20VC: 3 Biggest Mistakes Founders Make When Scaling, Management 101 on Trust Building, Morale Maintenance and Hiring & What We Can Learn About Parenting From Nature Programs with Scott Dietzen
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 28 February 2022
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Scott Dietzen is Vice Chairman of the Board of Pure Storage and served as the Company’s CEO from 2010 to 2017. Under his leadership, Pure grew to thousands of employees and
completed an IPO in 2015. Dietzen is a four-time successful entrepreneur with WebLogic, Zimbra, and Transarc. Before Pure, he was President and CTO of Zimbra (now part of VMware), but originally acquired by Yahoo!, where Dietzen served as interim SVP of Communications and Communities. Prior to Zimbra, Dietzen was CTO of BEA Systems, where he helped craft the technology and business strategy for WebLogic that drove BEA from $61m in annual revenues prior to the WebLogic acquisition to over $1B.
In Today’s Episode with Scott Dietzen You Will Learn:
1.) The Journey to Pure Storage CEO:
- How did Scott make his way into the world of tech and startups?
- What was the hardest element of making the transition from CTO to CEO?
- What advice would Scott give to more technical leaders looking to make the move to CEO? Where do so many make mistakes?
2.) How To Build Trust in a Team:
- What are the most important ways that leaders can build trust with their teams?
- How can leaders be honest and share the hard truths without damaging role?
- What is the right tone to communicate both the big wins and big losses?
- Why does Scott always believe the losses teach more? How does Scott approach post-mortems?
3.) The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make:
- What are the single biggest hiring mistakes that founders make?
- What are the single biggest firing mistakes executives make?
- Why should founders sometimes say no to customers?
- How should founders approach investor selection and valuation for rounds?
4.) How to Optimise a Board:
- What specifically can founders do to optimise their board?
- What are the biggest errors founders make when communicating with their board?
- What is the value per word framework? How does it tell which board member is the best?
Item’s Mentioned In Today’s Episode with Scott Dietzen
Scott’s Favourite Book: The 22 Immutable Laws Of Marketing
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and wow, what an episode we have in store for you today. |
| 0:04.6 | A stall with four-time successful entrepreneur, one of the great operators in the Valley over the last 20 years. |
| 0:10.1 | I'm so thrilled to welcome Scott Dietzen, vice chairman of the board of Pure Storage, |
| 0:14.1 | and served as the company's CEO from 2010 to 2017, and it was under his leadership that Pure grew to thousands of employees and completed an |
| 0:22.7 | IPO in 2015. Before Pure, he was president and CTO of Zimbra, originally acquired by Yahoo. |
| 0:28.7 | And before Zimbra, Scott was CTO of BEA systems, where he helped craft the technology and |
| 0:34.0 | business strategy for WebLogic that drove BEA from 61 million annual revenues |
| 0:38.9 | prior to the WebLogic acquisition to over a billion. I'd also have to say a huge thank you to |
| 0:43.3 | Mike Spicer at Sutter Hill for the intro and Somesh Dash at IVP and Satishe at Redpoint for some |
| 0:48.5 | fantastic question suggestions today. But before we move into the episode today, our first sponsor |
| 0:53.2 | for this episode is Core Signal. |
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... |
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