Why CEOs need to think more like athletes, with investor Byron Deeter
Masters of Scale
WaitWhat
4.6 • 4.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2026
⏱️ 38 minutes
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Summary
Byron Deeter has spent two decades at the epicenter of tech as an investor with Bessemer Venture Partners. His portfolio includes some of the most innovative companies in the world, from Anthropic to Waymo to Canva. He talks with host Jeff Berman about his advice for both founders and investors in this moment of AI transformation, why CEOs need to think more like athletes, and more.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Founders ship faster on deal. Set up payroll for any country and minutes, hire anyone anywhere, and get visas handled fast, so you stay focused on scaling. |
| 0:10.9 | Deal takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance so your team can grow without borders. |
| 0:19.2 | It's why more than 40,000 fast-growing companies trust |
| 0:21.8 | deal to move fast. Visit deal.com slash M-OS. That's D-E-E-E-L.com slash M-OS. |
| 0:31.2 | As your company scales, the hardest part isn't ambition, it's alignment. That's why Atlassian built the teamwork collection, an |
| 0:39.6 | AI-powered teamwork platform designed to help teams move faster together. By connecting Jira, |
| 0:46.0 | Confluence, Loom, and Rovo, teams can easily align work to real business goals, plan and track |
| 0:52.0 | progress together, remove knowledge silos, and access the real magic of AI plus human collaboration. Visit atlasian.com slash team changer to learn more. That's A-T-L-A-S-S-I-A-N dot com slash team changer. |
| 1:14.6 | When you have people pushing their agenda or their pet things or trying to help and you can just |
| 1:19.5 | see the CEO's head exploding in the meeting, it's, I think, also important to draw |
| 1:24.9 | line and pull back because life's too short and these companies |
| 1:30.9 | are running so fast. |
| 1:33.6 | Byron Dieter has spent more than two decades investing in some of the world's most innovative |
| 1:38.9 | companies, from Anthropic to Waymo to Canva and beyond. |
| 1:44.6 | Don't find things that are doing okay and going to fix them so that you go from good to great. |
| 1:50.3 | Go find the teams in the business that's already great and make them excellent |
| 1:53.5 | or help them just stay excellent if they're already there so that the slope of line stays bigger. |
| 1:59.5 | This is Masters of Scale. |
| 2:01.5 | I'm your host, Jeff Berman. |
| 2:02.9 | This week on the show, Byron Dieter. |
| 2:05.5 | After founding and exiting a pioneering company in the early days of cloud software, |
| 2:10.3 | Byron moved on to become an iconic investor. |
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