After the Round Closes: How to Leverage Your Investors
episode
Startup Success: A Podcast for Founders & Investors
31 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 14 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What background does Julia Austin bring to advising early‑stage founders?
Welcome to Startup Success, the podcast for startup founders and investors. Here you'll find stories of success from others in the trenches as they work to scale some of the fastest growing startups in the world. Stories that will help you in your own journey. Startup Success starts now.
Today I am joined by Julia Austin, who is an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. She's also a founder, author, executive coach, has built many startups, and she recently wrote a book that I have dug into and highly recommend to all founders listening. It's called After the Idea: What It Really Takes to Create. Create and scale a startup. Welcome, Julia. Thank you so much, Kate. It's great to be here. It's really great to have you because I dug into your book and I, you know, um our CEO has us read a lot of books, and they're very you know, strategic, high level, they don't get into like the nuts and bolts of what you really need to do. And I love your book because it goes into that. I mean, you have a lot on strategy and everything, but tactical detail, which you rarely see, right?
You really cover it all. It's awesome. I really enjoyed it. I want to get into your book a little later, but Before we do all of that, maybe if you could set the stage for all the founders listening and just kind of give us a brief overview of your background because it's pretty fascinating.
Thank you. Thank you. I'm happy to do that. And I appreciate all the kind words about the book. So I have a pretty unique background in that I came from an art undergrad degree, which back in the eighties involved a lot of programming when you're doing computer graphics. So I actually have some technical background and then followed that with a master's degree, a technical master's degree. So I started to build my technical chops. in the late eighties, early nineties and never imagined I'd be going into startup land and and doing the things I ended up doing. My whole career has been very organic and What's really led me in every direction has been working with amazing people, smart people, my favorite people to work with is super high EQ but brilliant technologists, solving hard problems and bringing some sanity to the to the hard problems.
So I joined Startup Land in the late nineties uh for the first real startup. I did some early stage businesses that you could call a startup, but the real one was Akmai Technologies, which I joined in nineteen ninety-nine. And that was back in the crazy internet bubble. And companies were going public with six million dollars in ARR and growing like bananas. And I joined that business because I was really fascinated with the internet. They were at the very big beginning of the internet. And I just thought it was really cool. And I wanted to be at the beginning of that. Loved the people that came out of MIT, brilliant founders, brilliant idea, uh, amazing team. I came in with one of those classic joiner jobs where they were like
I don't know, we'll call you release manager and just make us, you know, organized because they were getting ready to go public and we were not organized at all when I got there. So it was a very sort of vague, figure it out kind of job, but you really have to be comfortable doing when you're a joiner at an early stage, fast growing startup. And then it's we kinda went from there and I became their VP of engineering, which was a very deer in the headlights moment for me. Definitely wasn't prepared for that role and lots of lessons learned, but it was a really great opportunity to lead. big team for the first time and a few hundred people working for me. scaling the business and then the bubble burst.
We had a very sad loss of one of our co-founders on nine eleven. And so being resilient and and riding through that was was quite a lesson learned for us and brought a lot of the ideas around startup operations and how we build businesses to be sustainable through Crises, every startup has something. That one was pretty tragic, but but certainly there's always things that are happening and how do you really build a great culture and a great team and a great
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What background does Julia Austin bring to advising early‑stage founders?
0:01–5:00
2
How should founders decide when and how to communicate with investors after the check clears?
5:00–9:09
3
What strategies can founders use to disagree with investors while preserving trust?
9:09–12:26
4
How can founders extract maximum value from board members’ networks and expertise?
12:26–15:57
5
Why is transparent, regular reporting (monthly/quarterly) essential for board relationships?
15:57–19:45
6
When should founders hold one‑on‑one meetings with board members and what should they cover?
19:45–23:47
7
How can founders evaluate and act on board advice without blindly following it?
23:47–27:47
8
Why is culture, people, and team dynamics the hidden foundation for scaling a startup?
27:47–31:13
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Startup Success: A Podcast for Founders & Investors
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