In the latest episode of Executive Function, Brett sits down with Eric Sager, COO of Plaid, following stints as CRO of Bluevine and Head of Sales at Square. During his seven-year tenure at Plaid, Eric has helped lead the business through a pandemic, Visa's collapsed acquisition, a fintech downturn, and the AI boom. In today’s conversation, he unpacks how he kept teams focused during turbulent times, why he refuses to run at 100% capacity, and how he re-architected the go-to-market function as Plaid scaled.
In today's episode, we discuss:
- How Plaid stayed focused after the Visa acquisition fell through and then raised at nearly 3x the price
- Why great COOs deliberately make themselves obsolete
- Why Eric treats speed, risk, and cost as a three-way trade-off, and why sometimes going slower wins
- How refusing to run at 100% capacity helped Plaid win OpenAI, Perplexity, and Replit
- Why Eric personally cold-calls brand-new employees
References
- Bain & Company: https://www.bain.com
- Bluevine: https://www.bluevine.com
- Chase: https://www.chase.com
- Citibank: https://www.citi.com
- Eyal Lifshitz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eyallifshitz/
- Françoise Brougher: https://x.com/FrancoiseBr
- Gokul Rajaram: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gokulrajaram1/
- Jack Dorsey: https://x.com/jack
- Michael Mankins: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcmankins
- OpenAI: https://openai.com
- Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai
- Plaid: https://plaid.com
- Replit: https://replit.com
- Sarah Friar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-friar/
- Square: https://squareup.com
- Visa: https://www.visa.com
- William Hockey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-hockey-04536710
- Zach Perret: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zperret/
Where to find Eric Sager
Where to find Brett
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson
Where to find First Round Capital
- Website: https://firstround.com/
- First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
- This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
00:40 Leading a company through turbulent times
04:24 How to build a resilient team culture
08:33 How Plaid avoids bureaucracy, while operating at scale
10:58 The speed-quality tradeoff: Going faster isn't always better
15:32 When to move from generalists to specialized customer segments
20:14 Why Plaid has one owner for entire customer relationships
22:06 The "quarterback" model: one owner, experts on call
24:08 Why you should never run your org at 100% capacity
29:47 "Always available, never needed": the support mantra
36:49 Eric’s unusual "hit by a bus" test to measure job success
43:57 Why Eric cold calls brand-new employees
52:14 Eric's week: 25% ecosystem, 50% business, 25% team
55:15 How to spot fake mission alignment in interviews
59:04 The one thing a founder has that no hire can replicate