Building Companies from Ideation to Scale with Bruce Cleveland

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
So I was pretty impressed with how fast Tullio has been in vehicles, but Bruce, I think you've got him beat. Tullio, what's your fastest?

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:24)
Fontana Raceway, I think I almost hit 170 on the straightaway.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:29)
What did you do on a motorbike? What's the fastest on a motorbike?

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:32)
Oh, that, yeah, I needed to stop myself and give myself CPR. I think I hit 190 on a Ducati. That was crazy. There you go.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:40)
That's pretty impressive. But Bruce, you were talking 200?

**Bruce Cleveland** (0:44)
Yeah, just shy of 200 The guys who raced at Las Vegas in that Ferrari Challenge Race, my teammates, they hit, I think, just shy of 200 miles an hour, because a very long straight away there. It is all predicated upon, well, yeah, your car for sure, but also the track that you're on. It's not really about how fast you go on a straight away. It's how fast can you go with a lot of curves.

**Stephen Sakach** (1:11)
I'm going to stick to the go-karts and video games, but you guys go on ahead. Welcome everyone to The Bliss Business Podcast, where we explore principles that help businesses scale with purpose, leadership, and innovation. I'm Stephen Sakach, joined today by our co-host Tullio Siragusa and Mike Liwski. Today's conversation is especially timely for founders and teams in early stages of growth or even seasoned leaders looking to avoid common pitfalls when scaling. What if there was a more systematic proven way to move from idea to scale? What if the answer wasn't just more hustle but smarter alignment between product, market and message? Mike, who's joining us today to explore this topic with us?

**Michael Liwski** (1:59)
Yes, thanks Steve and we are super excited for it. Today's episode, we're honored to welcome Bruce Cleveland. He's the founder and CEO of Traction Gap Partners and a former technology operating executive, venture capitalist and entrepreneur. He's held senior positions at Oracle, Apple, Siebel Systems and c3.ai.
He's been a general partner in two venture capital firms and has also been the founder and CEO of ZipLine's Education. As well, his work includes his venture capital successes include companies like Marketo, C3 Ai, Vlocity and Doximity, who many of you may know, has been on a tear as far as a public stock company recently. Many of his investments were just ideas when he invested no product or revenue and went on to become a billion dollar company. So Bruce is also the author and the best seller of Traversing the Traction Gap, which hopefully many of our followers will enjoy reading. It's a perspective guide for startups, product teams, and even mature companies navigating growth challenges. So today, he acts as a board executive and advisor to startups, mature technology companies as well, and even venture firms using the Traction Gap framework to generate market engineering strategies and market success. So Bruce, we're absolutely thrilled to have you with us today. Welcome to our show.

**Bruce Cleveland** (3:43)
Well, thank you very much. I'm really glad to be here.

**Michael Liwski** (3:46)
And Bruce, just to kick things off, what inspired you to create Traction Gap Partners, and how you came up with this concept?

**Bruce Cleveland** (3:55)
Well, that's a great question. I wrote the book back in 2019, it was published anyway in February 2019, I wrote it during 2018, when I was still in venture capital. And I wrote the book as a sort of an expose into venture capital. How do you raise capital? Because sometimes it seems like a pretty mysterious business for entrepreneurs. And I wrote it as a prescriptive guide in order to help companies, in this case, B2B SaaS early stage startups, primarily. Because that was the business that we were in, in Wildcat Venture Partners, a venture firm I co-founded with two other partners. The purpose of the book, again, was to help guide people. But the principles inside of them, what I call market engineering and this traction gap framework, which is this continuum that use these market engineering techniques to progress your company from ideation to scale. All those concepts, as I work with my portfolio companies, I was able to then take to C3 Ai when I joined Tom Siebel, again, because I've worked for him back at Oracle a long time ago, and then I was at Siebel Systems as a variety of different executive roles. But I took all those principles and I really enjoyed using them. I used them to help take C3 Ai public. I used them with companies like Marketo and others, at least to provide input. They did all the work. I just provided whatever type of input I could give to help. I decided I thought that it made a lot of sense because I was having pretty good success with these startups that were effectively, as you said, Michael, they were just ideas. Marketo was three guys. It was John Miller, Phil Fernandez, and Dave Morandi and an idea. There was no code, no revenue, no product. I think there might have been a dog involved. I don't remember.