For the 77th episode of our podcast, I interviewed David Cancel, CEO & Founder of Drift.
David is a product minded founder with a proven track record of success at building companies. His last four companies—that being Compete, Lookery, Ghostery, and Performable—were all acquired. Looking back at HubSpot’s acquisition of Performable, it ended up being a key ingredient for the company’s future success.
David’s current company, Drift, is the first and only conversational marketing platform. The company has raised over $100M in funding from Sequoia Capital, CRV, and General Catalyst.
In addition to being a successful founder, David is also an angel investor, mentor, author, and a podcast host of Seeking Wisdom. If you haven’t listened to Seeking Wisdom, you definitely need to check it out. It’s definitely one of my favorite podcasts.
Thus in this episode of our podcast, which is the longest one to date, we cover a lot of topics like:
- Why David keeps building companies.
- Growing up in New York and the start of his career at Bolt, which was an incubator building truly visionary products during the early days of the Internet.
- The background story on Compete and Performable.
- Building the engineering and product function at HubSpot, including his philosophy on hiring without job descriptions.
- The story of Drift and how they are disrupting the way businesses buy from other businesses.
- Why there has been such an emphasis on building Drift’s brand from the early days of the company.
- His thoughts on building a company’s culture.
- The two books every entrepreneur should read.
- How he builds out his schedule and tips on time management.
- Plus, a lot more.
If you're interested in learning more, you can check out Drift's open positions here.
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Keith Cline is the Founder of VentureFizz. Follow him on Twitter: @kcline6.
