Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
The CEO rulebook is getting rewritten. Brian Halligan, Sequoia partner and co-founder and longtime CEO of HubSpot, sits down with some of the CEOs who are defining the new one—from hypergrowth AI-native startups to 150-year-old behemoths. Whether you’re an early-stage founder or a scale-up CEO, Brian will be digging for advice you can use on the long strange trip of your own CEO journey.
Episodes
Luca Ferrari: The Operating System Behind Bending Spoons
Luca Ferrari is co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, a serial acquirer of AOL, Vimeo and Evernote, Airtable, etc, that buys to hold forever, and whose only real edge is that it operates software companies better than almost anyone else.
Bending Spoons got 800,000 job applications last year and hired fewer than 300 people. Luca runs hiring the way a quant runs a portfolio — hundreds of signals
Databricks’ Ali Ghodsi Never Wanted to Be CEO. Now He’s Among the Best
Ali Ghodsi never wanted the CEO job. In 2015, Databricks had a wildly successful open source project, $1.5 million in revenue, and a board quietly interviewing other candidates behind his back. He got the seat as a trial run. They didn't even give him a CEO salary. When I had Ben Horowitz on this podcast and asked him who the best CEO in Silicon Valley is outside his own portfolio, he didn't hesit
The Philosopher CEO | Clay Co-Founder Kareem Amin
I had Kareem Amin all wrong. When Clay first crossed my radar, I thought he was too laid-back: no chip on his shoulder, not the hungry founder I expected to win. Clay has since exploded.
Kareem builds from what he calls "a place of wholeness" rather than lack — nothing to prove, no enemy to beat. It makes him sound like a philosopher, but the operating instincts underneath are sharp. He s
Kalshi’s Tarek Mansour vs. the Federal Government
Tarek Mansour calls himself a paranoid risk manager - the guy who can list 20 ways a hot air balloon will go down before it leaves the ground. Then he bet his entire company on suing its own regulator.
Kalshi spent years walking through the desert. The CFTC pocket-vetoed its election markets ahead of the 2022 midterms, people left, and the company took a layoff while the government piled on audit
David Senra: Mute the World and Build Your Own
David Senra has spent a decade reading the biographies of 400+ founders for his podcast Founders - and lately he's started interviewing the living ones face to face. He joins me to share what all of them actually have in common, and it isn't what Silicon Valley thinks.
His one word is focus — what he calls "mute the world and build your own." He walks through Dana White buying the UFC for $2 mill
Notion’s Ivan Zhao: The Refounder
Ivan Zhao, founder and CEO of Notion, joins me to introduce a new contender in the founder mode debate: jazz mode. Ivan has a different take than Jack Dorsey's circular org chart or Brian Armstrong's player-coach approach. He thinks hierarchy is human nature, and that you can't flatten it away but you can build a company that improvises like a jazz band instead of marching in formation. Notion has
Surviving Twitter's Growing Pains: Ex-CEO Dick Costolo
Dick Costolo took over as CEO of Twitter in 2010, inheriting what he calls "the drama queen of hypergrowth companies." Hired as the adult in the room behind founders Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams, Dick spent five years dragging Twitter from a chaotic collective into a public company, and learned a scale-up CEO playbook in the process.
We get into how he killed group decision-making and replaced it
What Founders Can Learn About Excellence From MIT President Sally Kornbluth
Sally Kornbluth is president of MIT and one of the best crisis leaders I've come across. Within a year of starting the job, she got summoned – not invited – to testify before Congress alongside the presidents of Harvard and UPenn. You know how that went. The others didn’t make it. Sally did, and she came out stronger.
We spend a lot of time on sustaining meritocracy, which I think is one of the h
Jack Dorsey: Every Company Can Now Be a Mini-AGI
Jack Dorsey (Block CEO) and Roelof Botha (Sequoia partner and Block board member) join to discuss a bold claim they wrote about recently: the traditional corporate hierarchy isn't just inefficient — it's obsolete. Jack made one of the toughest calls in recent business history: cutting 40% of his workforce and rebuilding the company from the ground up around what he calls an AI "intelligence layer.
Oura’s Tom Hale: What People Don’t Tell You About Being CEO
Tom Hale didn't originally set out to be a CEO - then he put it on his bucket list to prove something to himself. Now he runs Oura, the Finnish health tech company behind the most talked-about wearable on the market - the Oura ring. In this conversation, we get into what the job actually feels like from the inside (spoiler: the kibble-to-champagne ratio is not what you think), and Tom shares some
The Most Founder Mode CEO Working Today Isn’t the Founder: Opendoor’s Kaz Nejatian
Kaz Nejatian reveals how he left Shopify to pull off a highly unusual feat: refounding a struggling public company in just 16 days. From first attempting to take the company private and then becoming CEO with an unwavering commitment to prioritizing product, Kaz shares his unconventional playbook and approach to life.
We go deep on why most enduring companies are built on "first derivatives" of
Ben Horowitz On What Makes a Great Founder
A16z’s Ben Horowitz joins me for a raw, unfiltered conversation on what actually breaks founder CEOs, and what separates the great ones from the rest.
We unpack founder mode, where it works and where people are taking it too far. Ben shares why overly deferring to experienced executives creates politics and fiefdoms, but avoiding senior talent altogether is just as risky. Founder mode is not ab
Bayer’s Bill Anderson: Turning a 168 Year-Old Tanker Like a Speedboat
Bill Anderson runs Bayer, a 160-year-old pharmaceutical giant that had 100,000+ employees when Bill took the helm. In just two years after becoming CEO, he flattened 11 layers of management, expanded managers' direct reports from 6 to 90, and eliminated annual budgeting in favor of 90-day cycles.
Bill offers up some gems on how to scale without becoming bureaucratic, explains why "professional ma
The Wartime CEO: Vlad Tenev of Robinhood
In this episode, Vlad Tenev pulls back the curtain on what it takes to lead through the kind of crises that would break most CEOs. From waking up at 5 AM to raise $3 billion in a few hours during the GameStop frenzy to navigating a 90% stock price drop, Vlad shares how he stays unflappable when everything is falling apart.
We go deep on why "it's always wartime" should be your default mindset, no
Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg: Why You Should Reinvent Yourself Every 4 Months
This might be my favorite episode yet.
Harvey’s Winston Weinberg is the canonical 2026 hypergrowth CEO. He takes us inside what it's really like to scale from zero to $190M run rate in just a few years. What stands out? His obsessive intensity and willingness to do uncomfortable things on a weekly basis.
Winston shares how he cold-messaged thousands of lawyers to land his first customers, why
Palo Alto Networks’ Nikesh Arora: Why Context Switching is a CEO’s Most Critical Superpower
Nikesh Arora is one of the most fascinating CEOs in tech.
He didn’t come up through cybersecurity. He wasn’t a founder. And when he took over Palo Alto Networks, he openly admits he didn’t know what cybersecurity even meant. Today, under his leadership, Palo Alto has become one of the most successful platform companies in enterprise software.
In this episode, Nikesh and I go deep on what it actu
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon: What Startup Founders Get Wrong About the CEO Job
David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, says that no easy decisions reach the CEO’s desk - only “51/49” decisions. When I was leading HubSpot, I described the job as “choosing between two shitty options.”
David discusses some of the tough calls he’s had to make in the CEO seat, including the difficult decision to wind down Goldman's consumer banking ambitions. His perspective coming from a 156-year
Scaling AI Rocketships: ElevenLabs’ Mati Staniszewski & Lovable’s Anton Osika
This one’s a treat: two AI-native CEOs building some of the world’s fastest-growing startups from outside of Silicon Valley.
Mati and Anton are navigating a world that’s moving 10X faster than it was when I was CEO of HubSpot. We dig into the realities of what it’s like scaling today: managing co-founder relationships when you're the only person you can complain to, delegating while staying in f
Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi’s Grown-Up CEO Playbook
When Intuit was born, the world ran on DOS. Forty years later it is a $180 billion powerhouse serving millions of small businesses, and Sasan Goodarzi has led its evolution from boxed software to an AI-driven platform.
I’ve always admired Intuit’s track record with SMBs. I even had the chance to shadow one of its former CEOs, the legendary Brad Smith.In this episode, Sasan and I talk about what
Parker Conrad’s Revenge Fantasy
I didn’t think Parker Conrad would get up off the mat when he got ousted from his previous startup, Zenefits. No one in Silicon Valley did. Instead, Parker let his rage propel him into an all-consuming mission to prove the haters wrong and build Rippling, a $17 billion juggernaut that blows his prior success out of the water. Parker has advice for founders: from productively harnessing the chip on
Long Strange Trip hosted by Brian Halligan
Brian Halligan–Sequoia partner and co-founder and longtime CEO of HubSpot—is on a quest to uncover the new rules of CEO-ing from the best CEOs in the world, from hypergrowth AI-native startups like Lovable and ElevenLabs to scaleup juggernauts like Robinhood and Rippling, to 150-year-old behemoths like Goldman Sachs.Watch at:
https://www.youtube.com/sequoiacapital
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