#83: Building Business Success Through Culture And Leadership with SendGrid CEO Sameer Dholakia

It takes guts, grit, and an uncommon dose of wisdom to lead a business team. Sameer Dholakia has all three qualities, plus two decades of leadership experience in enterprise software. Dholakia is the CEO of SendGrid, one of the world’s premier email delivery services. SendGrid serves 50,000 customers and delivers 1.3 billion emails each day—more than double Twitter’s daily Tweet volume. In addition to its classic transactional email API, SendGrid more recently rolled out an email marketing product that has already been adopted by 5,000 users. Dholakia is an experienced tech executive with a love of history and a passion for building strong teams and big businesses in the enterprise software industry. In our interview, he shares his most effective leadership habits, including the importance of humility, how to foster an outstanding company culture, and strategies for turning around a dire financial situation. I’m so grateful Dholakia took the time to share so much of his knowledge and experience with the Powderkeg community, and I admire his resolve to always keep improving himself and his company. Connect with him on Twitter @spdholakia to share your appreciation, and enjoy the show. In this episode with Sameer Dholakia, you’ll learn: --- How you can begin using email marketing tools for your startup (13:40) --- Strategies for launching a new product within your existing brand (21:27) --- The only mistake in business you can’t recover from (33:26) --- Why you should be a humble leader (36:30) --- How to dig yourself out of a bad financial situation (42:48) --- The two biggest challenges SaaS companies face (47:08) --- How to create an exceptional company culture (53:54) If you like this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes. You can also follow us on Soundcloud or Stitcher. We have an incredible lineup of interviews we’ll be releasing every Tuesday here on the Powderkeg Podcast.