About this episode

Eric Sager, COO of Plaid, discusses leadership strategies and team management during turbulent times.

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…

People in this episode

Host: Brett

Guest: Eric Sager

Topics covered

• leadership
• business strategy
• fintech
• team management
• cold-calling
• go-to-market strategy

Keywords

• Plaid
• Eric Sager
• leadership
• cold-calling
• business strategy
• fintech downturn
• go-to-market

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Plaid, Bluevine, Square, OpenAI, Perplexity, Replit, Bain & Company

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