Building Breakthroughs

Before Lyft was Lyft, it was Zimride. Back in those days, Logan Green ceremoniously only ate beans until they raised money. Billions of rides and tens of billions of dollars later, they’ve forever changed the game in transportation.

lyft
Logan Green & John Zimmer

Building Breakthroughs

Todd McKinnon and Freddy Kerrest struggled to find product-market fit in the early days. But they persevered. As Todd has said, “Sometimes you have to believe even when you don’t believe.” Ten years after their founding, they’ve built a business with over 100 Million registered users, an extraordinary feat in B2B software.

Okta
Todd McKinnon & Frederic Kerrest

Building Breakthroughs

In Bogotá, Rappi's co-founders started with a unique idea: delivering anything locals desired. To test the idea, co-founder Simón Borrero eagerly pitched cyclists whenever they stopped at busy intersections. He even personally delivered a burger and roses, posing as a waiter, for a customer's marriage proposal. This hands-on ethos helped drive Rappi’s future meteoric 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 with Communist parents in Ecuador, Manny came to the USA knowing computer languages better than English. Now, he heads the leading sales engagement company.

Outreach
Manuel Medina

Building Breakthroughs

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

Applied Intuition
Peter Ludwig & Qasar Younis

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, a young Justin Kan walked into a coffee shop with a camera on his baseball cap and a backpack full of networking gear. He said “Justin.tv is a reality-show that livecasts my life on the Internet.” Thankfully, Justin.tv pivoted from this clearly awful idea into Twitch, which now livestreamed over 1.1 Billion minutes in 2020.

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. Luckily, we got to buy a vowel. Trillions of tweets later, Twitter has changed the rules in media, politics, culture, and technology.

Twitter
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.