20VC: YC's Ali Rowghani on Leadership Lessons From Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull and Jack Dorsey & The 3 Traits All Truly Successful Leaders Share
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2017
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ali Rowghani is a Partner @ Y Combinator, the world’s most successful accelerator with portfolio companies including the likes of AirBnB, Dropbox, Stripe, Zenefits, Twitch, the list goes on. At YC, Ali leads the Continuity Fund where has made investments in the likes of Segment, Convoy and Lob, where he also sits on the board of all 3. Prior to investing with YC, Ali spent 4 years at Twitter, starting as CFO before becoming COO. Whilst at Twitter, Ali saw the company scale from $0 revenues to over $2Bn and 20m users to close to 300m users. Before Twitter, Ali was the CFO @ Pixar Animation Studios.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ali made his way from CFO @ Pixar and COO @ Twitter to now leading YC's continuity fund?
2.) Ali describes a story of his time at Pixar working with Steve Jobs? How did he carry himself both as a leader and an operator? What was it about Steve that makes Ali say he is the most impressive exec he has ever worked with?
3.) Having seen the likes of Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull, Jack Dorsey in action what have been Ali's biggest takeaways with regards to what makes the truly great leaders? Why does Ali believe there are 3 traits all great leaders share? What are they?
4.) How does Ali look to bring that experience to his role now, investing with YC Continuity? How does that affect his mindset and evaluation when assessing investment opportunities today?
5.) Why does Ali believe that too many startups have been damaged by the amount of capital they have raised? As a former CFO, how does Ali analyze the capital being raised today and some of the burn rates in the valley?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Ali’s Fave Book: Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
Ali’s Fave Blog: Bill Gurley: Above The Crowd
Ali’s Most Recent Investment: Segment
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ali on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com.
Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You are listening to the 20 minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings. You can find me on Snapchat |
| 0:03.9 | at H. Stebbings with 2Bs to see all things behind the scenes with us. But to this week on the show, |
| 0:08.9 | and I'm very, very excited to be doing a feature week on the world's most successful accelerator, |
| 0:12.9 | Y Combinator, the organisation behind the likes of Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, Dropbox, and many more |
| 0:18.6 | incredible companies. So joining us in the hot seat today, |
| 0:21.3 | I'm thrilled to welcome not only a very special man, but a man who's had a front row seat for the |
| 0:25.3 | creation of some truly game-changing companies of the last decade, Ali Raugani, |
| 0:29.9 | CEO of the YC Continuity Fund, where he's made investments in the likes of segment, |
| 0:34.4 | convoy and lob, where he also sits on the board of all three companies. |
| 0:38.0 | And prior to investing with YC, Allie spent four years at Twitter, starting as CFO before becoming |
| 0:43.0 | C-O-O. Whilst at Twitter, Ali saw the company scale from zero dollars in revenue to over $2 billion |
| 0:48.3 | and 20 million users to close to 300 million users. And before Twitter, Ali was the CFO at |
| 0:54.0 | Pixar Animation Studios, one of my personal favourites. |
| 0:56.8 | And I do also want to say a big thank you to previous guest, Sasha, at Lendup, for the intro to |
| 1:01.0 | Allie today, without which this episode would not have been possible. |
| 1:04.0 | But before we move into the show today, if you're a founder or operator, your most important |
| 1:07.8 | job is people operations, whether that be hiring execs, developing managers, |
| 1:12.2 | or retaining top talent. And that's why you need lattice. Latus is the number one performance |
| 1:16.6 | management solution for growing companies. With lattice, it's easy to launch 360 performance review cycles |
| 1:22.1 | as often as you want. And you also get an incredible continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and one-on-one meetings to ensure employees get feedback between reviews. |
| 1:32.5 | So find out why the likes of Coinbase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay, trust Latis as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. |
| 1:41.9 | That's lattice.com, the number one performance management |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Twenty Minute VC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Twenty Minute VC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.