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
26
How goal-setting and planning is different for ...
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 the most famous AI demos online.
59 min
27
How Vercel found extreme product-market fit by ...
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 at age 18. In 2013, he sold his company Cloudup to Automattic (the company behind WordPress), and in 2015 he founded Vercel.
67 min
28
The business of growing and monetizing an open ...
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 over $1b.
74 min
29
How to leverage intuition, customer support, an...
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, which turned into a cornerstone competitive advantage for the company.
74 min
30
Building Zapier from first principles | Contrar...
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. He worked as a PM on a web app used by 20k students, and as an Email Marketing Manager at Veterans United - a role that had a significant influence on Zapier’s eventual success.
67 min
31
How young outsiders changed the shipping indust...
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 short internship at LendUp, which exposed her to Silicon Valley and startup culture.
59 min
32
AI Hot Takes and Unusual Twitter Fundraising St...
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 acquired by Episerver, a content management company. Dan was also the Director of Analytics for Obama’s first presidential campaign.
64 min
33
A guide to building product in a post-LLM world...
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 an ML Engineer at Incubit, and a Post-Doctoral Researcher at UC San Diego.
76 min
34
An org-design masterclass from a Square GM | Sa...
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 8+ years, and has overseen many complex re-orgs. These experiences have shaped Saumil into an all-round org-design expert.
74 min
35
How to supercharge your engineering org | Kella...
Kellan Elliott-McCrea is a Head of Engineering at Adobe. He discusses how software engineering has changed in the last 10-15 years, the importance of alignment and tactics for achieving it, how to think about and enable engineering productivity, and lessons on culture from Adobe, Dropbox and Flickr.
72 min
36
The zero to one B2B marketing playbook | Alex K...
The Zero to One B2B marketing playbook | Alex Kracov (Lattice, Dock)
63 min
37
Lessons from Loom on product strategy, organiza...
Anique Drumright is Chief Operating Officer at Loom. She shares insights and strategies on how Loom approaches product design and strategy, how to recruit and build a high-performing cross-functional org, and how to structure effective internal meetings.
61 min
38
Lessons from Slack on decision making, product-...
Noah Desai Weiss is Chief Product Officer at Slack. He shares frameworks and strategies on how Slack’s product org approaches decision making, what PLG for a horizontal SaaS product looks like, and when it pays off to take big bets.
76 min
39
Lessons in leadership | Scaling an org, develop...
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”.
78 min
40
Lessons from Stripe on adding new products - As...
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 experience with 0-1 SaaS products.
55 min
41
How to design a high-impact growth org for a PL...
Melissa Tan is the GM of Self-Service and Head of Growth at Webflow and formerly the Head of Growth and Monetization for Dropbox Business. She unpacks the nuances between the two PLG businesses, including the growth strategy, approach to pricing and packaging, and goal setting techniques.
59 min
42
Why is the transition from IC Engineer to Manag...
Marcel Weekes is the VP of Product Engineering at Figma, and was formerly VP of Engineering at Slack. 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.
58 min
43
How to pull off the ‘zoom-in pivot,’ and other ...
Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran is the co-founder and CEO of Luminai, an early-stage software startup that automates workflows by taking any multi-click process and making it one click. Formerly a world-renowned Rubik’s Cube champion and a back-to-back corporate Hackathon winner, Dinakaran shares nuggets of wisdom from his personal journey to tech and Luminai’s path to finding product-market fit for other founders.
57 min
44
The go-to-market guide for open-source compani...
Douglas Hanna, Chief Operating Officer at Grafana Labs, explores the nuances of building and scaling revenue at an open-source company.
63 min
45
What this 3-time founding team did differently ...
Jessica McKellar is the co-founder and CTO of Pilot, the largest accounting firm for startups. She’s also a three-time founder, all working with the same group of co-founders. McKellar shares the most valuable lessons the founding team has learned about smoothing your path to product-market fit by choosing the right market.
54 min
46
How to measure product-market fit with the REV ...
Artem Kroupenev, VP of Strategy at Augury, shares by-the-book frameworks for how his company measures product-market fit in the complex field of industrial equipment.
53 min
47
The early user research playbook for founders —...
User research expert Jeanette Mellinger shares her three-step process to high-quality user research, with tailored advice for founders in the early days of validating a startup idea.
71 min
48
Claire Hughes Johnson on being a “learning orga...
Claire Hughes Johnson spent seven years as the COO of Stripe, overseeing rapid growth as the company scaled from under 200 employees to over 7,000. She takes us behind the scenes at some of the most pivotal moments in her own life and career that catapulted her into the deeply curious leader she is today.
74 min
49
Notion’s Head of Marketing on building a growth...
Rachel Hepworth, Head of Marketing at Notion and formerly Slack’s first growth marketing hire, shares her high-level frameworks for bringing marketing process and analytical structure to PLG companies.
52 min
50
What makes someone a truly remarkable talent ev...
Nadia Singer, Chief People Officer at Figma, shares why she believes anyone can become a skilled talent evaluator, her best interview questions and how Figma leverages transparency across the org.
48 min