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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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
Bipul Sinha is the founder and CEO of Rubrik, a leader in zero-trust data security used by enterprises to defend against ransomware and to create global cyber resiliency. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with Bipul Sinha on his unusual path from India to Silicon Valley and his unique mindset as a startup founder:D
Guy Podjarney is the founder of Snyk, a leading security company building developer first security tools to help organizations develop fast & stay secure. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with Guy about the problem-solving approach he still carries with him from his time in the IDF and the threat of playing it too
Nir Polak is the co-founder of Exabeam, one of the most successful and valuable private cybersecurity firms currently valued at $2.4 billion. On today’s episode, Jon Sakoda speaks with Nir about how his time in the Israeli Defense Forces prepared him for the constant battles in the early days of a startup and the impor