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
The biggest lessons from building Hubspot, from...
Dharmesh Shah is the co-founder and CTO of Hubspot. He explores the 15-year journey building the company — from his partnership with co-founder Brian Halligan, choosing to never have direct reports, and treating company culture as a product.
53 min
102
The story of why Canva worked: Zach Kitschke sh...
Zach Kitschke was an early Canva hire, and since 2013 he’s done everything from comms, support tickets and cooking team lunch, to starting the people function. Now as CMO, he shares his own career lessons and digs into why the company worked.
61 min
103
Take your design org from good to great with th...
Hareem Mannan is the Senior Director of Product, Enablement & Design at Twilio, which she joined via the company’s Segment acquisition. She explores the three pillars that set great designers apart and her top lessons on hiring, onboarding and managing a high-impact design org.
64 min
104
Instacart co-founder Max Mullen gets tactical o...
Max Mullen has worn many hats as a co-founder of Instacart, but he’s been uniquely focused on culture. He shares advice for crafting unique values, tips for making sure they guide day-to-day behavior, and pointers for sidestepping common mistakes.
61 min
105
Growing from founder to CEO: Executive coach Al...
Alisa Cohn has nearly 20 years of experience in executive coaching at companies like Etsy, InVision, and Google. Here, she shares advice for getting better feedback and actually enacting change on the journey from scrappy founder to seasoned CEO.
61 min
106
Executive hiring is incredibly difficult to get...
Gretchen Howard is the COO of Robinhood and former Partner at CapitalG, Alphabet’s investment fund. She covers the ins and outs of building your executive team — from developing the profile and recruiting to interviewing and onboarding.
59 min
107
Building a hybrid go-to-market motion — GC Lion...
Giancarlo ‘GC’ Lionetti has been the CMO of Confluent, a VP of Growth at Dropbox, and sales engineer and product marketing manager at Atlassian. He digs into building hybrid go-to-market motions that combine product-led growth and traditional sales.
66 min
108
Creating physical products and getting feedback...
Sandra Oh Lin is the founder and CEO of KiwiCo, which creates hands-on learning kits for children. We discuss how Sandra tackled the early obstacles in creating a physical product — from the design process, production, and consumer testing when your cus
58 min
109
How to hire the right marketer at the right tim...
Maya Spivak is the Head of Marketing at Mux and former Head of Global Brand Marketing & Comms at Segment. She explains the three core pillars of the marketing org (product, brand and growth), how to know which one is right for your startup stage, and tips
56 min
110
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
111
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
112
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
113
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
114
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
115
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
116
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
117
“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
118
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
119
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
120
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
121
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
122
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
123
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
124
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
125
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