From $0 - $3B | Peek Inside Crypto Unicorn Anchorage Digital
Release Date: 03/13/2023
The Secret To Achieving Product-Market Fit - With Lama.ai Founder
Billion Dollar Tech
“Something that doesn't slice the pie differently or steal someone else's breakfast, but something with a potential to grow the overall pie,” is Omri Yacubovich’s description of Lama.ai, of which he is co-founder and CEO. Lama.ai provides business lending to banks, credit unions, SaaS companies, fintech and B2B brands. Through his research, Omri found that 80 percent of businesses that applied for a loan through their primary banking relationship were declined. Alternative methods included exorbitant APRs that could reach as much as 400%, as well as a very high cost of acquisition and...
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How to Develop Emotional Intelligence - Public Company CEO Shares
Billion Dollar Tech
“You probably can’t overemphasize the importance of your co-founder relationship,” says Noah Abelson-Gertler, founder coach and former public company CEO, explaining that 50% of startups and scaleups that fail do so due to co-founder relationships. Co-founders have an intimacy that is like marriage without the romance—you experience highs and lows, make major decisions together, you’re dependent on each other, and can often spend more time together than you do with your actual spouse. That is why it is so important to be as thorough as possible in getting to know your potential...
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Top Hostage Negotiator Teaches You How to Be a World-Class Communicator
Billion Dollar Tech
“We're emotional beings that think, not thinking beings that feel,” says Scott Walker, leadership coach, former Scotland Yard detective and one of the world’s most experienced kidnap for ransom negotiators. Scott joins the podcast today to share what engaging in covert counterterrorism and kidnapping operations has taught him about communicating in life and in the corporate world. The process, Scott explains, is a matter of taking your emotions—as well as your ego—out of the equation. At the same time, you must be very aware of the other person’s emotions, what they want and need...
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A Revolution in Blue Collar Jobs - How Sh1ft Creates 10X More Opportunity!
Billion Dollar Tech
“We started to feel like there was something bigger here, that this could be transformational,” says Jason Radisson, co-founder and CEO of Sh1ft, which brings push button technology to blue collar and middle class work, and is transforming HR in the B2B spaces by implementing gig economy-style automation and efficiency. Sh1ft promises to eliminate 80 to 90 percent of a traditional HR employee’s role by resolving issues such as schedule inefficiencies and time fraud. Sh1ft is currently making great strides in the professions of engineering, construction, and nursing. Born to a...
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From $0 - $3B | Peek Inside Crypto Unicorn Anchorage Digital
Billion Dollar Tech
“What if we could do it better than anyone else in the ecosystem?” Nathan McCauley asked himself while co-founding Anchorage Digital, a unicorn assets platform that provides instantly settled key storage and custody—holding investments on behalf of investors—for digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Before starting this venture, he worked at financial services platform Square, where he performed what he called “financial security” for four years with his future Anchorage Digital co-founder Diogo Monica. There the two helped to design the digital card reader with Jack Dorsey....
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Magic Words: Master the art of persuasion | NYT Best Seller Jonah Berger
Billion Dollar Tech
New York Times bestselling author Jonah Berger’s cutting-edge research reveals how six types of words can increase your impact in every area of life: from persuading others and building stronger relationships, to boosting creativity and motivating teams. He labels them SPEACC (“speak,” phonetically), and they are crucial to understanding if one wants to be a more effective and charismatic speaker. Meanwhile, Jonah explains–using words like seems, think, should–-lessens the effectiveness of speech overall. More specifically, though, there are certain hedging phrases which yield more...
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The Entrepreneur Success Story of Tony Jamous [Secrets of Building Two Unicorn Companies]
Billion Dollar Tech
“What drives me is the mission,” says Tony Jamous, founder and CEO of Oyster HR, a business that, as Brendan puts it, is “stewarding the remote work revolution.” Oyster, Tony’s second unicorn company, works to allow businesses to hire anyone from around the world without restriction. With their needs fulfilled, companies can then focus on their growth. This starts with everyone establishing their mission, collectively and individually. As Brendan points out, being mission driven ensures that your business is solving an actual problem. Yet, so many workers don’t know why they are...
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$1.6B CEO Reveals Secret to Identifying Undiscovered Niches
Billion Dollar Tech
“I had one job, which was to get the data right. Why was that so freaking hard?” asked Barr Moses, co-founder and CEO of Monte Carlo, the world’s first data observability platform, discussing what motivated her to create the product. Having worked with data for 15 years, she realized so many people across the industry couldn’t seem to get it right, nor did they have a systematic, scalable way to make sure data was accurate. In the world we’re living in, where so many people have access to data, just a few minutes of inaccurate data can lead to poor customer experience and millions of...
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Peel Back the Curtain! How To Build a $3.7B Technology Brand
Billion Dollar Tech
“Harness builds software for teams that build software,” says Scott Sanchez, CMO of Harness. Scott and his team recognize that software developers at larger companies spend an increasing amount of time doing everything but coding. Harness provides a series of end to end products which ensure that that coding is high quality and delivered quickly and securely. He explains the importance of positioning and individuating in an industry in which an increasing number of people are selling a similar product. A large part of setting your business apart is providing thoughtful, valuable...
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From $0 to $3B Valuation - Marcelo Lebre, Co-Founder Remote.com
Billion Dollar Tech
“We knew we wanted to address the pain of remote work,” said Marcelo Lebre of the goal he and Job van der Voort shared when the two founded Remote.com in 2019. As it turns out, it was a worldwide pain. There were countless freelancers who were waiting to be matched with opportunities and vice versa. Remote.com scaled the problem on a global level so that the right talent could be pooled from anywhere. Currently, the majority of the site’s business is inbound and via word of mouth. As Marcelo points out, this is due to the power of the brand, but also of the pain itself. A major feature...
info_outline“What if we could do it better than anyone else in the ecosystem?” Nathan McCauley asked himself while co-founding Anchorage Digital, a unicorn assets platform that provides instantly settled key storage and custody—holding investments on behalf of investors—for digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Before starting this venture, he worked at financial services platform Square, where he performed what he called “financial security” for four years with his future Anchorage Digital co-founder Diogo Monica. There the two helped to design the digital card reader with Jack Dorsey. Wanting to learn more about the sales, marketing and development aspects of B2B business before starting their own company, he and Diogo joined Docker, a software platform that helps developers to build, run and share applications.
Nathan talks about working at Square with Jack Dorsey and Keith Rabois, their unique approaches to leadership, and what the experience at Docker was versus what he thought it was going to be. Brendan explains the problem with overindexing on opportunities to make what turn out to be largely unneeded products. Early on in his career, Nathan’s managers constantly evaluated him as having “irrational optimism.” He later learned about the power of being paranoid.
Nathan started Anchorage because he wanted to build a culture, one in which his employees could find a purpose and enrich their lives. With this motivation still at the forefront, he spends a lot of time interviewing potential employees. He explains the key to finding the right people who align with the company’s mission.
Quotes:
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“This idea of sitting around and waiting for good opportunities and then when you find them, putting everything into them. One of the things that would've happened if I decided to start a company just after Square is I would've probably gone after a smaller opportunity that wasn't as high leverage as Anchorage. And so I'm extremely grateful for the patience aspect of it. In terms of waiting for the right opportunity, that was a good fit for mine and my co-founders’ skillset. That's not to say that I didn't learn a ton from Docker. I actually did learn a ton from Docker too. But it's kind of a dual purpose of learning a lot, learning about enterprise sales, learning about marketing, but also not jumping into something that was not as big of an opportunity as it possibly could have been.” (24:29-25:18 | Nathan)
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“We had this idea of a very secure system without a problem that actually needed solving that way, the custody problem coming along was almost this conceptual model of an idea of a very secure system that finally had a use case that we could build towards. So the answer to that ends up being that we had a very clear product vision very early on what needed to get built, but we did not want to build an mvp. because we knew the very nature of the product was likely to hold non-trivial amounts of funds very early on. We didn't want to do anything less than good enough in the first version.” (29:44-30:27 | Nathan)
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“The most useful outlet for fear is to keep innovating.” (35:46-35:50 | Nathan)
Connect with Brendan Dell:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendandell/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendanDell
Instagram: @thebrendandell
TikTok: @brendandell39
Buy a copy of Brendan’s Book, The 12 Immutable Laws of High-Impact Messaging: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780578210926
Connect with Nathan McCauley:
Anchorage.com
Check out Nathan’s recommended books:
Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company by Andrew S. Grove
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780385483827
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781400077304
A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters by Julian Barnes
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780679731375
Raids on the Unspeakable by Thomas Merton
https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780811201018
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