In Depth
Welcome to In Depth, a podcast from The 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
Ignoring Silicon Valley advice to build a $3B f...
61 min
27
Inside the ex-YC partner’s $15B self driving ca...
60 min
28
What Braintrust got right about product-market ...
70 min
29
How Gusto built a $9.5 billion company by ident...
55 min
30
How rejecting conventional wisdom grew Sentry t...
101 min
31
Inside Linear: Why craft and focus still win in...
93 min
32
How Wes Kao coaches founders to influence, lead...
79 min
33
From reluctant founder to $2B valuation: The st...
74 min
34
How a weekend hack became a multimillion-dollar...
60 min
35
1Password’s growth story | How they went from b...
68 min
36
Scrappy tactics and a huge post-COVID pivot | O...
83 min
37
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
38
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
39
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
40
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
41
Building a 4 billion dollar data platform: Insi...
55 min
42
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
43
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
44
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
45
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
46
How to find — and keep — product-market fit | B...
78 min
47
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
48
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
49
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
50
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