74 - Vlad Shmunis, RingCentral founder and CEO: A Multi-Billion-Dollar Midlife Crisis
Fortt Knox28 Apr 2018

74 - Vlad Shmunis, RingCentral founder and CEO: A Multi-Billion-Dollar Midlife Crisis

Vlad Shmunis just wasn't an enthusiastic employee. Didn't like following directions. And he had ideas – lots of ideas. Eventually, something had to give. So the entrepreneurial engineer took a leap, even though family members said he was nuts.

How'd that work out? Well today, Vlad Shmunis is the founder and CEO of RingCentral, a Silicon Valley company at the intersection of communication and cloud. The company went public just under five years ago. Today it's worth more than $5 billion.

If you're a long-time Fortt Knox listener, you're going to sense a pattern. Vlad is the third CEO I've had on who grew up in the former Soviet Union and eventually found his way to the U.S. There was Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov, Coupa CEO Rob Bernshteyn, and now Vlad. Their stories are all pretty different in key details, but similar in some important core ways, when it comes to education, values and … please listen for this one … the family's approach to risk.

If you or someone you know is thinking about taking a leap to start your own thing, but you're not quite sure, listen to Vlad's story.


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Avsnitt(147)

75 - Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO: The Vision for Power in Cloud and AI

75 - Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO: The Vision for Power in Cloud and AI

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7 Maj 201836min

73 - Rafat Ali, Skift founder & CEO: A Long Journey to Paid Content and Beyond

73 - Rafat Ali, Skift founder & CEO: A Long Journey to Paid Content and Beyond

Rafat Ali has done something remarkable in an era where it's really tough to make money telling people the truth. He built and sold PaidContent, a site that covered the digital media revolution with t...

21 Apr 201831min

72 - Rob Solomon, GoFundMe CEO: This Leader Bet the Farm on Generosity

72 - Rob Solomon, GoFundMe CEO: This Leader Bet the Farm on Generosity

GoFundMe is a generosity powerhouse – it's helped people raise a total of more than 5 billion dollars for all kinds of causes and pet projects. Rob Solomon is its CEO. Late last year, Solomon made a b...

14 Apr 201824min

71 - Tim Ryan, PwC U.S. Chairman: Tech is Reshaping the Dynamics of Global Business

71 - Tim Ryan, PwC U.S. Chairman: Tech is Reshaping the Dynamics of Global Business

Tim Ryan grew up in a working-class family in Boston, where his early jobs included a paper route and a job at a grocery. He’s now the U.S. chairman of PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the global accounting fi...

30 Mars 201833min

70 - Tony Xu, DoorDash CEO: It's About Data, Not Just Food or Delivery

70 - Tony Xu, DoorDash CEO: It's About Data, Not Just Food or Delivery

This week on the podcast? DoorDash cofounder and CEO Tony Xu. He just raised more than half a billion dollars to build out his business.  There’s this idea out there that today’s consumers are lazy, a...

24 Mars 201825min

69 - Danny Govberg, Watchbox CEO: Tech Didn't Kill the Luxury Watch Business After All

69 - Danny Govberg, Watchbox CEO: Tech Didn't Kill the Luxury Watch Business After All

Everybody loves a David and Goliath story. The problem is, in business these days, the David is usually a family business, and the Goliath is some technology-juicing giant. Goliath is usually winning....

17 Mars 201823min

68 - Abe Ankumah, Nyansa cofounder & CEO: Building on a Legacy of Entrepreneurship

68 - Abe Ankumah, Nyansa cofounder & CEO: Building on a Legacy of Entrepreneurship

Abe Ankumah had never touched a computer before he arrived at Caltech in 1997, but quickly became captivated and decided to major in computer science. Now he’s the cofounder and CEO of Nyansa, a Silic...

10 Mars 201832min

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