Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal, and today I'm here with two special guests,

Sokinder Zeeke Cassidy, who is the founder and CEO of the board list, as well as the founder and

CEO of Joyus, and she's actually been a serial entrepreneur for many years, and John Chena,

who is from the Silicon Valley Bank. Welcome, guys. Thank you for having us.

Thank you. So we're here to talk about, you know, we only have a short amount of time so we can talk about a lot of things.

But what I'd love to talk about is a little bit about your experiences, having been an entrepreneur,

and then also how you got to the board list, which I think is a really interesting initiative. And also why it's called the board list, because it doesn't, I feel like

we see a lot of lists out there, and I kind of want to unpack what that means. Sure.

All right. Well, in fact, I think being an entrepreneur and how I got to the board list are

fundamentally related, so it's probably natural to talk about one and the other. So I came to

Silicon Valley in 1997 after leaving Beeskei B in London, and I moved here and literally

slept on a friend's parents' couch in Mill Valley for three months until I found my first job.

And was lucky enough to have arrived at the right time, wanted to start a company, didn't know how, and ended up in maybe a year and a half later, through a series of events being introduced to four co-founders, engineering co-founders of a company called Yodley, which was in financial services software, who were looking for a business co-founder.

And so I started my first company,

gosh, in 1999, and was it Yodley for five years where we became the dominant provider of

actually financial data that was personal, right? And aggregated. Yodley subsequently went

public just last year and in the midst of getting acquired. And after Yodley, I went to Google for

six years where I feel like actually got to be an

entrepreneur because I spent a lot of time building different businesses at Google.

The first one was local.

So it was the first GM of local and maps.

And then went on to run many different countries internationally.

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