CEO & Co-Founder
Alex MacCaw (@maccaw) talks living on a boat, quitting his own 7-figure company, starting over with a lifestyle business, whether free will exists, crowdfunding from your own customers, and gaining a foothold in a crowded market with Courtland (@csallen) and Channing (@ChanningAllen).
This week we’re talking with Alex MacCaw — he’s well known for his work as founder and CEO of Clearbit. In May of 2021, Alex shared a personal update with the world on his blog. After much reflection, he decided to step down as CEO of Clearbit to go back to his roots. In his words, “I love the early stages of company building. Hacking together code, setting up the Stripe account, getting the first customer. That’s my jam.” We talk with Alex about this portion of his journey at Clearbit, the Catamaran he bought in South Africa and then sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, and the new thing he’s building called Reflect that let’s you keep track of your notes, books, and meetings. Join the discussion Changelog++ members get a bonus 4 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today! Sponsors: Fly.io – Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.com/ Sourcegraph – Transform your code into a queryable database to create customizable visual dashboards in seconds. Sourcegraph recently launched Code Insights — now you can track what really matters to you and your team in your codebase. See how other teams are using this awesome feature at about.sourcegraph.com/code-insights Honeycomb – Guess less, know more. When production is running slow, it’s hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? With Honeycomb you get a fast, unified, and clear understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. Join the swarm and try Honeycomb free today at honeycomb.io/changelog Featuring: Alex MacCaw – Website, GitHub, X Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Show Notes: A personal update Alex’s first appearance on The Changelog reflect.app Clearbit Earl Grey Capital Google - “Catamaran” The Manager’s Handbook Ross Moser Beginning of Infinity Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies remirror/remirror Replicache Mimestream The Changelog #455: Building software for yourself with Linus Lee Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
David Pierce hosts a special "work from anywhere" episode of The Vergecast while he is on vacation. 02:33 - CEO of Rove Jonah Hanig chats about his approach work-friendly travel. Reflect's Alex MacCaw shares his experience working from a sailboat in the middle of the ocean. 17:12 - Verge deputy editor Thomas Ricker talks about his review of the Jackery Solar Generator 2000 Pro, as well as his experience of working remotely in Europe. 36:28 - Verge policy editor Russell Brandom and senior reporter Loren Grush discuss the state of using satellites like Starlink to access the internet in rural areas. Further reading: Starlink’s Dishy McFlatface internet now available for Boaty McBoatfaces — just $5,000 per month Jackery Solar Generator 2000 Pro review: letting flex-workers flex Starlink RV review: the dawn of space internet to go Ventje VW Campervan review: 'work from home' from anywhere How Starlink and other satellite services are changing the shape of the internet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
0:58 Jason intros Alex MacCaw 2:26 What is Clearbit? 8:53 What are some Clearbit use cases? 12:48 Benefits of cashflow positivity in terms of fundraising 15:39 How Jason felt about Alex Tew’s Calm investor updates 18:59 GDPRs effect on Clearbit and the industry as a whole 27:37 How did Alex go from anti-coaching to benefitting from a CEO coach? 32:49 Alex’s experience finding a CEO coach from Naval Ravikant 34:22 What did Alex learn about company building from his coach? 38:39 Clearbit’s therapy policy 44:10 Alex’s history before Clearbit 47:16 Jason describes his first business, “Jason’s Hot Tapes” 49:37 What is Clearbit X? 53:26 Alex gives advice to his younger self
Alex MacCaw is the Founder & CEO @ Clearbit, the marketing data engine for all of your customer interactions, from customer understanding to prospect identification to personalising every sales and marketing interaction. To date, Alex has raised $17m in financing from some incredible people including Geoff Lewis @ Bedrock, Ash Fontana @ Zetta Venture Partners, First Round Capital, Battery Ventures and then former guest Ilya Sukhar, Naval Ravikant and Josh Buckley. Prior to founding Clearbit, Alex spent time in the engineering teams at both Twitter and Stripe. In Today's Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Alex made his way from the UK to becoming one of the hottest founders in the valley with the rise of Clearbit? What does Alex believe is more important mission and vision or organisational discipline? What does Alex mean when he says he started the company as a "vehicle for growth thinking and self-actualisation"? 2.) What did Alex mean when he said, "when you hit product-market-fit, it is time to move into company making"? What does company making mean to Alex? What would Alex like to fundamentally change about the way we manage companies today? When is the right time to make this transition? What needs to be in place to do it successfully? 3.) What does Alex mean when he says, "The 6 Pillars Behind Clearbit"? What elements does Alex think the team should not have full transparency on? How does Alex approach transparency when it comes to fundraising and M&A opportunities? What have been some of Alex's biggest learnings on both delivering and absorbing feedback? What can one do to create an environment of radical candor and rich feedback? 4.) Why does Alex believe that health has to be the #1 priority for every founder? What does that look like in practice? What can one provide the team to encourage this? How does Alex respond to those that might say, "fine but we cannot afford it"? How does Alex suggest there are 3 ways you can become more self-aware as an individual? 5.) What advice does Alex give to founders on successfully negotiating with investors? What value has Alex found that VCs really do bring? What does Alex optimise for when selecting his investor base? What value do most think that VCs bring but they actually do not? When does Alex think one should establish a board? Why does Alex think your board should only have operators and no investors on it? Items Mentioned In Today's Show: Alex's Fave Book: The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Alex on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Alex MacCaw started Clearbit.com as a solo founder, and he's since grown it to millions of dollars in annual profit. Learn the marketing and sales techniques he's used to reach over 1000 customers.
Alex MacCaw is the Founder & CEO @ Clearbit, the startup that is building a suite of business intelligence APIs to help companies find more information on their customers in order to increase sales and reduce fraud. They have backing from some of the best early stage investors including the likes of First Round Capital, SV Angel, Intercom's Eoghan McCabe, Hubspot's Dharmesh Shah and many more incredible investors. As for Alex, as well as being a fellow Brit who loves tea, he also worked at the likes of Twitter and Stripe prior to founding Clearbit. In Today's Episode You Will Learn: How did Alex make his way into the world of SaaS and came to found Clearbit in SF having grown up in the UK? Should API driven companies have sales teams? Should they do outbound? What's the most effective way to generate leads? Alex has said before that the trouble is, 'everyone is treating their customers the same". What does he mean by this? How do the smart companies differ? How possible is it to address customer specific needs at scale? How does this scalability alter when elements like freemium and self service models are added to the equation? How effective have freemium tools been for Alex as a lead gen to on board new customers? Why did Alex choose the same pricing structure as the likes of Stripe and Twilio? What was the thought process behind this? 60 Second SaaStr How important is it for SaaS startups to be in SF? What does Alex know now that he wishes he had known when he started? Biggest mentor to Alex and how it came about? Fave SaaS reading material? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Alex MacCaw
Wynn caught up with Alex MacCaw to talk about Spine, CoffeeScript, writing books, and working at Twitter. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Featuring: Alex MacCaw – Website, GitHub, X Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X Show Notes: Alex MacCaw, O’Reilly writer and open source developer now working on the front-end for Twitter. Spine Lightweight MVC library for building JavaScript applications, inspired by Backbone. Spine is written in CoffeeScript Eco is Alex’s favorite client-side templating engine. Alex suggests trying to use the same templating engine server-side and client-side, perhaps with Mustache, is a pipe dream. Spine integrates with Rails out of the box. Hem is like Bundler but for Node.js. Juggernaut enables realtime server push with node.js, WebSockets and Comet Spine.app “Effortlessly generate Spine, CoffeeScript and Hem applications. Spine.App gives your applications structure, CommonJS modules, a development server and more.” Alex is working on The Little Book on CoffeeScript in printed form for O’Reilly. JavaScript Web Apps covers building client-side MVC apps in a framework agnostic way. Twitter is hiring! Got the chops? Get in touch. Jeremy Ashkenas is Alex’s programming hero. Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!