Matt MacInnis is the COO at Rippling, an all-in-one HR, IT, and finance platform for businesses, which last raised $500M at a $11.25B valuation. Before Rippling, Matt was the co-founder and CEO at Inkling, a mobile learning platform that was acquired in 2018. He also held several management roles at Apple. — In today’s episode,[...]
Alyssa Henry is the former CEO of Square, a financial services company providing products and services used by over 4 million merchants. Formerly at Amazon, Alyssa led the development and growth of Simple Storage Service (S3) at AWS. Alyssa now serves as an Independent Director at Intel and Confluent. — In today’s episode, we discuss:[...]
Adam Nash is the co-founder and CEO at Daffy, a platform that makes it easier to donate to charities and non-profits. Before Daffy, Adam was the President and CEO at Wealthfront, where he scaled the company’s assets under management from $100M to over $4B. Adam has also held leadership and technical roles at Dropbox, LinkedIn,[...]
Eilon Reshef is the co-founder and CPO at Gong, an AI-powered platform that tracks, records, and analyzes sales calls to drive revenue growth. In 2021, Gong raised $250M at a $7.25B valuation. Gong was one of the fastest SaaS companies to hit $100m ARR, and now has over 4000 customers. Before Gong, Eilon sold his[...]
Dennis Pilarinos is the founder and CEO at Unblocked, a developer tool that lets you talk to your codebase. In 2018, Dennis’ first company, Buddybuild, was acquired by Apple, and he was subsequently appointed Director of Development Technologies. Before that, Dennis was a Senior Director at AWS and a Director at Microsoft. — In today’s[...]
May Habib is the co-founder and CEO of Writer, a full-stack generative AI platform built for enterprises. The model is trained on a customer’s own data to create content that is consistent with their brand style and voice. Writer recently raised $100M at a valuation of around $500M. Prior to Writer, May co-founded Qordoba, an[...]
Amjad Masad is the co-founder and CEO of Replit, an online platform designed for collaborative coding in multiple programming languages. Replit boasts over 30m users, has secured $200M in venture funding, and was recently valued at $1.2B. Before Replit, Amjad was a Software Engineer at Facebook, and a Founding Engineer at Codecademy. — In today’s[...]
Michael Cieri is the Chief Product Officer at Gusto, an HR and payroll platform used by more than 300,000 businesses. With a decade of experience, he has led successful SMB product development and scaled high-performing orgs. Before Gusto, Michael was also the Head of Product at Square, where he led a team of 15+ PMs[...]
Stephanie Berner is a Customer Success Executive at LinkedIn. Since 2018, Stephanie has spearheaded all post-sales functions at LinkedIn Sales Solutions through its period of rapid growth. With a background in building and scaling customer success teams at Box, Medallia, and Opower, Stephanie has extensive experience in delivering exceptional customer experiences across various company stages.[...]
Michael Lopp is an experienced engineering leader known for building products at iconic companies like Apple, Borland, Netscape, Palantir, and Slack. Since 2002, Lopp — as he’s more commonly known — has written about engineering, management, and leadership on his popular blog ‘Rands in Repose’. He is also the renowned author of three books: Being[...]
Kareem Amin is the co-founder of Clay, a lead-generation software that uses AI to scrape 50+ databases and help companies scale their outbound campaigns. Before Clay, Kareem was the VP of Product at The Wall Street Journal. Kareem also co-founded Frame (useframe.com) which was acquired by Sailthru in 2012. — In today’s episode, we discuss:[...]
Kyle Parrish, Figma’s first sales hire, built the company’s zero-to-one sales engine from scratch. Figma now has more than 3 million monthly users. Prior to Figma, Kyle spent 5 years at Dropbox in various sales roles. At Dropbox, Kyle successfully launched and scaled the Austin office to 100+ people, and then led the enterprise sales[...]
Oliver Jay is a sales and expansion specialist. Oliver was Chief Revenue Officer at Asana and led the company’s global expansion. He grew the team from 20 to 450 people and increased international income to 40% of Asana’s total revenue. Prior to this, Oliver built the first business sales team at Dropbox, and led the[...]
Steve Blank, an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, is widely regarded as the father of modern entrepreneurship. Prior to academia, Steve’s career spanned eight different startups. Credited with launching the Lean Startup movement with his May 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story, Steve has changed how startups are built, and how entrepreneurship is taught. Steve[...]
Neha Narkhede is a co-founder at Confluent, a data streaming software that raised at a $9.1b valuation in 2021. Neha later co-founded Oscilar, a no-code platform that helps companies detect and manage fraud. Before building these two companies, Neha was a Principal Software Engineer at LinkedIn where she co-created Apache Kafka. Neha is ranked #50[...]
Jack Krawczyk is a Senior Director of Product at Google, building Bard. Bard is Google’s collaborative, conversational, and experimental AI tool that’s bridging the gap between humans and bots, while addressing ethical considerations around AI. After joining the project in 2020, Jack helped ship Bard in less than four years. Bard sources information directly from[...]
Will Larson is the CTO at Carta, an ownership and equity management platform that raised at a $7.4b valuation in 2021. Prior to joining Carta, Will was CTO at Calm, founded Stripe's Foundation Engineering org, and led Uber’s Platform Engineering people and strategy. Will also writes extensively about engineering leadership, and has authored two books[...]
Anastasis Germanidis is the Co-Founder & CTO at Runway, an applied AI research company shaping the next era of art, entertainment, and human creativity. Runway has raised $237m and was one of Time Magazine’s “100 most influential companies” in 2023. Runway has been a persistent viral sensation in recent years, and is behind many of[...]
Guillermo Rauch is the CEO of Vercel, a frontend-as-a-service product that was valued at $2.5b in 2021. Vercel serves customers like Uber, Notion and Zapier, and their React framework - Next.js - is used by over 500,000 developers and designers worldwide. Guillermo started his first company at age 11 in Buenos Aires and moved to San Francisco[...]
Ashley Kramer is the CMO and CSO at GitLab, a publicly listed DevSecOps platform. Ashley took a unique path into her CMO role. She started out in software engineering before becoming a product leader, and eventually, a marketer. Most recently, Ashley was the CPO and CMO at Sisense, a data analytics company last valued at[...]
Colin Zima is the co-founder and CEO of Omni, a business intelligence tool that has raised over $26.9m. Prior to starting Omni, Colin was Chief Analytics Officer and VP of Product at Looker, which was acquired by Google for $2.6b. Colin was an early employee at Looker, and stood up its high-touch customer support arm,[...]
Wade Foster is the Co-founder & CEO at Zapier, a platform for building workflow automations without a developer. Zapier was started during 2011 in Columbia, Missouri, and by 2021, it was valued at $5b, having only raised $1.3m. Prior to founding Zapier, Wade had just two professional jobs, and had never managed or hired anyone.[...]
Laura Behrens Wu is the Founder & CEO at Shippo, a company that has raised $100m+ and was last valued at $1b in 2021. Shippo provides an API and dashboard that makes shipping easy for e-commerce businesses, marketplaces, and platforms. Prior to starting Shippo, Laura graduated from Harvard University, and was heavily influenced by a[...]
Dan Siroker is the co-founder and CEO at Rewind AI, a personalized AI powered by everything you’ve seen, said, or heard. Dan launched Rewind to an emphatic response on Twitter, and used a public pitch video to fundraise at a $350m valuation. Prior to starting Rewind, Dan co-founded Optimizely, which reached $120m ARR before being[...]
Sprig is an AI-powered user insights platform that has raised over $88m. Today’s discussion features two key individuals in Sprig’s journey so far: Ryan Glasgow, Sprig’s CEO and founder; and Kevin Mandich, Sprig’s Head of Machine Learning. Before Sprig, Ryan was an early PM at GraphScience, Vurb, and Weeby (all of which were acquired), and Kevin was[...]
Saumil Mehta is the GM of Square’s flagship point-of-sale business, as well as CRM, Square Staff, and Square Online. Before Square, Saumil was the Founder and CEO of LocBox, which raised over $5.1M, and helped offline/local businesses run multi-channel marketing campaigns, all from one universal dashboard. Saumil has now been a leader at Square for[...]
Kellan Elliott-McCrea is a Head of Engineering at Adobe, overseeing Frame.io, a newly acquired video review and collaboration platform. He is known for his experience and expertise as an engineering leader. He was previously a VPE at Dropbox, and CTO at Etsy where he built and led a team of 300 people, from tech and[...]
Alex Kracov is the CEO and Co-Founder at Dock, and the former VP of Marketing at Lattice. Alex joined Lattice as the first marketer and third employee, and he helped to grow the business from seed to 1850+ customers. Prior to Lattice, Alex was a consultant at Blue State Digital — the team that elected[...]
Anique Drumright is the COO at Loom, a video communication tool for streamlining workflows. Loom has raised over $200M, and was last valued at $1.5B. Anique has a proven track record across product development, executive leadership, and building high-performing organizations. Before joining Loom, Anique was the VP of Product at TripActions, where she scaled the[...]
Noah Desai Weiss is the Chief Product Officer of Slack, and has an accomplished track record inside and outside of the company. He started Slack’s Search, Learning, and Intelligence division, led the Self-Service (SMB) Business, and led the Expansion and Virtual HQ product areas (responsible for Huddles, Clips, and more). Before joining Slack, Noah was[...]
Jack Altman is the co-founder and CEO of Lattice, a people success platform for building engaged, high-performing teams. Lattice has raised over $330M, and was last valued at $3B. He is an expert in building company culture, and wrote a book on the topic, titled: “People Strategy”. In today's episode, we discuss: The importance of[...]
Tara Seshan is the Head of Product at Watershed, a climate platform that companies use to measure, report, and reduce their carbon emissions. Before joining Watershed, Tara was Head of Product at Stripe throughout the launch of Stripe Billing and Stripe Treasury. As a Thiel Fellow and experienced multi-product builder, Tara brings a wealth of[...]
Our guest today is Melissa Tan, GM of Self-Service and Head of Growth at Webflow and formerly Head of Growth and Monetization for Dropbox Business. In today’s conversation, she unpacks the nuances between the two PLG businesses and how growth strategy changes for a more complex product like Webflow, including: Designing and structuring a growth org The right way[...]
Our guest today is Marcel Weekes, VP of Product Engineering at Figma and former VP of Engineering at Slack. In today’s conversation, he unpacks why most startups get it wrong when they uplevel someone from IC engineer to eng manager and unfurls what stellar engineering management looks like at high-growth companies, including: Setting appropriate expectations and goals Turbocharging the[...]
Todd Jackson is back on the mic to guest host another product-focused episode. This time, he chats with Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran, co-founder and CEO of Luminai, a B2B software tool that helps automate any manual process down to just one click. Dinakaran’s personal and professional story is one that you do not want to miss.[...]
Our guest today is Douglas Hanna, Chief Operating Officer at Grafana Labs. Grafana Labs is an observability stack built around Grafana, a leading open-source technology for dashboards and visualization. Douglas is a seasoned revenue leader, previously leading operations and GTM strategy at Zendesk. At Grafana Labs, Douglas has been instrumental in scaling GTM at the[...]
Today’s conversation is with Jessica McKellar, co-founder and CTO of Pilot, which is the largest accounting firm for startups. She’s been working on Pilot for the last 6 years with her two co-founders, Waseem Daher and Jeff Arnold. But what makes this founding trio super unique is that they’ve stuck together in not just one, but three[...]
Our guest today is Artem Kroupenev, VP of Strategy at Augury. Augury is a leader in a category they helped to define known as “machine health.” The company sells products that combine hardware, AI, and SaaS within industrial manufacturing. Artem joined the team at the very beginning of its journey and helped shape strategies for[...]
Our guest today is Jeanette Mellinger, Head of UX Research at BetterUp and our User Research Expert in Residence at First Round. In today’s conversation, Jeanette unspools her tested playbook for high-quality customer interviews, with particular advice for founders in the very early days of validating an idea, including: The three-step framework for a thorough user-research process The biggest[...]
Our guest today is Claire Hughes Johnson, former COO of Stripe and author of the new book, “Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building.” Claire joined Stripe as its COO back in 2014 and, over the course of her nearly seven years in the company’s executive suite, she oversaw rapid growth as Stripe scaled from under 200[...]
Our guest today is Rachel Hepworth, Head of Marketing at Notion. Rachel currently runs growth marketing at Notion, and sees her job as bringing process and control to all of Notion’s different marketing channels. Before joining Notion, Rachel launched the first growth marketing team at Slack, laying down the tracks for a well-oiled go-to-market strategy[...]
Our guest today is Nadia Singer, Chief People Officer at Figma. Nadia joined Figma in 2020 and has seen explosive growth in her own career alongside the collaborative design platform’s. Before Figma, Singer was a talent expert who has hired hundreds of talented folks at places like Quora, Facebook and Google. In our conversation today,[...]
Todd Jackson is back on the mic to guest host another product-focused episode this week with Christina Cacioppo, the co-founder and CEO of Vanta. Vanta is the leading automated security and compliance platform, with thousands of businesses relying on the product to get compliant (and to stay that way). After toying with some initial ideas, like a voice[...]
Our guest today is Ben Lang, Head of Community at Notion. Since joining the company in 2019, Ben has had his hand in several high-impact projects at Notion that has grown its tight-knit community of passionate Notion evangelists into millions of users today. But before he was doing this as a full-time job, Ben was already spreading his love[...]
Todd Jackson is back on the mic to guest host another product-focused episode this week. He chats with Bryant Chou, co-founder and founding CTO of Webflow, a no-code visual web design platform built with freelance designers and developers in mind. Today, Webflow is valued at over $4 billion and has millions of users all over the world.[...]
Our guest today is Don Faul, CEO of CrossFit. Don has a fascinating background where he’s been able to find success in environments as different as a combat zone and a corporate board room. After spending 8 years as a platoon commander in the U.S. Marine Corps, Don had stints at some of the most vaunted companies in[...]
Our guest today is Brie Wolfson. Brie spent nearly 5 years at Stripe, where she worked on bizops and launched Stripe Press, followed by a stint at Figma where she worked on education. She then started her consultancy, named The Kool-Aid Factory, to share her lessons on building team cultures. And now she’s operating as a first-time founder[...]
Our guest today is Aaron Zamost. After a comms career at Google, Aaron joined Square in 2011 to lead corporate communications. He went on to join the exec team, reporting directly to Jack Dorsey and leading the comms strategy for Square’s IPO in 2015. In an interesting move, he also took on leading the people organization as well,[...]
Our guest today is Daniel Debow, a VP of Product for Demand at Shopify. Daniel is a three-time founder and a seasoned M&A pro. Daniel oversaw the process of all three of his companies’ acquisitions and has helped continue to grow them at scale inside larger corporations. His most recent startup, Helpful, was acquired by[...]
Our guest is Anna Binder, Head of People at Asana. We go back to the earliest days when Anna first took on the role, starting with how she prioritized the initial things to tackle as a new People exec and combing through a slew of opinions that bubbled up from other folks at the company. [...]
For our first episode of 2023, our guest is Mike Boufford, CTO of Greenhouse, an applicant tracking system and recruiting platform. Mike has a unique career as an engineering leader. He wrote the first line of code at Greenhouse in May 2012, and he’s still there — over a decade later. This isn’t the typical[...]
Our guest is Peter Kazanjy, co-founder of Atrium and author of “Founding Sales: The Early Stage Go-to-Market Handbook.” As an early-stage founder, there’s something comforting about the build stage. You’re tinkering with the nascent product, honing your MVP and dreaming up the possibilities of how much folks are going to love what you create. But[...]
Todd Jackson is back on the mic to guest host another product-market fit focused episode this week. He chats with Deepak Rao, co-founder and CEO of X1, a consumer fintech startup that’s building a credit card for a new generation. Just last week, X1 announced a $15 million funding round. But we’re here to rewind[...]
Our guest today is Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the bestselling author of “Contagious” and “Invisible Influence.” Today we’re chatting about his follow-up book, “The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind.” Founders start companies to change industries and behaviors, but change is hard. Going back[...]
Todd Jackson is back on the mic to guest host another product-focused episode this week. He chats with David Hsu, founder and CEO of Retool, a low-code platform for developers building custom internal tools. Today, Retool is valued at over $3 billion and has some of the biggest companies in the world building apps on[...]
Our guest is Rich Rao, the VP of the Small Business Group at Meta, where he manages the global revenue and operations for properties including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. He also spent 10 years at Google, where he held a bunch of different go-to-market roles at the company, eventually becoming the GM for the Devices[...]
Our guest is Sara Varni, CMO of Attentive, a conversational commerce platform. Before joining Attentive, Sara was Twilio’s CMO and spent 10 years as a senior marketing leader at Salesforce. In today’s conversation, we talk about what startups can learn from enterprise marketing playbooks, particularly around creating and honing a corporate message. Sara takes us[...]
Todd Jackson’s back on the mic this week. (As a reminder, he’s guest hosting a few product-focused episodes this season — all about finding product-market fit.) Today, Todd chats with Harry Ritter, founder of Alma, a membership-based network that helps independent mental health care providers accept insurance and build thriving private practices. In our conversation,[...]
Our guest is Annie Duke, a retired pro poker player and First Round’s Special Partner focused on Decision Science. She’s also the author of the bestselling book, “Thinking in Bets.” In today’s conversation, we’re talking about her follow-up to that book, titled “Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away,” which was just released[...]
Our guests are Manu Sharma and Brian Rieger, co-founders of Labelbox. In this interview, we take a microscope to their co-founder DNA, exploring the ins and outs of how they’ve made the relationship work over the years. We discuss: How Manu and Brian came together as co-founders and landed on the idea for Labelbox. How[...]
Today’s episode is with Sydney Strader, VP of Customer Success at Catalyst. Prior to joining Catalyst, Sydney was the VP of Customer Success at InVision. In our conversation we focus on founder-led customer success, an area of early company building that’s often overlooked. Here’s a preview of her tactical advice: How to structure early customer[...]
Today’s episode is with Steven Bartel, co-founder and CEO of Gem. Before building the talent acquisition platform, Steven was an early engineer at Dropbox, where he spent 5 years working on analytics, Dropbox Paper, and hiring as the company grew from 25 to 1500 people. This experience from Dropbox, combined with his lessons from building[...]
Today’s episode is with Snir Kodesh, Head of Engineering at Retool, which is a development platform for building custom business tools. Before joining Retool, Snir spent six years as a Senior Director of Engineering at Lyft. In our conversation, we cover some of the biggest differences between leading engineering teams for a consumer product versus[...]
Today’s episode is with Claire Butler, Senior Director of Marketing at Figma, and one of the company’s first 10 employees. In today’s conversation, she sketches out Figma’s five phases of community-led growth — and shares tons of advice along the way for startups who also are looking to build an organic growth engine. In the[...]
Todd Jackson’s filling in as host again this week. (As a reminder, he’s hosting a few product-focused episodes this season — all about finding product-market fit.) Today, Todd chats with Andrew Ofstad, co-founder of Airtable. In our conversation, we go deep into Airtable’s early days, and how they navigated the journey of finding traction and[...]
Today’s episode is with Ian Wong, co-founder and CTO of Opendoor. Before founding Opendoor, Ian was Square’s first data scientist, where he developed machine learning models and infrastructure for fraud detection. In today’s conversation, we cover his essential advice for how to integrate data science into your startup. As Ian puts it, in the early[...]
Today’s episode is with Sidharth Kakkar, founder and CEO of Subscript, a subscription intelligence platform that empowers B2B SaaS leaders to better understand their revenue. (Read more about the company in this Techcrunch article.) Previously, he was the founder, CEO of Freckle, an education platform that grew to serve 10 million students and was acquired[...]
Our guest is Sara Clemens, most recently COO of Twitch and former COO of Pandora. In this interview, we explore the nuances of the COO role, which can vary drastically across different companies. We cover: The three main COO archetypes and which sorts of folks are best suited for those roles. The tactical elements of[...]
For our 60th episode, we’re doing things a little bit differently — with a new guest host! Welcome to Todd Jackson, who’s filling in for Brett Berson this week. Todd is also a Partner at First Round, and the episodes he hosts will mostly focus on product, given his previous product roles, from the VP[...]
Today’s episode is with Russ Laraway, a seasoned leader who's been at Google, Twitter, Candor Inc, Qualtrics, and is now the Chief People Officer for Goodwater Capital Since we last had Russ on the show, he’s written a new book, titled: “When They Win, You Win.” On today’s episode, we dive deep into the management[...]
Today’s episode is with Nate Stewart, CPO of Cockroach Labs, the creator of database product CockroachDB. In today’s conversation, we cover his essential advice for building a highly-technical product. He sketches out how the Cockroach team decided on the specific use case for its database product. Nate explains the steps the team took to reach[...]
Today’s episode is with Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, co-founder and CEO of Promise, a modern government payment solution. In today’s conversation, Phaedra explores the ins and outs of selling a product into government. Phaedra pulls back the curtain of how she and the Promise team tackle the extra-long sales cycles, navigate layers of subcontractors, and convince risk-averse[...]
Today’s episode is with Gagan Biyani, co-founder and CEO of Maven, a company that empowers the world’s experts to offer cohort-based courses directly to their audience. After being early at 3 startups that achieved over $1 million in run-rate in their first six months of going live, Gagan has learned some valuable lessons and seen[...]
Today’s episode is with Kaitlyn Knopp, founder and CEO of Pequity, which automates HR workflows to make compensation more equitable and scalable. Prior to starting Pequity, Kaitlyn built compensation programs and teams at companies like Instacart, Cruise, and Google — bringing a deep well of experience to this often complicated topic. We start our conversation[...]- Today’s episode is with Nairi Hourdajian, the VP of Communications, Content and Community Marketing at Figma. Prior to joining Figma, Nairi was the Chief Marketing Officer at Canaan, an early-stage venture capital firm. In 2013, she became Uber’s first communications person and spent the next 3 years building out the function. Before getting into tech,[...]
Today’s episode is with Jack Altman, co-founder & CEO of Lattice. There were so many topics we could have gotten into with Jack as it relates to scaling as a founder and CEO, but we decided to dive deep on executive hiring, a huge challenge for founders. The conversation starts with how the hiring profile[...]
Today’s episode is with Amber Feng, who is the co-founder and CTO of Cocoon, and was previously an engineering leader at Stripe for eight years. In today’s conversation, we pull on threads from Amber’s engineering career to weave together lessons for other engineers charting their own path. Although Amber’s spent the majority of her career[...]
Today’s episode is with Meka Asonye, a Partner at First Round Capital. This week marks the one year anniversary since he joined, making the transition from seasoned GTM leader to full-time early-stage investor. Prior to First Round, Meka served as the VP of Sales & Services at Mixpanel, where he ran the more than 100-person[...]
Today’s episode is with Max Rhodes, the co-founder and CEO of Faire, an online wholesale marketplace that connects independent retailers and brands. Prior to starting Faire in 2017, Max spent several years at Square, where he was a founding member of Square Capital, the first product manager on Square Cash, and a Director of Consumer[...]- Today’s episode is with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Head of Americas Revenue and Growth for Stripe, where she’s responsible for all sales functions and leads the company’s enterprise strategy. She joined Stripe after a career in sales at Google and also serving as Dialpad’s Chief Revenue Officer. In today’s conversation, we dive super deep into all[...]
Today’s episode is with Ravi Mehta, who is formerly the Chief Product Officer at Tinder, and taught product strategy as an Executive in Residence at Reforge. In today’s conversation, we dive exceptionally deep into product strategy, starting with what Ravi sees as the most common disconnect between product strategy and what product teams actually work[...]
Today’s episode is with Arielle Jackson. For the past 7 years, she’s helped hundreds of companies build their positioning and brands from the ground up, both as our Marketing Expert in Residence here at First Round and in her own consulting work. Before helping early-stage startups, Arielle started her career in Product Marketing at Google,[...]
Today’s episode is with Adrian McDermott, CTO of Zendesk. Adrian started at the company back in 2010, when they were only 50 employees. Since then, he’s led product management and engineering teams as the company has gone public and scaled to over 5000 employees. Our discussion digs into the challenges that come from scaling startups.[...]- Today’s episode is with Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder and CTO of Hubspot. In today’s conversation, we deeply explore some of the marquee moments along the 15-year journey building Hubspot. To start, Dharmesh unpacks the very specific way he and his co-founder Brian Halligan approached evaluating their compatibility as co-founders. He’s got tons of advice for[...]
Today’s episode is with Zach Kitschke, CMO of Canva, an online design and publishing tool. Since launching in 2013, Canva has grown from an Australian startup to a global company, with 60 million monthly active users, over 2,000 employees, and a $40 billion valuation. Zach was one of Canva's first employees, leading comms efforts around[...]
Today’s episode is with Hareem Mannan, who was a product design leader at Segment for nearly four years, and joined Twilio as a Senior Director of Product, Enablement & Design following the company’s acquisition of Segment. In today’s conversation, we deeply explore Hareem’s three pillars of what makes a great designer. To summarize, they are[...]
Today’s episode is with Max Mullen, co-founder of Instacart. He started as a generalist, running everything from product to payroll, but as the company has grown over the years, he’s come to focus on one particular area: culture. Since Max is also an active angel investor, he’s also been able to partner with tons of[...]
Today’s episode is with Alisa Cohn, an executive coach with nearly 20 years of experience working with companies like Etsy, Venmo, InVision, The Wirecutter, Google and IBM. Her new book, From Start-Up to Grown-Up: Grow Your Leadership to Grow Your Business, just came out this week. In our conversation today, we focus on what founders[...]
Today’s episode is with Gretchen Howard, COO of Robinhood. Gretchen joined Robinhood in early 2019 as the company’s COO and just its second executive hire. She climbed aboard the Robinhood rocketship after 5 years building CapitalG, Alphabet’s investment fund. In today’s conversation, we dive really deep into what she’s learned about executive hiring. To start,[...]
Today’s episode is with Giancarlo 'GC' Lionetti, the former CMO of Confluent and VP of Self-Serve Growth at Dropbox. (GC also previously spent 6 years at Atlassian, as a sales engineer and product marketing manager for developer tools.) He describes his career as more of a maze than a ladder, and this functional diversity combined[...]
Today’s episode is with Sandr Oh Lin, founder and CEO of KiwiCo, which creates hands-on learning kits for children. Sandra started KiwiCo over ten years ago, after a career with executive positions at PayPal and eBay. She was looking for ways to give her own kids more hands-on projects to exercise their creativity, which led[...]
Today’s episode is with Maya Spivak, the Head of Marketing at Mux, which is an API for developers to build video experiences. Maya recently joined Mux after five years at Segment, where she was the company’s second marketer and its Head of Global Brand Marketing and Communications, as well as a stint at Wealthfront as[...]
Today’s episode is with Archana Agrawal, CMO of Airtable, a low-code platform for building collaborative apps. Archana joined Airtable last year after 7 years at Atlassian, where she eventually became the company’s Head of Enterprise and Cloud Marketing. She also sits on the board for MongoDB and Zendesk. We start today’s conversation by dissecting some[...]
Today’s episode is with Tara Viswanathan, co-founder and CEO of Rupa Health. Tara started Rupa Health in early 2018, but the product vision today looks very different from what she first built. As she’ll talk about over the course of today’s interview, she went through plenty of sometimes painful pivots on the path to finding[...]
Today’s episode is with Steve Gutentag, the co-founder and CEO of Thirty Madison, a healthcare company focused on widening access to specialized care for chronic conditions. After previously starting two other companies with his co-founder Demetri Karagas, they launched Thirty Madison in 2017 with Keeps, a men’s hair loss solution. The team has since gone[...]
Today’s episode is with Jane Davis, the Director of UX Research and UX Writing at Zoom. She previously led UX Research and Content Design at Zapier, and managed the growth research team at Dropbox. Throughout the episode, Jane tackles the thorniest customer development questions and walks us through the end-to-end research process in incredible detail,[...]
Today’s episode is with Alex Buder Shapiro, the Chief People Officer at Flatiron Health, a company that focuses on accelerating cancer research and improving patient care. Alex first joined Flatiron back in 2016, after an 8-year stint on Google’s People Operations team. Before her promotion to Flatiron’s executive team this past March, Alex previously[...]
Today’s episode is with Ryan Glasgow, the founder and CEO of UserLeap, a product research platform that helps PMs, user researchers, and growth marketers launch microsurveys to uncover customer insights faster. Before founding UserLeap in 2018, Ryan was a PM and early team member at Weebly (which was acquired by Square) and Vurb (which was[...]
Today’s episode is with Nick Caldwell, VP of Engineering at Twitter. Previously, Nick was at Microsoft for 15 years, eventually becoming GM of Power BI. Nick has also held roles as Reddit’s VP of Engineering and Looker’s Chief Product and Engineering Officer. Between Microsoft, Reddit, Looker, and now Twitter, Nick’s worked for companies with[...]
Today’s episode is with Sam Taylor, VP of Sales and Success at Loom. Previously, Sam was Dropbox’s first enterprise sales rep, and also served as Quip’s first sales leader. In today’s conversation, we dig into the key learnings from each stop in Sam’s career so far. Starting with his earliest experience at Dropbox, he walks[...]
Today’s episode is with McKenna Quint, who was most recently the Head of People at Plaid and also built and led the people team at Cruise Automation. Currently, she’s co-founder and general partner at Quint Capital, a seed-stage fund. In today’s conversation, we focus on the people challenges that inevitably crop up when you’re[...]
Today’s episode is with Waseem Daher, co-founder and CEO of Pilot, a company that specializes in bookkeeping, tax prep, and CFO services for high-growth startups. In addition to Pilot, Waseem co-founded two other startups with the same group of co-founders, including Ksplice, which was acquired by Oracle in 2011, and Zulip, which was acquired by[...]
Today’s episode is with Shannon Brayton, a Silicon Valley veteran with more than two decades of experience shaping corporate narratives and leading teams at companies like LinkedIn, OpenTable, eBay, Yahoo!, and Intuit. She recently joined Bessemer as the venture capital firm’s first-ever CMO. In today’s conversation, Shannon shares the comms and leadership lessons she’s[...]
Today’s episode is with Colleen McCreary, the Chief People Officer at Credit Karma. With more than 20 years of experience in HR, operations, recruiting and M&A, Colleen has headed up the people function at companies such as Vevo, The Climate Corporation, and Zynga. She’s also seen the early-stages and scaled through multiple IPOs and[...]
Today’s episode is with Irving Fain, founder and CEO of Bowery Farming. Bowery is a modern farming company that grows produce indoors, free from pollutants and using significantly less water and space. Just this week, the company announced a $300 million Series C round, the largest private fundraise to date for an indoor farming company.[...]
Today’s episode is with Kelly Watkins, CEO of Abstract, a platform for structure and transparency in the design process. In joining Abstract last year, Kelly is one of very few folks from a marketing background to take on the CEO seat. She brings a wealth of experience leading incredibly high-performing marketing teams for Slack, Github,[...]
Today’s episode is with Rick Song, the co-founder and CEO of Persona, a platform that enables companies to create the ideal identity verification experience for their customers. Before founding Persona in 2018, Rick was an engineer at Square for 5 years, and an early team member at Square Capital. Rick is at an exciting inflection[...]
Today’s episode is with Eric Berg, CEO of Fauna, which is an adaptive operational database platform. In joining Fauna as its CEO in the summer of 2020, he brought a wealth of experience as a product leader. Most recently, he was the Chief Product Officer at Okta, scaling the company from 10 employees and zero[...]
Today’s conversation is with Elliot Shmukler, founder and CEO of Anomalo, which is a platform that validates and documents all of your data. Elliot founded Anomalo after a storied career as a product and growth leader at some of the most interesting companies around. Most recently, he was Instacart’s Chief Growth Officer, driving fast and[...]
Today’s episode is with Kate Taylor, who recently joined Notion as their Head of Customer Experience. Previously, Kate spent 8 years at Dropbox, leading their SMB revenue and scaled sales operation before leaving in 2020. Prior to that, she started her career as a sales rep at Salesforce. In today’s conversation, Kate shares a[...]
Today’s episode is with Mark Frein, the Chief People Officer & Head of Alumni Programs at Lambda School. Previously, Mark served as the Chief People Officer at both InVision and Return Path. He also ran his own leadership development consultancy and taught on HR topics as an adjunct professor. Mark has an invaluable perspective[...]
Today’s episode is with Marco Zappacosta, co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack. He’s spent the last 13 years building the company into a billion-dollar business — and it’s his first and only job after graduating college. In today’s conversation, Marco dives into the company milestones that require a return to first principles versus pulling from[...]
Today’s episode is with Tido Carriero, the Chief Product Officer at Segment, a customer data platform which was recently acquired by Twilio. Before that, he built out the engineering teams that worked on the core product and the initial business product at Dropbox. Tido started out his career in 2008 as an early member of[...]
Today’s episode is with Russ Laraway. After starting out in the Marine Corps, Russ made his way into the world of startups, joining Google in 2005 where he led teams for 7 years and was recognized as one of the company’s best managers. Russ then went to Twitter, where he founded and ran the SMB[...]
Today’s episode is with Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Twilio. He’s spent the last 13 years building and running the company, including leading through a successful IPO in 2016. In today’s conversation, Jeff looks back on some of the peaks and valleys in Twilio’s journey, and his own evolution as the CEO. He[...]
Today’s episode is with Leah Sutton, SVP of Global HR at Elastic. Leah’s been in the HR space for over 20 years, and now leads everything from HR operations to recruiting and employee engagement for Elastic’s fully-distributed employee base, which includes over 2,000 spread across 40 countries and 48 states. In today’s conversation, we look[...]
Today’s episode is with Kevin Fishner, Chief of Staff at HashiCorp. As the first business hire at the cloud infrastructure automation company, he previously built out the sales, marketing and product management teams. Now as chief of staff, he’s focused on building a strong foundation of company-wide systems, now that the team has grown to[...]
Today’s episode is with David Lieb, the Director of Google Photos. Previously, he was the founder/CEO of Bump, an app that allowed users to swap contact information by physically bumping phones. Bump was acquired by Google in 2013, and formed the basis for the design of Google Photos, which launched in 2015 and passed the[...]
Today’s episode is with Bill Carr and Colin Bryar, two long-time Amazon executives who just published a new book, “Working Backwards,” which provides an inside look at how the leadership principles and business processes that have made the company so successful. Bill started at Amazon in 1999, and went on to launch and run the[...]
Today’s episode is with Anne Raimondi, Chief Customer Officer at Guru, and independent board member at Asana, Gusto and Patreon. Previously, she was part of the founding team at Blue Nile, spent five years in product marketing at eBay, and led marketing as an early employee at SurveyMonkey, before pivoting to operations as an SVP[...]
Today’s episode is with Jean-Denis Grèze, Head of Engineering at Plaid, which securely connects your bank to your apps. Before joining Plaid, Jean-Denis served as Director of Engineering at Dropbox, and even had a stint in law school and one year as a lawyer under his belt before diving deep into the world of CS. [...]
Today’s episode is with Dave Girouard, the CEO and co-founder of Upstart, an AI-powered lending platform that recently went public. Before founding Upstart, Dave was President of Google Enterprise, and spent 8 years building Google's billion dollar cloud apps business. Here at First Round, we first came to know Dave when we invested in Upstart’s[...]
Today’s episode is with Jay Simons, who’s currently a partner at Bond and serves on the boards of Hubspot and Zapier. But before that, he had a long run as the President of Atlassian, which develops software collaboration tools like Jira, Confluence and Trello. In today’s conversation, Jay dives into Atlassian’s growth story, from what’s[...]
Today’s episode is with Cristina Cordova, Notion’s Head of Platform & Partnerships. Previously, she was the 28th employee and the first partnerships hire at Stripe, where she cultivated partnerships with companies like Shopify, Squarespace and Apple, built out the BD org, and led their new Corporate Card effort. After a decade in partnerships, Cristina has[...]
Today’s episode is with David Cancel. David has been a CEO and founder of multiple different companies throughout his career. He’s also been a software engineer, a serial CTO, and the Chief Product Officer at Hubspot, giving him a unique lens into company building and leadership at different levels. In today’s conversation, David unpacks those[...]
Our third episode is with Steve El-Hage, co-founder and CEO of Drop, an electronics company that creates products powered by feedback by a massive community of enthusiasts and experts. Reflecting on his 8-year, heads-down grind since becoming a first-time founder at 22, Steve shares the lessons that he figured out the hard way, from revenue[...]
Our second episode is with Ayo Omojola, VP of Product at Carbon Health. Previously, he was the founding product manager on the banking team for Cash App at Square, where he co-created the Cash Card and helped build out Square’s technical banking infrastructure. He’s also a former founder of a Y Combinator-backed startup and an[...]
Our first episode is with Molly Graham, a seasoned exec and builder who particularly excels at helping startups to go not from 0 to 1, but from 1 to 2. We’ve interviewed her four times on First Round Review — which might be a record — because the advice she has to share and the[...]
Welcome to In Depth, a new podcast from First Round Review that’s dedicated to surfacing the tactical advice founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies and themselves. We’ll cover a lot of ground and a wide range of topics, from hiring executives and becoming a better manager, to the importance of[...]
Welcome to In Depth, a new podcast from First Round Review that’s dedicated to surfacing the tactical advice founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies and themselves. Hosted by Brett Berson, a partner at First Round, In Depth will cover a lot of ground and a wide range of topics, from hiring executives and becoming a better manager, to the importance of storytelling inside of your organization. But every interview will hit the level of tactical depth where the very best advice is found. We hope you’ll join us. Subscribe to ‘In Depth’ now and learn more at firstround.com
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All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are directy attributed to First Round or their podcast platform partner. If you believe your copyrighted work is in use without your permission, you can follow our process outlined here. See terms of use.
