The Decibel Podcast: Founders Helping Founders
The Decibel Podcast brings together founders from diverse backgrounds to share their personal journeys, words of wisdom, and lessons learned from the earliest years of their now successful startups. Creating something out of nothing is always a hard and messy process, and we demystify the most thrilling and challenging phase of every startup’s life: the very beginning. Hosted by Jon Sakoda, Founding Partner of Decibel, we go deep on how every founder survives the moments of crisis that kill others, overcomes personal challenges and adversity, and ultimately finds their way through the twists and turns on the winding road of a startup’s journey. Along the way, we debunk conventional wisdom about the VC and tech industry for first time founders. This podcast is produced by Decibel, an independent venture capital firm created in partnership with Cisco to push the conventional boundaries of early stage investing. Decibel combines the speed, agility, and independent risk-taking traditionally found in the top Silicon Valley venture firms, while offering differentiated access to the scale, entrepreneurial talent, and deep customer relationships found in one of the largest tech companies in the world. We invest in software startups at the earliest stage - visit www.decibel.vc to sign up for our newsletter, view more content, and learn more about our portfolio.
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Yaron Singer is the Founder and CEO of Robust Intelligence, the early leader in AI security that was recently acquired by Cisco. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with Yaron on how academics need to decide on the right time to start a company, why the capabilities and risks of AI for many industries need to be appr
Dmitri Alperovitch, Co-Founder and Former CTO of Crowdstrike: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
Dmitri Alperovitch is the Co-Founder and former CTO of Crowdstrike, one of the most valuable cybersecurity companies founded in the modern era that defined the Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) category. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with Dmitri on why email security was one of the best places to learn cybe
Chris Wysopal, Founder and CTO of Veracode: How Hackers Became the Celebrities of Cybersecurity
Chris Wysopal is the Founder and CTO of Veracode, a $2.5 billion software supply chain security company that pioneered the field of application security and was one of the first companies to embrace software as a service. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with Chris on his early fame as a cybersecurity researcher a
Kevin Mandia, Founder and CEO of Mandiant: Creating the Navy Seals of Cybersecurity Software
Kevin Mandia is the Founder and CEO of Mandiant, the widely recognized leader in cybersecurity incident response which was recently acquired by Google for $5.4 Billion. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with Kevin on why he founded Mandiant, and his personal journey to create a company to defend companies against c
Shay Banon is the Founder and CTO of Elastic (NYSE: ESTC) the open source leader platform that enables enterprise search, observability, and cybersecurity. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with Shay on his path to starting Elastic, and his success building a commercial open source company in the era of cloud provi
HD Moore is the founder and CEO of Metasploit and runZero, two cybersecurity companies that are widely used to identify assets and vulnerabilities in corporate environments. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with HD on growing up as one of the most famous cybersecurity hackers who had the courage to publish softwar