Today, Chad is joined by Alex MacCaw, founder and CEO of Clearbit. Alex’s road to entrepreneurship was anything but conventional. Having taught himself programming at a young age, he dropped out of high school at the age of 17 to pursue a full-time career as a software engineer. Living in the London, Alex had intentions to get his visa and move to San Francisco to start his own company. But when he encountered a few roadblocks along the way, he took the opportunity to travel through south-east Asia and South America and wrote two successful books on programming along the way.  He built a remarkable portfolio and big tech companies took notice. Eventually, Twitter offered Alex a job, and from there he was able to pursue his dream of moving to the United States. Shortly afterward, he joined Stripe, working on their product team to create some of the core features that the company is built upon today. But he was yearning for something more and knew it was time to fully self actualize.  “I felt like I had a lot of self-growth to do. I had little idea of the amount of self-growth, but I knew there was something there. So, I wanted to try and start a company, something much bigger and use that to self-actualize,” says Alex. After starting a successful lifestyle company called Sourcing.io and selling it off, Alex decided to go big and started his current company, Clearbit. Clearbit is a marketing data engine that combines public and private data sources to allow companies to truly understand their customers and sales interactions. On this episode of Mission Daily, Alex shares more details about his path to founding Clearbit, his philosophy of building a fun culture within the company, and the importance of keeping your employees happy and motivated. — Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org. We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!