20VC: The Most Successful Companies Are Not Where Employees Work The Most, How To Know When To Promote From Below Or Bring in External Candidates & Why It Is A Unique Advantage To Be Building A Company Outside A Tech Hub with Rick Nucci, Founder & CEO @ G
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 24 January 2020
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rick Nucci is the Co-Founder & CEO @ Guru, the knowledge management platform that delivers everything you need so you can spend less time searching and more time doing. To date, Rick has raised over $38m with Guru from some of the best in the business including Thrive, Emergence Capital, Firstmark, Slack and Salesforce. Prior to Guru, Rick was the Founder of Boomi, which defined and led a new segment as the first-ever cloud integration platform-as-a-service. Boomi was ultimately acquired by Dell where Rick went on to grow the organisation into the industry leader it is today.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Rick made his way into the world of startups originally and how he came to change the way we think about knowledge management with his founding of Guru?
2.) How would Rick describe his leadership style today? How has he seen his style change over the years? What have been those learnings and the inflexion points causing them? Does Rick believe can be learned as a leader? What does he recommend to founders wanting to become more empathetic?
3.) Culture is a fluffy and overused term, what does it mean to Rick? What has Rick done to purposefully build a very specific culture that he wanted to create? What specific initiatives have worked well? What have not worked so well? How does Rick think about culture maintenance with scale? What are the challenges with scaling culture?
4.) How does Rick think about the interview process when adding to the team at Guru? How do they literally structure it? What does their culture interview encompass? How heavily is it weighted? What specific questions do they ask and responses they look for? If it does not work out, what have been Rick's biggest lessons on letting people go?
5.) Rick is based in Philadelphia, often people say if you are not in a tech hub it is not possible to get the best talent, does Rick agree with this? In what roles does it make sense to hire from a tech hub for? What are the advantages of hiring outside of a hub? Fundraising wise, does Rick believe you have to have a presence in a core hub to raise from Tier 1 VCs?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Rick’s Fave Book: The 9 Types of Leadership: Mastering the Art of People in the 21st Century Workplace
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Rick on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We are back and this is Founders Friday on the 20 minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and you can see |
| 0:04.0 | more behind the scenes from us on Instagram at H. Debbings 1996 with 2Bs. It would be great to see |
| 0:09.1 | you there. But to the show today, and we're moving away from our usual Valley focus and moving |
| 0:13.3 | to the land of Philadelphia. And so with that, I'm thrilled to welcome Rick Nucci, found and |
| 0:17.3 | CEO at Guru, the knowledge management platform that delivers everything you need |
| 0:21.1 | so you can spend less time searching and more time doing. To date, Rick has raised over $38 million |
| 0:26.0 | with Guru from some of the best in the business, including Thrive, Emergence Capital, First Mark, Slack, |
| 0:31.9 | and Salesforce. Prior to Guru, Rick was the founder of Bumi, which defined and led a new segment |
| 0:36.8 | as the first ever cloud integration platform as a service, and Bumi, which defined and led a new segment as the first ever cloud |
| 0:38.0 | integration platform as a service, and Bumi was ultimately acquired by Dell, where Rick went on |
| 0:42.6 | to grow the organisation into the industry leader that it is today. |
| 0:45.9 | I'd also want to say a huge thank you to Ryan at Thrive, Jacob and Emergence and Jason at Slack |
| 0:49.9 | for some fantastic questions suggestions today. I really do appreciate that. |
| 0:53.9 | But before we move into |
| 0:54.8 | the show today, this episode is brought you by Silicon Valley Bank. For over 35 years, Silicon Valley |
| 0:59.8 | Bank has been the Bank for visionaries of all kinds, people and businesses who've revolutionized |
| 1:04.6 | everything from software to social media, from workspaces to wine. With nimble banking services |
| 1:09.8 | and solutions, Silicon Valley Bank helps |
| 1:11.9 | startups adapt to the changing needs of a growing company. Learn more at SVB.com backslash next. |
| 1:17.8 | That's Silicon Valley Bank, Ideas Bank here. Let's face it, though, also, everyone not only needs banking, |
| 1:23.8 | but everyone today wants to start a podcast, but man, the incumbent tool set sucks for creating |
| 1:28.4 | podcasts, take my word for it. And that's why I love Descript so much. Descript is the brand new way to |
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