Building Breakthroughs

There will be a day when we wonder how people ever died in cars. Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig were “Made in Detroit” before they came to Silicon Valley and worked at companies like General Motors and Bosch before Google Maps and Android Auto. Today, they’re fast-forwarding us all to a better future.

Applied Intuition
Peter Ludwig & Qasar Younis

Building Breakthroughs

Before Lyft was Lyft, it was called Zimride and Logan Green ceremoniously only ate beans until they could raise money. But when everyone in San Francisco started talking about the Lyft cars with the pink mustaches, we knew those days were behind us. Billions of rides later, they’ve forever changed the game in transportation.

lyft
Logan Green & John Zimmer

Building Breakthroughs

In 2009, Todd McKinnon and Freddy Kerrest foresaw the cloud's growing importance but weren’t sure how to find product-market fit just yet. But they persevered. As Todd has said, “Sometimes you have to believe even when you don’t believe.” A decade later, Okta hit 100M users—an extraordinary feat for B2B software.

Okta
Todd McKinnon & Frederic Kerrest

Building Breakthroughs

In Bogotá, Rappi's co-founders started with a bold idea: delivering anything locals desired. To test the idea, Simón Borrero pitched cyclists at busy intersections. He even personally delivered a burger and roses for a marriage proposal. This hands-on ethos helped drive Rappi’s rise as Latin America’s everything store.

Rappi
Simon Borrero, Felipe Villamarina, Sebastian Meja

Building Breakthroughs

Manny Medina shows how “immigrants get the job done.” Raised on a shrimp farm in Ecuador, Manny came to the USA knowing computer languages better than English. He set out to build a new recruitment platform, but when cash started to run low they built an internal tool to make their sales team more efficient—and Outreach was born.

Outreach
Manuel Medina

Building Breakthroughs

Nat Friedman was on a worldwide sailing trip when he and Miguel de Icaza learned there was a chance to spin the Mono open-source framework out of Novel and start a new company. Great opportunities don’t follow neat timelines, so he and his wife, Stephanie, ended their sailing trip abruptly and headed home. Along with Miguel, they incorporated Xamarin. Five years later, Microsoft acquired Xamarin, where Nat rose to become the CEO of GitHub. Now, Friedman is a leading AI investor. He also runs an AI grant program, providing funding and compute resources to top AI founders.

Xamarin
Miguel de Icaza & Nat Friedman

Building Breakthroughs

In 2007, Justin Kan walked into a coffee shop with a camera on his hat and a backpack full of networking gear and pitched Justin.tv, “a reality-show that livecasts my life on the Internet.” We weren’t sure about the idea but we were sure about the team. Thankfully, Justin.tv pivoted into Twitch, which served 1.35 trillion minutes of content in 2022.

Twitch
Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, Kyle Vogt

Building Breakthroughs

In the early days, we debated whether to call it Twttr or Voicemail 2.0. Turns out, if you build something that people love, the name might not matter. Trillions of posts later, the radical idea to limit users to 140 characters or less has changed the rules in media, politics, culture, and technology.

X
Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams & Biz Stone

Building Breakthroughs

Long before Chegg was a public company, it faced an existential challenge – it couldn’t raise money to buy the textbooks students were desperate to rent from them. Co-founder Osman Rashid knocked on doors—venture firms, banks, and debt providers. But none opened. So, he bought $3 million worth of textbooks with a dozen American Express cards to satisfy customer demand. Sometimes, the only way out is through.

Chegg
Osman Rashid, Aayush Phumbhra, JoshCarlson
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We started a movement that put seed investing on the map and made it a permanent part of venture funding. Back then we had skeptics of our own, so we know what it’s like to have doubters. But we also know what it’s like to turn them into believers.