In Depth
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
1
How Wes Kao coaches founders to influence, lead...
79 min
2
From reluctant founder to $2B valuation: The st...
74 min
3
How a weekend hack became a multimillion-dollar...
60 min
4
1Password’s growth story | How they went from b...
68 min
5
Scrappy tactics and a huge post-COVID pivot | O...
83 min
6
What makes (or breaks) executive hires | A deep...
Eeke de Milliano is the Head of Global Product at Stripe, helping drive innovation and success in the company's product line. Before this role, she was Head of Product at Retool and co-founded Constellate. Eeke previously spent 6 years as Product Lead at Stripe, working with the company during their hyper-growth era.
59 min
7
Inside Guideline's mission to modernize 401(k)s...
Kevin Busque is the co-founder and CEO of Guideline, a 401(k) management company revolutionizing the retirement space for small and medium-sized businesses. Prior to Guideline, Kevin co-founded Taskrabbit, where he encountered firsthand the complexity and low participation rates of traditional 401(k) plans—largely due to confusing fee structures.
84 min
8
Inside Braze’s blitz to $500M in CARR | Buildin...
Bill Magnuson is the co-founder and CEO at Braze, along with Kevin Wang, who joined as employee #8 and serves as the CPO. The two MIT graduates have built Braze into a publicly listed customer engagement platform with a $4.4B market cap. In 2023, Braze surpassed $500M in CARR, and serves over 2,200 customers worldwide. Before Braze, Bill spent time at Bridgewater Associates. Kevin’s academic background is in brain & cognitive sciences, and prior to joining Braze he worked at Accenture and Brewgene.
83 min
9
Inside Clay's unconventional path to $1.25B: Re...
Varun Anand is the co-founder and Head of Operations at Clay, a lead-generation software that combines data and AI to help over 5000 companies reach their best-fit customers. Clay recently announced their Series B expansion, raising $40M at a $1.2B valuation. Before Clay, Varun was the Director of Operations at Newfront and the Head of Expansion at Candid. Varun also spent four years working on Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Campaign.
62 min
10
Building a 4 billion dollar data platform: Insi...
55 min
11
How Figma taps into taste, simplicity, and stor...
Yuhki Yamashita is the Chief Product Officer at Figma, leading the product and design teams. Previously, he was a product and design leader at Uber, where he orchestrated the redesign of the rider and driver apps. Yuhki was also a product manager at Google (YouTube iOS app) and Microsoft (Hotmail). Additionally, he has taught introductory computer science at Harvard University.
69 min
12
How to find customers in the Dept of Defense: F...
Steve Blank is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, where he co-created the "Hacking for Defense" curriculum for the Department of Defense.
34 min
13
Shifting Career Altitudes: Insights from a CPO’...
Anneka Gupta is the Chief Product Officer at Rubrik, a cloud management and data security company with a US$6B market cap. Before Rubrik, Anneka spent 11 years leading various teams at LiveRamp, including product, go-to-market, and operations.
69 min
14
How to find and pull startup growth levers | Ma...
Matt Lerner is the Founder and CEO at SYSTM and the author of "Growth Levers"
65 min
15
How to find — and keep — product-market fit | B...
78 min
16
Rebooting Intercom: Eoghan McCabe on Defying Si...
Eoghan McCabe is the CEO and cofounder at Intercom, an AI customer service platform. Intercom has raised over $240M, and was last valued at $1.3B in 2023.
75 min
17
Inside marketing at Stripe, OpenAI and Retool |...
Krithika Muthukumar is a marketing veteran. She is currently the VP of Marketing at OpenAI where she was the first marketing hire. Before that, she was Head of Marketing at Retool. Her longest tenure was at Stripe where she was hired as the first marketer and scaled with the company over nine years, from a 60-person team to 7500+. She began her career in Product Marketing at Google and Dropbox.
68 min
18
Developing technical taste: A guide for next-ge...
Sam Schillace is the CVP and Deputy CTO at Microsoft. Before Microsoft, Sam held prominent engineering roles at Google and Box. He has also founded six startups, including Writely, which was acquired by Google and became Google Docs.
65 min
19
How to build and scale winning marketplaces | C...
Casey Winters is a legendary advisor on scaling, product and growth. He’s worked with companies like Airbnb, Faire, Canva, Whatnot, Thumbtack, Tinder, and Reddit. Until recently, Casey was the Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite, and has also led growth and product teams at Pinterest and Grubhub.
73 min
20
Lessons from Sentry on scaling DevTools and fin...
Milin Desai is the CEO at Sentry, an application monitoring tool for developers. Sentry has recently passed two key milestones: 100K customers and over $100M in ARR. Before Sentry, Milin was a GM at VMware and scaled their cloud networking into a billion-dollar business. Prior to stepping into leadership roles, Milin was a PM at Riverbed and a software engineer at Veritas.
58 min
21
How to be effective up and down the org chart |...
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.
75 min
22
Timeless lessons on running software companies ...
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.
76 min
23
Building products that delight customers | Adam...
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, eBay, and Apple.
76 min
24
A masterclass in founder conviction | Eilon Res...
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 previous e-commerce startup, Webcollage.
43 min
25
Essential lessons for building and scaling DevT...
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.
58 min