Growing Abroad

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Brennan O’Donnell, Partner at Frontline Ventures, recounts lessons learned from standing up Google Europe, identifies success factors for expanding into European markets, and discusses the importance of vulnerability.

 

Episode Notes

(02:41) Brennan describes Frontline Ventures’ mission and his role there

(04:17) The mistakes companies typically make when moving into Europe

(09:18) How Brennan taught himself to code and found his calling as a builder

(11:13) Working at Google in the early days, and getting the opportunity to lead efforts in London and Dublin

(15:11) Observations from Google Europe, including why the best companies are always reinventing themselves

(21:02) Leading social network Yammer through its acquisition by, and learning from the practices of, Microsoft

(26:44) Discovering vulnerability as an essential leadership trait

(29:13) Technology innovations that excite Brennan and his team

In a recent article for TechCrunch, Frontline Ventures partner Brennan O’Donnell described the burgeoning opportunity that European markets offer to U.S companies, particularly in tech, pointing out that EMEA now represents 38% of the world’s GDP and is the world’s second-largest B2B software market. But in order to capitalize on the opportunity, CEOs would be wise to learn from thought leaders like Brennan, who have been through the rigor of scaling high-growth companies in Europe and seen the potential pitfalls.

In this episode, Brennan talks to Jesse about the most common mistakes he's seen brands make when expanding into Europe, what it was like to lead growth at Google Europe, reflections on guiding Yammer through its acquisition by Microsoft, how he's learned to embrace vulnerability as an essential leadership trait, and the emerging technologies he's most excited about as an investor.

Guest Bio

Based in Silicon Valley, Brennan O’Donnell has over 20 years of experience building technology businesses and scaling global teams. As a partner with Frontline Ventures, he invests in growth stage startups with a focus on helping them expand into Europe. The fund’s portfolio includes companies such as TripActions, Lattice, Clearbanc and Attentive.

Before moving into venture capital, Brennan spent nearly a decade at Google, where he held multiple go-to-market leadership roles in the US and EMEA, building teams across both the Cloud and Ads businesses. After Google, he went on to hold c-level and executive roles in several early stage and high growth SaaS startups, including Yammer (acquired by Microsoft), SurveyMonkey (IPO), Euclid (acquired by WeWork) and most recently Airtable. He is a graduate of Northwestern University.

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+ Episode Transcript

Brennan O'Donnell [00:00:00] The highest performing organizations in the world are always reinventing themselves every 12 to 18 months. Structurally, internally, they're always re-orging. It's like operating on tectonic plates. You could be doing all the right things, leading this wonderful team, building this thing, and all of a sudden it's like, "Hey, we're going to change tact." And that's not a bad thing. Not only is it not a bad thing, the best companies do that by design. Are constantly changing and iterating.

Jesse Purewal [00:00:31] From Qualtrics Studios, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts, and ideas fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands, and experiences.

Katie Sunku Wood [00:00:52] Hey there, builders. Jesse's producer Katie here, to give you a little preview of this episode. Today, we're bringing you Jesse's conversation with Brennan O'Donnell. As Partner at Frontline Ventures, Brennan advises US B2B companies on how to prepare for successful expansion into European markets. He taps into a deep and distinctive experience that includes a nearly 10-year stint at Google, where he was among the first 600 employees, playing foundational growth roles in both Silicon valley and Europe, and as a product and revenue leader at Yammer, SurveyMonkey, Euclid, and Airtable. Brennan talks to Jesse about the most common mistakes he's seen brands make when expanding into Europe, what it was like to lead growth at Google Europe, reflections on guiding Yammer through its acquisition by Microsoft, how he's learned to embrace vulnerability as an essential leadership trait, and the emerging technologies he's most excited about as an investor. Enjoy Breakthrough Builder Brennan O'Donnell.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:52] I am here with Brennan O'Donnell. Brennan, thank you for joining me on the podcast.

Brennan O'Donnell [00:01:56] Great to be here. Thanks, Jesse.

Jesse Purewal [00:01:57] Brennan, we've known each other a while. I think of you as somebody who's had a front row seat for, and you've often had a lead role in, some pretty cool growth stories in tech and in SaaS. But tell me how you frame yourself and who you are as a professional.

Brennan O'Donnell [00:02:30] Yeah, sure. One, I've always considered myself a builder, but the two themes that have consistently run throughout my professional career have been one, building and scaling go to market teams for high growth at US tech companies, and the second has been doing that through international expansion. So I've been an operator for 20 years, and more recently I've been carrying those same two themes, but as an investor.

Jesse Purewal [00:02:32] So tell me about the thesis of where you're at today and how you decided to bring those two themes together. We'll start at the end and work our way back and rewind the clock to the start.

Brennan O'Donnell [00:02:41] Yeah. So Frontline Ventures as a firm, our heritage is based in Europe as an early stage B2B investor across all of Europe, originally kind of focused in Dublin and London. And I could lead our newer practice in the firm, which is focused on investing in growth stage companies coming out of the US, and we specifically help with expanding into Europe. So for me, the way it kind of came about was a good friend of mine and early colleague, Stephen McIntyre. He joined Frontline a couple of years before me, after Google here, and Twitter for Europe, Middle East, and Africa.

And so we both had had these same two themes, helping high-growth US companies build out their go to market teams and then doing that through international expansion. And so we had ourselves made many mistakes through the process, and we'd had a front row seat, seeing our peers and even the best companies make a lot of the same mistakes over and over again. And we sort of said, "There's a missed opportunity here." We did the research into the numbers, and when you look at it, by the time SaaS business is IPO, about 30%, 35% of revenue is coming from Europe. So it's this massive opportunity that was sort of underserved from the venture point of view, and we figured who was better placed to start a fund and bring that specific kind of experience to companies as they're growing?

Jesse Purewal [00:03:51] And what are the barriers to expanding into Europe? I mean, I could easily kind of invent some narrative about things like distance, and time zones, and things like that. Those of us that have tried to negotiate the business day working relationships with people that are far away, but it's got to go deeper than that. There must be more really kind of entrenched barriers and things that you and the team are working through breaking through. Can you talk to some of that?

Brennan O'Donnell [00:04:17] It's more so kind of, what are the mistakes that people make, that companies kind of typically make? And usually there's a handful, of four or five. I think it kind of is the questions that businesses need to answer.

One is timing. When is the right time to go? If you go too early and you don't have your own infrastructure in place, then you're going to stumble if you wait too late. The local competitors are going to take market share. Do you have the right team members in place? That's another big one. How do you make the right hires and the right kind of sequence of hires that make sense for your business? Location is a big one, not only where you should go, but what is kind of the structure of your team? What changes do you need to make internally as a leadership team and as a global company? This is really kind of one of the first major steps that CEOs take from transforming themselves and their organization from kind of a single country, to really being on the path to be a global company. And there's a few others, right?

So we think of it through that lens, is maybe not so much challenges per se, but not thoughtfully going, "What are the questions we need to answer?" First principles approaches are great for so many aspects of tech, but this is one where experience really helps.

Jesse Purewal [00:05:25] So what are some simple heuristics, though, that almost no regrets moves you have to make, or calculuses that you have to go through? Europe expansion already is sort of a generalization of the opportunity. It's like, "No, no, no. You have to pick actually a set of cities or a set of markets within Europe. You have to sort of figure out how you're going to stand up cultural processes that adhere to one region versus another." If you had a little bit of peek into the playbook, what are some of the lessons that you bring into your conversations at the early stages of any of your discussions with CEOs or business leaders who want to make that jump?

Brennan O'Donnell [00:06:04] You're absolutely right. But it's easy, we even do it, we refer to Europe as sort of one homogeneous kind of entity, right? And it's absolutely not. You do need to break it down and think about your prioritization with different markets and not just, "When is the right time to go to Europe?" But, "What's the sequencing of those markets?" So that's absolutely one of them.

I'd say one of the other things we frequently find ourselves talking to CEOs about is this concept of success amnesia. And what we mean by that is oftentimes we're talking to high-performing companies. They're already on great growth trajectories. They're performing really, really well by the time they're thinking about expanding internationally, and the conversation is relevant. And it's very, very easy to forget that all of the brand awareness, all of the product-market fit iterations, all of the figuring out what's the right marketing channel or sales motion that brought you all the success in the US market, just sort of instantly ports over to the UK, or ports over to Germany, or ports over to France.

There's a lot of kind of subtopics that you can get into, but the meta point is not having that amnesia of, what are the things that you had to do to get to the point of success that you found in the US market? And sort of taking a couple steps back and going through those exercises again, either to validate that it's going to work in the new market, or to kind of discover, "Oh, this aspect of the business that's just absolutely humming in the US doesn't work in this new market." So that's more of kind of a thematic umbrella, I suppose, but once you kind of then take that mindset, it allows you to kind of peel the layers back on a lot of different subtopics, companies kind of navigate to the answers that make sense for them.

Jesse Purewal [00:07:41] Yeah. You have to get back to that place where you're framing yourself as a builder. So let me go back to you as a builder and where you first maybe identified some of that in your life. If you went back into your memory, your childhood, your college, wherever is the right starting point, when did you first reckon with, get fascinated by the idea of building?

Brennan O'Donnell [00:08:01] I've always been a builder. I mean, one of the things from the time that I was a kid, Legos, right? I mean, it's very common for everybody, but I was just always fascinated with Legos, constructs, all the different building and creating different things. And for as long as I can remember, I wanted to be an architect, because that was sort of this really exciting intersection of you get to create buildings, and there's a beautiful kind of design aspect to it. But at the same time, it's technical. I discovered at one point the amount of education and money involved in pursuing that career path and decided to do something different. But in many respects, a lot of those same themes carried with me, right? It's just sort of building companies and building teams as opposed to building buildings.

Jesse Purewal [00:08:41] But you hacked your way through some of this personal growth. You're a self-taught coder. You got yourself some educational, professional hybrid experiences working in and around Chicago during college. You're being a little modest. You went sort of hunting for areas that you could grow and develop in, even if they weren't pursuing

a highly traditional engineering path or going to the places that in the late nineties or early 2000s we would have recognized as training ground companies. You blazed your own trail a little bit and you found your way to what would become a really interesting series of high growth kind of enterprises.

Brennan O'Donnell [00:09:18] Yeah. I absolutely think that's fair. I've always been a big believer in is you got to be comfortable betting on yourself and at the say comfortable, I mean, it's, there's always fear involved and things like that, but if you're going to bet on anything in the world, you shoulD be able to bet on yourself. And if you're going to take risks professionally ones that are sort of de-risk to the point where, okay, well it's up to me and my abilities to figure it out or execute, that's the best kind of risk to take. So yeah. I did. I taught myself early website and HTML. It started off undergrad, pursuing an engineering degree, got several years into it. Realize I didn't particularly love being up to the wee hours of the morning debugging code. And simultaneously took on an internship in Chicago where I got to work hands-on actually doing what I guess today you consider it, we call it information architecture.

And got the chance to work on some really cool early websites for like American Airlines and Millers Brewing and a handful of others. And sort of realized it when I was learning in the classroom was completely getting out paced in the late nineties, but when I was picking up at this internship and also realized that while I wanted to be involved in tech, being a developer was probably not the path that was going to be the most exciting for me. But yeah that experience ended up taking me down the path where I shifted majors. And then later on took a bet on upon going to Google for the same reasons.

Jesse Purewal [00:10:37] So you bet on Google. You bet on yourself. And you bet on yourself at Google and you were there for almost a decade at the start of your career. And that was a time that corresponded to Google's growing from about a billion in revenue, if I remember right to over 50 billion in revenue. So that's an incredible time to be part of that company. And you had, in particular, a really interesting vantage point running sales ops and having a global view of the business from Europe and from Silicon Valley. I'd love it if you could just talk in general about what the experience at that time at Google was like and what it was like for you to be there.

Brennan O'Donnell [00:11:13] So I was very fortunate. One of my friends got a job at Google. I was still in Chicago at that time. This was 2003. If you weren't an engineer or a senior executive, everyone was still reeling from the dot com implosion. And so they hired almost everybody as a contractor. So I actually did all my interviews over the phone, got offered a contractor job, put everything in storage, packed up, moved to California, lived out of a rented car in my friend's parent's place in Saratoga. And fortunately a couple of months later that converted into a full-time job with Google and then just a front row seat to observe and participate in all these amazing stages of growth from like five or 600 people through to about 60,000 people.

The big theme throughout all of that was the opportunity to go international and go to Europe early on. And sort of the fact that people put that trust in me to do that. And that obviously just opened up all these windows in terms of my career for the next 20 years. And the second one was getting the opportunity to take leadership roles very early in my career and having the trust instilled in me to do that. So they were both really fundamental. Didn't realize it at the time, but it absolutely led to these themes that just kind of carried with me for the next 15, 20 years.

Jesse Purewal [00:12:28] Yeah. You're right. In the throws of high growth for sure and found your way into the international view. Go back to maybe when you were starting to spend legitimate time in Dublin or in London, what would your reflections have been around the reality of that experience? How easy was it? How hard was it? What were the distinctive characteristics of trying to do European expansion over a decade ago when you first got a glimpse of it?

Brennan O'Donnell [00:12:56] Yeah. I would say it was the opportunity to work internationally. It's just so phenomenal. Right? I mean, particularly if you get to do it for a longer period of time or across several different geographies like I got to do, but even if it's three months or six months, it's just such an eye-opening experience and I recommend it to anybody that gets the opportunity. And I do think it's different than doing a year abroad or traveling. They're all wonderful experiences, but in the professional context, working outside of the US, I think is really powerful. If you forget like the US is only 5% of the global population. Right? It's small. It's so small. And so it gives you such a better perspective on everything. And with that also comes greater scope and responsibility like you, by default, just have to understand so many more aspects of the business, whether it's your particular team or the broader business that the company is doing, because you find yourself in situations where you're representing the company locally well beyond the scope of what your particular role is. Right?

And that gets to some of the challenges I would say which would be any startup, any early stage company. You're obviously wearing a ton of hats, but that environment means you're wearing that many more hats. And so you have to be more self-sufficient. You're always operating with fewer resources. You have to proactively educate and advocate with your peers' headquarters for the challenges that you're facing in local markets. Right? So it definitely comes with a lot of work and a lot of additional challenges, but the opportunity is just fantastic, if you're afforded it. Right? The pros far, far outweigh the challenges.

Jesse Purewal [00:14:28] And do you think of your time there, and as let's call it almost being part of a separate company, or just a sort of singular P&L and you sort of keep people updated in Silicon Valley? Or was there in fact, a lot of interconnectivity communication feedback loops coming through around how learnings you may have had in your part of the business could reinforce what was happening back in America and vice versa. What was the reality of that collaborative cycle like for you? And to what extent did you learn and grow from where the gaps were as you took on more roles? And now as you're advising people on how they think about spanning the globe?

Brennan O'Donnell [00:15:11] It's interesting. I think we're all very much kind of products in many respects of the companies we work for in the first several years of our careers. So everything you learned from management style to cultural to the pace at which the business moves, all these sort of things, you'd like pick up a lot from those first handful of experiences. So being at Google in the early 2000s, it was very fortunate to pick up a lot of these things. And one of them was the highest performing organizations in the world are always reinventing themselves every 12 to 18 months, structurally internally. They're always reorg-ing. Right? Operating on tectonic plates. You could be doing all the right things, leading this wonderful team, building this thing, and all of a sudden it's like, Hey, we're going to change tact. And that's not a bad thing.

Not only is it not a bad thing, the best companies do that by design are constantly changing and iterating. And then there was things that we would do to consciously foster collaboration. One of the things we did early on was we designed this thing called the ambassador program, which was essentially an opportunity for people from each geographical office high-performers could apply and spend three months in another office. Right? And we did a bunch of other things as well, but that was one that always stuck out because the learnings that that program offered, one, it creates a wonderful experience for the people that get to go to the other location.

But then it's more than just five days in a business trip and kind of spending some time with your colleagues and with a few specific things you're trying to achieve. You get to kind of sit in the seat of the people that are in the other location, and it's an ample amount of time to figure out what they're doing that is challenging, a challenge that you haven't had to face because you're at headquarters or things that they're doing that are more innovative, right, that you can bring back to your team and having a program that did that continuously every quarter was really, really powerful, right, for fostering collaboration and communication, because even today where people are really comfortable working remotely, nothing substitutes time well spent and the depth of rapport and relationship that could get built when you spend time with folks in person. And then it makes your ability to operate remotely that much smoother. I'm sure there's a lot of other things we did, but that's one that jumps out that was sort of the design element.

Jesse Purewal [00:17:21] And so you were now living in Europe for a number of years going on to your eighth year, ninth year of Google. At some point, ostensibly, you decide it's time for a change, but you'd been there a while. So what made the time that you chose to leave the right time for you? And what kind of signals were you getting from your sense of self, from opportunities around you and maybe just the reality of where Google was on its particular point in the growth journey?

Brennan O'Donnell [00:17:50] I had joined a company that was a few hundred people. Right? I didn't have intended to join a company that was 60,000, 70,000. And so I just hit the point in my career I had always been taking the mindset of kind of skate to where the pucks going to

be, in terms of where technology was going, go to those businesses. Sometimes, I got it right, sometimes I was too early and got it wrong. But, that was one of the moments for me. It was like, this has been a fantastic experience. Now, it's time to take that, leverage it and go back to earlier stage high growth companies and have just a bigger impact on the overall success, or failure of the entire business. Naturally, it becomes harder to have a huge impact as a company gets to that scale. And so, yeah, that was really the driver for me.

Jesse Purewal [00:18:35] But, you also had a particular interest in social business and collaboration and driving a new way of working using software. I mean, when you went to Yammer, it wasn't like you spun a wheel and picked a logo and tried to get an interview. I think you had, if I remember right, some interesting intentionality around why that organization at that particular time was a good match, not just for your skill set and the growth arc that you'd help build at Google. But also, where you wanted to go and what you saw as a really exciting category reinvention process.

Brennan O'Donnell [00:19:10] That's absolutely right. And in fact, so I spent my first six years at Google on the consumer side of things, more or less, consumer and advertising. And then, I saw the transformation that had been happening in our consumer lives. It was so crystal clear that, that was going to happen in the business world, right? Google had just acquired a company called Postini. I was running the consumer Gmail team as part of my portfolio in Europe. And so, the early iterations of Google Apps and G suite, that was one of the teams that I was managing. And so, you saw that internally and it became really clear that that was going to happen in the business world, all of that transformation. But, it was going to be a slow burn. So, I ended up spending my last three years at Google within what is now, Google's cloud business, right?

And so, from the time we went from about 100 million in revenue to, I think it was 1,000,000, 005, or something. At the same time, we were part of this bigger, fantastic goose that laid the golden egg ad machine, right? And so, why had it been a fantastic run? I also saw where there was huge opportunities in the market, that Google was choosing not to invest in, in terms of productizing and monetizing, and then social business was absolutely one of them, right? So yeah, had the opportunity, was approached by one of the investors at Yammer and got the chance to meet the team. And I was like, "This is awesome." Right? Not only, is this the future of part of how people are going to work and communicate and collaborate internally, but I can see that Google wasn't going to be making that investment in the short term, in that particular space. So, in terms of Yammer, that's what got me particularly excited about that product.

Jesse Purewal [00:20:43] That's great. Jumping to the end of your journey with Yammer. I want to ask you about, what it was like to be on the acquiree side of a table? Or, the side of a table where when you're searching for the next chapter in the company's growth, what was it like to be on the south side of the deal?

Brennan O'Donnell [00:20:59] That, in terms of the Microsoft acquisition?

Jesse Purewal [00:21:01] Yeah.

Brennan O'Donnell [00:21:02] That was interesting, because you actually right. I've been on the other side and helped integrate teams into Google a few times. But, that was the first time I'd gone through it. For me personally, I guess there's two things that jump out from that point in time. One, helping lead a team through that transformation. We were growing so fast, we'd gone from 200 to 400 people in the span of six months, or 12 months. A lot of people joined the company, myself included, with the intention of having a run that was many, many years, right? Acquisition, wasn't necessarily on the immediate horizon. So, how do you go through that organizational change and communicate, change management and all that stuff to the team? So, you keep it intact and find a home for everybody, and that you're collectively additive to the company that's acquiring you.

And then, the other was after 10 years at Google, I certainly didn't anticipate finding myself at Microsoft, but it's an iconic company. It's one of the most iconic technology companies ever. And so, getting then, to experience that for a period of time and see how they operate and see what made Microsoft so successful, was really eyeopening and a great learning experience, right? And just give so much more context around, in different businesses were approaching, being very, very successful with different strategies, right? Because, up to that point, as diverse as the many of the opportunities I had at Google, they had wide range of opportunities, and from that perspective had been fantastic. They'd all been within one company more or less, at least, since I'd gotten into tech. That can give you blinders as well. So, there's a lot of learnings that came just by being able to see how Microsoft operated.

Jesse Purewal [00:22:35] Well, it had to give you some incredible enthusiasm and energy to see this hypothesis that you followed, or this vision that you laid out, or this just, belief you had about what would happen as the enterprise would get more consumerized, just get validated by the interest in companies like Microsoft.

Brennan O'Donnell [00:22:54] Absolutely. I mean, certainly the theme that ended up, as I look back in terms of, what's a theme from a product perspective on some of the businesses I've worked with? And they've been, SAS largely for the last 12 years, or so. But, the other one, is that they've all had this viral freemium dynamic, but underneath all of that, whether it's a future of work, or call whatever you want, is really the transformation that has been happening for a solid 15 plus years around shifting the power of technology decisions from a centralized body, whether it's IT, or management, or whatever it is, in empowering employees to make those decisions around the tools and technologies that are going to help them do their jobs the best, right?

But, at the same time, I'd be lying if I said it was completely straight forward, because this was prior to Satya's reign in Microsoft, right? And so, you have this mixed bag frankly, there were visionaries, that saw a company like Amor and wanted to bring in some of that. What's the future going to look like? Mindset. But, they were going through a transformation in and of themselves. It wasn't unilaterally, that perspective, right? And obviously, I think fantastic testament to went to see what Microsoft's done, over the last seven, or eight years since that period of time, without a doubt, they've become a leader, right? In terms of that innovation mindset. Yeah.

Jesse Purewal [00:24:07] Yeah, it's been incredible to watch the journey they've been on, especially since Satya took over to your point. And it's so neat to see social business and collaboration at the center of, of much of that business transformation that's been led by the cloud. I want to ask you about the mosaic of organizations that you were part of, or have been part of post Google. I mean, there are some really innovative and disruptive and interesting companies that are following the thesis of product-led growth. Yammer, we talked about. SurveyMonkey, and now Momentive. You ran revenue at Airtable for a time. And you talked about the pattern there in terms of viral growth and product-led growth. But, what's even a level deeper, in terms of the leadership teams you find yourself gravitated to and that you work well with, or the conditions in a category, or the particular stage of some of these companies. What else did some of those organizations have in common? As you look back on it, that maybe set them up as a nice cadre of places to go build your career arc out post-Google?

Brennan O'Donnell [00:25:12] Sure. Well, I think one just fantastic talent level, right? Leadership level, but talent just pours through the organization and it's a little cliche, but it's going to be your A people hire, A people mentality, right? So, the best leaders tend to just build fantastic organizations. That was without a doubt, always at the unit of every company I've worked out, fortunately. And with that comes the surrounding cast, right? So, that attracts the highest quality investors, which are great people to learn from and help the business fulfill its potential. Product market fit has always been one, businesses where the market opportunity was either massive, or the opportunity to create a market was massive, and that was brand new. And where at least at a personal level, where I discovered through successes, but also getting it wrong, making the mistake, where I operated the best was when it was over a product market fit stage. And now, how do we take this thing and scale it?

Jesse Purewal [00:26:07] Got it. Talk to me in the context of hiring an A player, if you're the CEO that just hired Brennan into one of these organizations, what do you believe you uniquely brought to the table, or bring to the table in these leadership structures? And then, maybe what's something that you've observed and developed and grown in yourself, that maybe coming out of Google, was a growth area for you? Or, an area you wanted to work on? Give me one big, "Brennan does this thing really well and always has." And one of, "This is what I've gotten better at, by learning to grow and develop myself."

Brennan O'Donnell [00:26:44] So, I think on the first part of the question, my approach has always been to try to hire the best people, that you can help set a clear vision with them, ideally, right? Where their part of the vision and bought into it, and they get out of the way. And I mean, get out of the way, not in the sense of, you're not there to support, quite the opposite. It's like, empower people. Get the best people.

Have clarity of where we're running, and let them figure out how to get there. And then be there to support, help remove roadblocks, et cetera, et cetera.

In terms of how that translates to personal management and leadership style, there's a fantastic book, The Culture Code, by Daniel Coyle. So the subtitle is, I might get this wrong, but it's something to the effect of the secrets of highly successful groups. And basically it looks at everything from elite military units to the top leadership teams of high-performing organizations and tries to develop, what are the top themes here?

And the three things that they come back with are one, the most important thing is building safety and stuff like trust within the team dynamic. The second one is that opens the ability to share vulnerabilities. And the third then is establishing a common purpose. And so when I read that book, I was like, "Oh, this is exactly the ideal way to build a team and to be a manager, be a leader." I'd say I historically was probably quite good at the last one. What's our purpose? Where are we running towards? Probably pretty good at building safety. And the one that after Google, I would say, I probably struggled with, it wasn't until several other rules in my career is learning how to become vulnerable. And I think that's quite common, particularly when you're in an environment where you've had success. And then you find yourself in a situation, the success isn't coming quite as easily, for whatever reason, and figuring out how to open yourself up and be vulnerable as a leader to your team. That one takes more time, I think. And you only get the learning around it when you're faced with adversity. So taking teams through those challenges is one that I definitely learned post-Google.

Jesse Purewal [00:28:45] Love it. Thanks for being vulnerable and sharing that with me and with the audience here. So your two dimensions, which you framed for me at the start, high growth, US companies and international expansion. But given you focused your career on software, software as a service and then consumer and B2B side, what kinds of technologies excite you the most as you look into the next half-decade or decade? What technology trends do you think portend some really exciting stuff?

Brennan O'Donnell [00:29:13] Some areas that I continue to be excited about are the democratization of software development. So we call it low code, no code, et cetera. There's a ton of companies that can fit into this category. But really if you think about what's driving it, the evolution that we've gone through with physical devices from 50 years ago you had to be a computer engineer and have access to what we now have now in our pockets and purses. You had to have a degree. You had to have this deep knowledge of capital, even with AWS and Google cloud and all of that, the distribution barriers for producing products and distributing them have broken down. But you still have to be a coder to build a lot of the software on them.

And it, to me, seems so logical that that same evolution will happen for the software on our devices that happened for the devices. Other ones that I'm interested in, developer tools is a huge space. Again, there's a lot of sub-categories within that. We've been taking a look quite a bit at supply chain and logistics business. That's an industry that's interesting to me just because it's so fundamental. It's so huge. It has been wildly underserved by technology. And so there's lots of sub-categories and lots of interesting things going on in that space.

And there's a handful of others. Life sciences is another one. That's what you think about the impact, the scale of the market, the fragmentation that currently exists in the market. There are others, but those are a handful that I think are particularly interesting at the moment.

Jesse Purewal [00:30:40] Got it. All right, Brennan, I want to move us into a lightning round here for some rapid-fire questions. Are you ready?

Brennan O'Donnell [00:30:46] Hit me.

Jesse Purewal [00:30:46] Your favorite author or favorite book.

Brennan O'Donnell [00:30:49] I love biographies and autobiographies, so that doesn't give you one author. But the book that I end up recommending the most is a book called The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. It breaks down why good people are divided by politics and religion.

And the two things that jumped out, he's got this concept of an elephant and writer. And it's like the moral judgments that we make are not really reason-driven. We make them from our gut and then fill in the logic after the fact. And then he has five or six pillars that he uses as a great foundation to think about. It's almost like five senses, where different people can look at the exact same topic, and their foundational starting point from a moral perspective is just different through a combination of nature and nurture.

Jesse Purewal [00:31:37] What would you say is your biggest professional breakthrough?

Brennan O'Donnell [00:31:40] Oh, joining Google, without a doubt, and just all the opportunities it provided me.

Jesse Purewal [00:31:45] What are the first three words that come to mind when you're describing your experience at Northwestern?

Brennan O'Donnell [00:31:50] Oh, it would have to be friends, Chicago and football, of course.

Jesse Purewal [00:31:54] Love it. Love it. Sticking with the three theme here, what are the top three places a first-time visitor to Ireland would absolutely have to check out?

Brennan O'Donnell [00:32:03] In Dublin, you have to go to Grafton Street. You have to check out a pub, a local pub. If the rugby is on, if a Six Nations rugby matches is on, I'd suggest that. Little bit more touristy, the Guinness Storehouse is fantastic. It's touristy, but it's wonderful. And then you've got to get outside of the city. There's a million different places to go, whether it's the cliffs of Moher or the countryside or something, you've got to explore the full country.

Jesse Purewal [00:32:25] And what should I not be surprised to see Brennan O'Donnell up to five years from now?

Brennan O'Donnell [00:32:29] I think professionally, I love my job now. I think continuing to help founders scale their businesses internationally is not going to go away anytime soon. And I'd expect that's where you'll find me in five years.

Jesse Purewal [00:32:54] Well, Brennan, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for bringing a little bit of the European vibe to the podcast. It's been something we have been probably deficient in to date. So appreciate you spanning the Atlantic silos of California and the European market for us and for our audience. Look forward to doing this again soon. And in the meantime, be safe and be well.

Brennan O'Donnell [00:33:06] Thanks, Jesse.

Jesse Purewal [00:33:13] Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, I'd be grateful if you could spread the word by leaving a rating and a review. It really does help other people find us. And please tell your friends. Breakthrough Builders is a Qualtrics Studios original presented and produced in collaboration with StudioPod Media in San Francisco.

The show is hosted and executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. Our writer is Todd Bagnull. From StudioPod Media, Deanna Morency is our show coordinator. Editing and production by Katie Sunku-Wood. Additional editing and music is provided by Nodalab. Our designers are Barren Santiago and Vinsuka Chindavijak. Website by Gregory Hedon. Photography by Christy Hemm-Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, James Wadsworth, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.

30-60Jesse Purewalfrontline ventures, brennan o'donnell, leadership guidance, high-growth startups, advice for ceos, venture capital, european markets, scaling the business