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
101
From developer to CMO — Archana Agrawal’s marke...
Archana Agrawal is CMO of Airtable and former Head of Enterprise and Cloud Marketing for Atlassian. She shares her biggest marketing lessons from the two product-led growth companies, including developing the right personas and strategic org design.
56 min
102
How to pivot your way to product/market fit & o...
In this episode with first-time founder Tara Viswanathan, co-founder and CEO of Rupa Health, we cover her biggest lessons on finding product/market fit and hiring the early team.
57 min
103
Building an operationally-intensive business an...
Steve Gutentag shares the lessons he’s learned building three startups, including how to figure out if there’s founder/product fit and how to build an operationally complex business with unit economics that work from day one.
59 min
104
Don’t have a UX research team? Jane Davis’ tips...
Jane Davis shares the playbooks she’s honed leading user research teams at Zoom, Zapier and Dropbox, tackling everything from specific questions to ask in customer interviews, to frameworks for getting feedback as you launch and prototype products.
63 min
105
Getting startup employees to stick around & lea...
Flatiron Health’s Chief People Officer Alex Buder Shapiro shares her lessons from scaling, including resolving workplace conflict with techniques from couples therapy and getting employees to stick around long-term at startups.
57 min
106
How to find product/market fit before you start...
UserLeap founder & CEO Ryan Glasgow stops by to share tactics for validating startup ideas, approaching early customer conversations, operationalizing product principles, and teaching yourself founder-led sales.
65 min
107
Nick Caldwell on the engineering cultures that ...
In this episode with Nick Caldwell, we have a wide-reaching conversation on his storied engineering leadership career at Microsoft, Reddit, Looker, and now Twitter.
59 min
108
“Everyone wants a silver bullet” — Selling less...
In this episode with Sam Taylor, we get super tactical with the lessons he’s picked up from his career as an early sales leader at top product-led growth companies — Dropbox, Quip and now Loom.
61 min
109
The do’s and don’ts of scaling from dozens of e...
In this episode with McKenna Quint, most recently Head of People at Plaid, she unpacks the unique people challenges when aggressively scaling, including decoding data, when to pull from existing playbooks, and looking for your first people leader.
66 min
110
A look at one repeat founder’s frameworks for v...
Waseem Daher is the co-founder and CEO of Pilot and previous co-founder of Ksplice (acquired by Oracle) and Zulip (acquired by Dropbox). He digs into the first year of validating a startup idea, choosing an ICP, and outlining the product roadmap.
66 min
111
Killing stories and creating categories — Comms...
Bessemer CMO Shannon Brayton has worked at Yahoo!, eBay, OpenTable and LinkedIn (as head of comms and CMO)— today she shares the comms and leadership lessons she’s picked up after 25+ years in Silicon Valley.
59 min
112
People leaders aren’t the CEO of culture, they’...
Today’s episode is with Colleen McCreary, the Chief People Officer at Credit Karma and former CPO at Vevo, The Climate Corporation, and Zynga. Colleen shares why she thinks of her role as the product manager of the systems that run the company, flagging
68 min
113
Go unreasonably deep on complex problems and bu...
Today’s episode is with Irving Fain, founder and CEO of Bowery Farming. Bowery’s efficient indoor farms grow produce free from pollutants and using significantly less water — democratizing access to fresh, local food. It’s an incredibly complex sy
67 min
114
The story behind Slack’s marketing and the leap...
Today’s episode is with Kelly Watkins, CEO of Abstract. Before joining Abstract, Kelly ran top marketing teams at Slack, Github, and Bugsnag. She shares her biggest lessons from her first year as a CEO and then she pulls back the curtain on some of the
62 min
115
Ask why it won’t work — Rick Song’s lessons fro...
Today’s episode is with Rick Song, CEO of Persona. Before starting the identity verification company, Rick was an engineer at Square and an early team member at Square Capital. On the heels of raising a Series B round, Rick shares his approach to buildi
57 min
116
Product Pitfalls From 0 Customers to the Messy ...
Today’s episode is with Eric Berg, CEO of Fauna. Before joining at the helm of Fauna, Eric was a product leader at some of the most interesting companies around. He shares his executive playbook, weaved together from his experiences at Okta, Microsoft a
62 min
117
After leading product & growth teams at Instaca...
Today’s episode is with Elliot Shmukler, founder and CEO of Anomalo. Before starting Anomalo, Elliot was a top product and growth leader at Instacart, Wealthfront, LinkedIn, and eBay. He shares his biggest lessons from transitioning from exec to CEO, ho
65 min
118
A deep-dive into product-led growth & self-serv...
Today’s episode is with Kate Taylor, who spent 8 years at Dropbox (leading their SMB revenue and scaled sales operation) and is now the Head of Customer Experience at Notion. Kate is full of actionable tactics on getting product-led growth, self-serve a
57 min
119
Setting up the people function and training for...
Today’s episode is with Mark Frein, the Chief People Officer & Head of Alumni Programs at Lambda School and former CPO at InVision. As we dive into how to set up this essential startup function, Mark shares advice on everything from org design and onboa
67 min
120
How Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta Parses Throu...
Today’s episode is with Marco Zappacosta, co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack. Reflecting on the 13-year journey of creating Thumbtack as a first-time founder, Mark pays special attention to the many cultural hurdles that founders must clear on the path to
67 min
121
Building engineering orgs and new products at S...
Today’s episode is with Tido Carriero, an engineering leader who’s built out teams at Facebook, Dropbox and Segment, where he is currently the Chief Product Officer. From his thoughts on organizational design and advice for newly minted engineering ma
58 min
122
Essentials to engaging employees & developing h...
Today’s episode is with Russ Laraway, a seasoned leader who’s been at Google, Twitter, Candor Inc, and Qualtrics, where he recently served as Chief People Officer before shifting into a new role helping the company’s customers think differently abou
71 min
123
CEO Jeff Lawson Reflects on the Peaks and Valle...
Today’s episode is with Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Twilio. Reflecting on the 13-year journey of creating Twilio, Jeff shares the peaks and valleys and some unexpected aha moments — from getting his executive team to argue more, missteps with t
64 min
124
Treat Operational Debt like Tech Debt — Leah Su...
Today’s episode is with Leah Sutton, SVP of Global HR at Elastic, which provides open-source software for search and data analytics. Elastic has been a distributed company from the beginning, now with over 2,000 employees across 40 countries and 48 stat
57 min
125
“My product is the company” — Kevin Fishner on ...
Today’s episode is with Kevin Fishner, the first business hire, former VP of Product, and current Chief of Staff at HashiCorp, a cloud infrastructure automation company. Kevin takes us through the most important systems at HashiCorp, including how they
73 min