How do you scale yourself as your company scales? Tien Tzuo, Founder and CEO of Zuora, joins David Politis to share hard-won lessons from his journey building a category-defining SaaS company.
In this candid conversation, Tien reflects on early team building, founder growth inflection points, strategic planning, and the leadership gaps many founders face as their companies mature. Drawing on his new book, Founders Keepers, he reveals why great founders often succeed in spite of themselves—and how to turn blind spots into leadership strengths.
Takeaways:
- Category Creation and Team Building: Tien reflects on the impact of coining the term “subscription economy” and credits early success to not just vision, but team-building. He shares how Zuora evolved through multiple “generations” of leadership, and how long-tenured team members were balanced with fresh perspectives as the company grew.
- Recognizing the Founder’s Growth Curve: Tien describes a critical inflection point when Zuora hit ~150 employees—a moment where personal evolution became necessary. That led him to executive coach Rich Hagberg and a deeper understanding of how personality traits drive both success and failure.
- The Three Pillars of Leadership: Through data-driven leadership profiling, Tien outlines the three dominant founder traits—vision, execution, and relationships. He shares that most founders score high on vision but often struggle with execution and people management, which can lead to common pitfalls.
- Owning Your Leadership Gaps: Tien reveals his own leadership profile—high vision, medium execution, low relationship—and how understanding that helped him improve in areas like prioritization, team-building, and relationship development. He even shared his leadership gaps openly with his company to build trust and culture.
- A Better Way to Do Strategic Planning: Borrowing a method from Brad Smith (former Intuit CEO), Tien walks through how Zuora moved from a 2-day offsite to a 6-month annual strategy cadence. It includes deep research, team ownership of ideas, board engagement, and company-wide evangelism—because a founder’s job is to repeat the story until it sticks.
- Letting Go Without Losing Drive: He emphasizes the importance of giving leaders autonomy and building space into his calendar—cancelling recurring meetings, avoiding over-scheduling, and giving energy to what matters most. He advises founders to avoid being the bottleneck and protect organizational focus by saying “no” to distractions.
Quote of the Show:
- "The same things that make up a founder, that make us do what we do, ultimately are the seeds sewn of our own destruction." - Tien Tzuo
Links:
Ways to Tune In:
#NotAnotherCEO #BusinessSuccess #Zuora
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
02:00 The Journey of Building Zuora
03:59 Scaling and Team Dynamics
07:43 Founder's Journey and Coaching
22:12 Strategic Planning and Execution
30:28 Frameworks for Strategic Alignment
32:33 Self-Awareness and Leadership
34:10 Execution-Oriented Teams
37:03 Lessons from Salesforce
38:07 The Power of Storytelling
40:59 Advice on Managing Time
43:33 Biggest Challenges and Overcoming Them
46:24 Future Vision for Zuora
48:22 Personal Journey and Motivation
52:33 Advice for Aspiring Founders
54:13 Outro
