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
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-sager-a529516
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
