 - What challenges Tom faced as a sales leader, that led him to start Jiminny

3:29 - Jiminny’s capabilities

09:41 - What does success look like with Jiminny’s implementation

14:20 - Customer success function as a massive differentiator

16:12 - Building a product that loved by customers

19:20 - How to stay focused on the customer as the organization scales

25:40 - Jiminny’s origins 

28:49 - Getting first customers

30:50 - How to pick the right features for your MVP

34:22 - AI capabilities

38:17 - Fundraising seed vs. series A

44:31 - Tom’s vision for Jiminny

Links:

Web: https://jiminny.com/ 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomlavery7

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomlavery7/ 

At forward we invest in visionary leaders who move the world forward. Learn more at https://dawn-gv.com 

Contact us at forward@dawnglobalventures.com