Podcasts about first round review

Wes Kao is an executive coach, advisor, and instructor, best known for her newsletter on high-impact communication, and for co-founding course platform Maven and the AltMBA with Seth Godin. Across her career, Wes has helped leaders communicate with clarity and conviction, whether it's rallying a team, pitching investors, or influencing stakeholders. In this episode, Wes and Brett unpack how founders can be more persuasive, why playing to your strengths is critical, and how everyone can raise their own standards. --- In today's episode, we discuss: Wes' “personality-message fit” framework Why charisma is misunderstood How anyone can improve their communication What being told you need to “be more strategic” actually means and much more… --- Referenced: AltMBA: https://altmba.com/ Maven: https://maven.com/ Seth Godin: https://www.sethgodin.com/ Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/ --- Where to find Wes: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weskao --- Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson --- Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast --- Timestamps: (1:54) Charisma is misunderstood (4:44) What underpins authenticity? (13:53) Clarity in communication (16:02) Start with your ideal outcome (22:05) The role of power dynamics (26:39) Should you work on weaknesses? (29:02) Effective self-reflection (32:13) Role-strength fit (37:39) What do you resent? (39:17) “Be more strategic” (45:20) Stack ranking (51:45) How AltMBA started (60:04) Defining your craft

Rick Song is the co-founder and CEO of Persona, the identity verification platform used by some of the world's largest companies. Before starting Persona, Rick worked on identity fraud and risk products at Square, which laid the groundwork for what would become Persona's highly technical, horizontal platform. Since founding the company, Rick has scaled Persona into a category-defining leader, recently raising a $200M Series D at a $2B valuation. In today's episode, we discuss: How Rick's skepticism shaped Persona's early strategy What it takes to scale a true platform company Successful execution in hypercompetitive markets What Rick's learned from his co-founder, Charles Yeh and much more… Referenced: Accenture: accenture.com Anthropic: anthropic.com Braze: braze.com Bridgewater Associates: bridgewater.com Charles Yeh: linkedin.com/in/charlesyeh/ Christie Kim: linkedin.com/in/christiekimck/ Clay: clay.com Kareem Amin: linkedin.com/in/kareemamin/ MIT: mit.edu Newfront: newfront.com Palantir: palantir.com/ Persona: withpersona.com Rippling: rippling.com Scale AI: scale.com Snowflake: snowflake.com Square: squareup.com Y Combinator: ycombinator.com Zachary Van Zant: linkedin.com/in/zacharyv/ Where to find Rick: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-song-25198b24/ Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast Timestamps: (0:05) Life before Persona (2:11) The push from Charles (3:09) Early reluctance and low expectations (9:50) Winning the first $50 customer (13:08)“Invalidating” Persona (16:43) How Persona found their edge (19:35) Transitioning from MVP to platform (24:18) Turning down a $5K deal on principle (26:47) Generalizing bespoke solutions (28:28) Finding product-market fit (33:51) Founder-led sales and consultative approach (39:30) Building a culture of reactivity (45:47) Landing the first enterprise customers (51:34) Silicon Valley's obsession with frameworks (58:17) Developing first principles thinking (1:00:24) Stay competitor-informed

Adit Abraham is the co-founder and CEO of Reducto, which helps leading AI teams extract and structure data from complex documents and spreadsheets in their pipeline. Within 6 months of launching, Reducto went from 0→7 figures in ARR. Reducto has grown to process tens of millions of pages monthly for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 10 enterprises. They just announced a $24M Series A. Before Reducto, Adit was a Product Manager at Google, working on Ads and Search, and conducted machine learning research at MIT's Media Lab. --- In today's episode, we discuss: How listening to customers revealed an opportunity to pivot The weekend project that became Reducto's breakthrough Landing a Fortune 10 customer A technical founder's guide to sales Key insights from Reducto's fundraising journey Advice for founders: “You're going to fail” Much more --- Referenced: Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/ Chetan Puttagunta: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chetanputtagunta/ Diana Hu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sdianahu/ Liz Wessel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethwessel/ Raunak Chowdhuri: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sauhaarda/ Reducto: https://reducto.ai/ Scale AI: https://scale.com/ Stripe: https://stripe.com/ Textract: https://aws.amazon.com/textract/ Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/ --- Where to find Adit: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aditabraham/ --- Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson --- Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast --- Timestamps: (00:00) Hackathons, YC, and an unexpected pivot (05:23) The weekend project that became Reducto's breakthrough (09:11) How customer signal led to PDF processing (14:46) Landing a Fortune 10 customer (22:42) Building “transferable features” (25:58) How caring beats sales skills in startup growth (30:28) The strategy behind Reducto's horizontal expansion (36:18) Hire slow, go-to-market fast (41:45) A technical founder's guide to sales (43:45) “You're going to fail” (46:27) Why startups win (48:30) Key insights from Reducto's fundraising journey (51:43) Less structure, more impact (55:00) How frustrations shaped Reducto's culture (57:35) The question you should always ask in meetings

Jeff Shiner is the CEO of 1Password, the access management company used by over 100,000 businesses and millions of individuals worldwide. He joined 1Password as CEO in 2012, when the team was just under 20 people. Under Jeff's leadership, 1Password expanded into B2B, launched a SaaS platform, and scaled from a small family-run operation into a global company. In 2019, Jeff led 1Password through its first-ever funding round – a $200M Series A from Accel – to build out its go-to-market team and accelerate product development. Before joining 1Password, Jeff held senior roles at IBM and led teams through multiple acquisitions and integrations. --- In today's episode, we discuss: Why bootstrapping isn't always what it's cracked up to be The switch from a consumer product to B2B Launching before billing — and why that worked When being “too secure” nearly killed the product Becoming CEO… without telling anyone Much more --- Referenced: 1Password: https://1password.com Accel: https://www.accel.com Arun Mathew: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arun-mathew-b7186412/ David Teare: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daveteare/ Floodgate: https://floodgate.com LastPass: https://www.lastpass.com Mike Maples: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maples/ Natalia Karimov: https://1password.com/company/meet-the-team/natalia-karimov Roustem Karimov: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roustem/?originalSubdomain=ca Sara Teare: https://1password.com/company/meet-the-team/sara-teare Shopify: https://www.shopify.com Tobi Lütke: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobiaslutke/ --- Where to find Jeff: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jshiner --- Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson --- Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast --- Timestamps: 0:03 – How Jeff got involved with 1Password 2:01 – How 1Password was initially set up 10:41 – The secret CEO 13:44 – What Jeff's first six months encompassed 16:13 – The lightbulb moment that caused a pivot 17:50 – 1Password's unusual company journey 22:08 – Creating an aligned product roadmap 29:19 – Retaining a customer-centric focus at scale 30:40 – Why 1Password's first B2B product failed 39:43 – How Jeff thinks about competitors 46:44 – Building different go-to-market functions 52:45 – Staying bootstrapped for 15 years 57:17 – Jeff's one regret 1:02:00 – 1Password's most pivotal moments

Adam Guild is the co-founder and CEO at Owner, an online food ordering system for independent restaurants. Within a year, Owner went from being about to run out of money to having hundreds of customers. Last year, they raised a $33M Series B. Adam's entrepreneurial journey began as a teenager when he built a successful Minecraft server, which led him to drop out of high school to become a founder. His passion for helping small businesses was sparked by his mom's struggles running a dog grooming shop, which led him to launch the early iteration of Owner. -- In today's episode, we discuss: How working with a small business kickstarted Owner Adam's unusual outbound strategy Why the pandemic accelerated Owner's success How Owner's pivot led to “hyperbolic” product-market fit The two qualities Adam looks for in new hires -- Referenced: Alex Bard: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexbard/ Dean Bloembergen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deanbloembergen/ Guisados: https://www.guisados.la/ HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/ Jack Altman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackealtman/ Kimbal Musk: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimbalmusk/ Modern Restaurant Management: https://modernrestaurantmanagement.com/ Naval Ravikant: https://www.linkedin.com/in/navalr/ Neil Patel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilkpatel/ Peter Thiel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterthiel/ P.F. Chang's: https://www.pfchangs.com/ Sean Rad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanrad/ Thiel Fellowship: https://thielfellowship.org/ Tim Ferriss: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timferriss/ Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/ -- Where to find Adam: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamharrisonguild/ -- Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast -- Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (01:29) Adam's first business (04:15) The transition from Minecraft to Owner (05:58) The dark side of the gaming industry (14:20 Adam's scrappy strategy to landing his first customers (16:52) The COVID pivot (21:31) The quest to find product-market fit (30:53) What actually worked to get new customers (36:03) Inside Owner's explosive growth (46:41) How Owner secured its crucial first round of funding (53:34) The bet on going multi-product (64:28) What Adam wishes he knew at 17 (76:22) Sales-led vs. product-led growth

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. – In today's episode, we discuss: Eeke's wealth of experience as an executive leader The challenges companies face when hiring new executives Common hiring red flags and pitfalls Practical advice for measuring success Why learning your strengths is an underrated piece of the process – Referenced: ASML: https://www.asml.com/en Claire Hughes Johnson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/claire-hughes-johnson-7058/ Constellate: https://constellate.team/ John Collison: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbcollison/ Mike Maples Jr.: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maples/ Patrick Collison: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickcollison/ Retool: https://retool.com/ Stripe: https://stripe.com/ Will Gaybrik: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-gaybrick-5730347/ – Where to find Eeke: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eeke-de-milliano-3b05a629/ – Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson – Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast – Timestamps: (00:00) Should you ‘buy or build' a leader (03:45) Why do executive hires fail so often? (09:35) Why the stakes are so high for leadership hires (12:26) The hardest document Eeke ever wrote (14:06) Two red flags in a new hire (17:27) An example of an outstanding leader (21:40) What creates dysfunctional exec relationships (22:38) The three steps towards hiring successful leaders (30:30) What you should know about outside hires (33:12) Eeke's advice for easing leadership transitions (42:06) How to notice success patterns (47:21) Why high-functioning executive teams are like parents (52:02) The most surprising lesson from Eeke's first stint at Stripe (55:11) The leadership data Eeke wishes we had

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. After launching Guideline to address those problems head-on, the company has seen remarkable growth, hitting $120 million in ARR by June 2024. In this conversation, Kevin shares pivotal moments that shaped Guideline's trajectory, including a strategic partnership with Gusto. He also explains how his “Do the hard thing first” mindset helped the team build an industry-leading platform and disrupt an entrenched market. – Referenced: ADP: https://www.adp.com/ Aydin Senkut: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aydins/ CalSavers: https://www.calsavers.com/ DoorDash: https://www.doordash.com/ Fidelity: https://www.fidelity.com/ Guideline: https://www.guideline.com/ Gusto: https://gusto.com/ Intuit: https://www.intuit.com/ Jeremy Caballero: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremycaballero/ John Zimmer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnzimmer11/ Josh Reeves: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuareeves/ Mike Nelson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mnelsonio/ Leah Solivan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahsolivan/ Paychex: https://www.paychex.com/ Plaid: https://plaid.com/ Taskrabbit: https://www.taskrabbit.com/ Tomer London: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomerlondon/ – Where to find Kevin: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbusque/ – Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson – Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast – Timestamps: (00:00) Teaser: “I don't believe in stealth mode” (02:51) Inspiration behind Guideline (07:56) Lessons from a year's research before Guideline (10:44) Identifying market pull for Guideline (14:28) What Kevin learnt before shipping their first product (19:10) How Guideline set their fees up (27:51) The surprising range of Guideline's early customers (31:48) Kevin's insights from the Gusto integration (39:48) Guideline's first year (44:44) Working with Plaid as Guideline's first customer (53:28) Guideline's auto-enrollment feature (57:53) Lucky 8: Kevin's unexpected pricing strategy (62:04) Franchise opportunities (64:49) Kevin's reflections on Taskrabbit (71:36) Will Guideline ever go multi-product? (72:37) Kevin's take on product-market fit (73:30) Guideline's compounding advantage (78:51) The challenges faced by introverted leaders

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. – In today's episode, we discuss: The Braze founders' early insights into the mobile revolution How a TechCrunch Hackathon sparked Braze's creation The journey from 1,000 beta signups to 2,200+ paying customers Breaking traditional lean startup rules Navigating early fundraising challenges Finding product market fit by “fishing in every pond” Approaching competition strategically like a boxer Much more – Referenced: Accenture: https://www.accenture.com/ Appboy: https://www.braze.com/resources/articles/appboy-social-network-for-mobile-apps Bipul Sinha: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bipulsinha/ Braze: https://www.braze.com/ Bridgewater Associates: https://www.bridgewater.com/ Jon Hyman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-hyman/ Mark Ghermezian: https://x.com/markgher MIT: https://www.mit.edu/ Rubrik: https://www.rubrik.com/ WeWork: https://www.wework.com/ – Where to find Bill: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billmagnuson/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/billmag – Where to find Kevin: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-wang-96131916/ – Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson – Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast – Timestamps: (00:00) Teaser: Finding “terminal value” product market fit (00:24) Introduction (02:34) Bill's insights into the mobile revolution (04:43) Lessons from Bridgewater Associates (09:12) First principles thinking in action at Braze (14:14) Meeting co-founders at an NYC Hackathon (24:35) Braze's scrappy scaling (33:37) Early product development (39:37) From 1,000 beta signups to 2,200+ paying customers (43:51) Braze's fundraising struggles (47:01) Breaking the rules of a lean startup (53:02) Riding the mobile wave to success (60:02) Building a global customer base (64:04) The never-ending quest for PMF (70:29) 3 things every founder needs to know (73:56) Navigating competition like a boxer (79:03) When scale helps or hurts (80:32) 1 thing they've learned from each other

Varun Anand is the co-founder and Head of Operations at Clay, a GTM development environment that combines data and AI to help over 5000 companies power everything from CRM enrichment to highly targeted outreach campaigns. Clay recently announced their Series B expansion, raising $40M at a $1.25B 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. – In today's episode, we discuss: Clay's unconventional GTM machine 3 changes that unlocked Clay's upmarket motion Layering enterprise customers on top of PLG Scrappy sales tactics: WhatsApp groups, Reddit threads, and reverse demos Thinking long-term about brand and content Building an elite team of people who are “technical enough” Clay's contrarian take on compensation Much more – Referenced: Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/ Clay: https://www.clay.com/ Clay's Series B expansion: https://www.clay.com/blog/series-b-expansion Eric Nowoslawski: https://www.linkedin.com/in/outboundphd/ Figma: https://www.figma.com/ Jesse Ouellette: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesseoue/ Kareem Amin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kareemamin/ Nick Merrill: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-merrill-64562310/ Notion: https://www.notion.com/ Oyster: https://www.oysterhr.com/ Pave: https://www.pave.com/ Rippling: https://www.rippling.com/ Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/ Verkada: https://www.verkada.com/ Webflow: https://webflow.com/ Yash Tekriwal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yashtekriwal/ – Where to find Varun: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaanand/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/vxanand – Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson – Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast – Timestamps: (00:00) Teaser + Introduction (03:13) Turning traditional GTM on its head (05:37) How Clay hustled for its first customers: Reddit threads & WhatsApp groups (08:53) Unpacking Clay's credit-based pricing (14:29) Building Clay's self-serve engine (16:54) Why Clay rejected the usage-based model (19:04) Clay's big bet on content (23:59) How "reverse demos" win enterprise deals (27:49) 3 changes that unlocked Clay's upmarket motion (36:59) How to build trust with enterprise buyers (38:49) Applying the land and expand model (40:40) Hiring people who are “technical enough” (46:33) Inside Clay's hands-on interviewing process (48:15) Why Clay invested in brand from day-one (50:21) Clay's contrarian take on compensation (58:35) The person who shaped Varun's career

Tristan Handy is the Founder and CEO at dbt Labs, a cloud-based data management platform that has raised over $400M to date, and was last valued at $4.2B in 2022. Dbt Labs has grown from just three companies using its free tool in 2016 to an ecosystem of 30,000+ enterprise users. Before founding dbt Labs, Tristan was the VP of Marketing at RJMetrics and the Director of Operations at Squarespace. – In today's episode, we discuss: Dbt's explosive growth The strategic pivot from consulting to a software company Unexpected strategies for building a tech category from scratch The critical moment: Why and when dbt Labs sought venture funding How to drive commercial adoption after open-sourcing Two things every founder CEO should do Much more – Referenced: Amazon Redshift: https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/ Bob Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertjmoore/ Crossbeam: https://www.crossbeam.com/ dbt Labs: https://www.getdbt.com/ Drew Banin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewbanin/ Jerry Colonna: https://www.reboot.io/team/jerry-colonna/ RJMetrics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJMetrics SeatGeek: https://seatgeek.com/ Steve Ritter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-ritter-69495210/ Squarespace: https://www.squarespace.com/ – Where to find Tristan: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tristanhandy/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/jthandy – Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson – Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast – Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:56) The critical oversight in data analysis (05:41) Becoming an “accidental founder” (07:04) Inside the unique decision to start a consultancy (08:17) The game-changing principle behind dbt Labs' rapid growth (11:20) Finding dbt Labs' first customers (15:52) Consulting's hidden scalability (17:25) How dbt Labs created a new category (21:03) The anti-demo strategy (23:59) Community hacking: the Slack group that changed everything (26:00) The open source philosophy (27:39) When growth went exponential (28:49) How consulting engagements shaped the roadmap (30:02) Fundraising only when “things started to break” (32:40) Consultancy superpowers: the hidden advantages (34:04) Pivoting from consulting to software (40:00) Key monetization strategies (48:56) Why “begrudging” CEOs can be successful (51:02) Advice for finding PMF: “It's not a playbook” (51:59) Lowering your standards is a hack (53:30) Navigating emotional overwhelm (54:25) Every CEO needs a coach

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. In today's episode, we discuss: How Figma approaches new products, prioritization, and storytelling Product culture at Uber, Microsoft, Google The difference between “good” and “extraordinary” PMs Tactical advice for storytelling The “un-learning” required in new jobs and industries – Referenced: Figjam: https://www.figma.com/figjam/ Figma: https://www.figma.com/ Figma Dev Mode: https://www.figma.com/dev-mode/ Figma Slides: https://www.figma.com/slides/ – Where to find Yuhki: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuhki/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/yuhkiyam – Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson – Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast – (00:00) Introduction (02:50) Figma's early days (09:11) Product culture across companies (13:42) Knowing when to change things (17:40) How business goals impact product expansion (21:00) Advice for going multi-product (24:30) The skills of a “0 to 1” PM (27:36) Identifying entrepreneurial talent (29:06) Why aren't there more designer founders? (35:22) How Figma launches new products (41:19) “0 to 1” versus “1 to 10” talent (46:01) The role of storytelling at Figma (49:22) How Figma prioritizes product (55:11) Advice for product storytelling (59:02) “Good” vs “extraordinary” product managers (61:21) Why product simplicity matters (63:52) The importance of taste in product and design (67:56) The biggest influence on Yuhki's product thinking

Steve Blank is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, where he co-created the "Hacking for Defense" curriculum for the Department of Defense. As a consultant to top defense and intelligence organizations, Steve brings cutting-edge strategies to the national security sector. Before entering academia, Steve built eight different startups. He helped launch the Lean Startup movement with his May 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story. Steve also authored the acclaimed business books "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" and "The Startup Owner's Manual.” This episode's is guest host is Meka Asonye, a Partner at First Round Capital. Before joining First Round as an investor, Meka led go-to-market teams at both Stripe and Mixpanel. – In today's episode we discuss: Commercial versus military market strategies Finding mission solution fit The hidden challenges most startups miss Building relationships in National Security The new generation of “defense founders” Much more – Referenced: Alexander Osterwalder: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osterwalder/ Department of Defense: https://www.defense.gov/ Eric Ries: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eries/ Hacking for Defense: https://hackingfordefense-prod.stanford.edu/ How Saboteurs Threaten Innovation: https://steveblank.com/2024/07/30/why-large-organizations-struggle-with-disruption-and-what-to-do-about-it/ How to find your customer in the Dept of Defense: https://steveblank.com/2024/09/17/the-directory-of-dod-program-executive-offices-and-officers-peos/ Mission Model Canvas: https://steveblank.com/2019/09/ Pete Newell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petenewell/ Special Operations Command: https://www.socom.mil/ The Frozen Middle: https://steveblank.com/2024/07/30/why-large-organizations-struggle-with-disruption-and-what-to-do-about-it/ The Hacking for Defense Manual: https://stanfordh4d.substack.com/p/the-hacking-for-defense-manual-a The Hacking for Defense Course: https://www.h4d.us/ The lean launchpad at Stanford: https://steveblank.com/2011/05/10/the-lean-launchpad-at-stanford-–-the-final-presentations/ The Secret History of Silicon Valley: https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ – Where to find Steve: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveblank/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/sgblank Website: https://steveblank.com/ – Where to find Meka: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mekaasonye/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/bigmekastyle – Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast – Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:27) Validating ideas for defense products (03:57) Guide to military sales and procurement (07:15) Rethinking GTM strategies (10:13) Building a network in national security (15:07) The dual-use debate (18:35) Behind the rising number of “defense founders” (22:30) “Mission solution fit” (24:35) Breaking new ground in military tech (26:09) Essential resources for any defense founder (28:59) What's missing from Silicon Valley

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. In today's episode, we discuss: How LiveRamp went from $30M to $200M ARR in 3 years Anneka's jack-of-all-trades career Why specialist hires can backfire When leaders should get in the weeds One area every PM can improve in Rubrik's approach to building product Much more – Referenced: Acxiom: https://www.acxiom.com/ Acxiom's acquisition of LiveRamp: https://tinyurl.com/2shm83de Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/ Auren Hoffman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/auren/ Dentsu: https://www.dentsu.com/ Dentsu's acquisition of Merkle: https://tinyurl.com/yvxe6fws James Arra: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-arra-a43a06/ LiveRamp: https://liveramp.com/ Merkle: https://www.merkle.com/ Rubrik: https://www.rubrik.com/ Slack: https://www.slack.com/ Travis May: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stmay/ – Where to find Anneka Gupta: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annekagupta/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/annekagupta – Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson – Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast – Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:11) Inside LiveRamp's unique growth journey (12:18) Anneka's first PM role (14:20) Leading LiveRamp's marketing function (16:17) Why the best product doesn't win (21:06) Crafting products for different personas (24:53) Transitioning Acxiom's customers to LiveRamp (33:54) Why Acxiom chose to buy not build (36:40) Anneka's leap to GM and product leader (38:22) How 17 diverse roles shaped Anneka's CPO approach (40:54) The hidden career growth hack (43:15) Where domain experience is overrated (50:33) Mastering the art of altitude shifting (53:54) PMs should undergo the same training as sales reps (59:37) Strategies for selling to new personas (62:40) Lessons from Anneka's mistake at LiveRamp (67:56) Who had an outsized impact on Anneka

Matt Lerner is the Founder and CEO at SYSTM, a startup coaching consultancy that helps high-potential companies grow their business. Matt also authored the book “Growth Levers”, which shares his framework that's helped over 200 seed-stage startups grow as much as 100x. Previously, Matt was on the early growth team at PayPal, a partner at 500 Startups, and a guest lecturer at Stanford Business School. - In today's episode, we discuss: Understanding the key drivers of startup success Applying the Growth Lever framework Several case studies Customer-centric growth tactics Adapting growth levers for different business models - Referenced: Airbnb: https://www.airbnb.com/ Bold Commerce: https://boldcommerce.com/ Calm: https://www.calm.com/ Caribou: https://www.usecaribou.com/ eBay: https://www.ebay.com/ FATMAP: https://fatmap.com/ Growth Levers and How to Find Them: https://www.systm.co/growth-levers-matt-lerner-book PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/ Peter Karpas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterkarpas/ Popsa: https://popsa.com/ Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/ Sonic Jobs: https://www.sonicjobs.com/ SYSTM: https://www.systm.co/ - Where to find Matt Lerner: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewlerner/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/matthlerner - Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson - Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast - Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (03:11) The hidden truth about startup success (05:10) Popsa's journey: A case study in growth (07:31) Breaking down the growth lever framework (11:30) Understanding the customer's journey (14:14) The art of customer interviews (18:07) Unlocking growth through customer insights (24:23) The triple threat: Founder failure modes (27:32) The power of founder-led growth strategies (32:42) Unlocking growth bottlenecks (36:40) Timing and implementation of growth strategies (39:43) Founder red flags (41:32) Crafting effective growth experiments (43:14) Why customer mindset is the ultimate growth driver (46:19) The power law of business (48:59) Why startups don't need paid marketing (50:47) Growth levers for sales-driven companies (53:43) Matt's own application of growth principles (55:39) Growth levers in B2B sales (57:05) Finding customer "locksmith moments" (64:08) The mentor who shaped Matt's thinking

In this episode of Content Briefly, we've interviewed Jessi Craige Shikman, Editor at First Round Capital, and discussed how the First Round Review operates, some of the best interview tips,  how she empowers writers with good editing and feed processes, and more.This episode is brought to you by our friends at Duckbill (https://www.getduckbill.com/). Use code SUPERPATH for 50% off for the first two months.************************Timestamps:00:00 Intro03:03 Who is Jessi Craige?03:25 Jessi's background.03:55 Editor's role at First Round Capital.05:01 Content's purpose at First Round Capital.06:36 Creating relevant expert-led content.09:28 Jessi's day-to-day and content calendar.10:29 Are there still available topics to cover?11:36 Has AI creeped into their workflow?13:09 Differences in creating content for SaaS companies and a VC firm.17:21 Content reporting at First Round Capital.18:14 Investing in owned channels.20:02 Are there technical SEO issues with a large library of content?21:04 The intersection of the Review and their podcast.22:22 Is there a significant video component to content in the First Round?23:21 Transitioning from a writing role to an editor role.24:47 Editorial tips to make writers better.26:07 How much time does the editorial work take?27:42 What to expect from the First Round.28:39 Learn more about Jessi and First Round Capital and get in touch.29:17 Outro************************Useful Links:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessi-craige-shikman-47650a75/https://review.firstround.com/https://every.to/https://lex.page/************************Stay Tuned:► Website: https://www.superpath.co/► YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@superpath► LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/superpath/► Twitter: https://twitter.com/superpathco************************Don't forget to leave us a five-star review and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

In this episode, Sasha Orloff sits down with Camille Ricketts, former Co-Head of Marketing at Notion, Editor of First Round Review and Elon's comms manager at Tesla, to talk about the ROI of content as a growth driver. Camille, currently a partner at XYZ Venture Capital, played a key role in persuading Sasha years ago to invest in content as a revenue channel. In this episode she shares her invaluable insights from her roles at Notion, Tesla, and First Round Review. Tune in to hear Camille's compelling arguments for CEOs and VPs about the strategic value of content marketing. This is a must-listen for founders, finance leaders, and anyone eager to leverage content for growth.

Bob Moore is the co-founder and CEO at Crossbeam, a “LinkedIn for data” platform that helps companies find overlapping opportunities with their partners. Crossbeam has raised US$117M to date and recently acquired Reveal in 2024. Bob previously cofounded RJMetrics (now part of Adobe Commerce Cloud) and Stitch Data (acquired by Talend). He is also the author of Ecosystem-Led Growth. In today's episode, we discuss: The unique way he evaluated and validated startup ideas Lessons learned from falling in and out of product-market fit How to recognize and act on market shifts that impact your business Specific tactics for distribution and building with conviction vs. consensus Creating scalable and durable startups Unlocking network effects in software Getting mergers right – Referenced: Adobe's acquisition of Magento: https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/adobe-to-acquire-magento-for-1-6-b/ Amazon Redshift: https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/ Chris Merrick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/merrickchristopher/ Crossbeam: https://www.crossbeam.com/ Crossbeam/Reveal merger: https://www.crossbeam.com/crossbeam-and-reveal-merger-announcement/ Ecosystem-Led Growth: https://www.robertjmoore.com/book Jake Stein: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakestein/ Nick Mehta: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickmehta/ Reveal: https://reveal.co/ Rick Nucci: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricknucci/ RJMetrics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RJMetrics Simon Bouchez: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonbouchez/ Stitch Data: https://www.stitchdata.com/ Talend's acquisition of Stitch Data: https://www.businessinsider.com/talend-acquires-stitch-2018-11 The 4 Levels of PMF: https://pmf.firstround.com/levels – Where to find Bob Moore: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertjmoore/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/robertjmoore – Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson – Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast – Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (02:44) Tactics for finding founder-market fit (06:17) Speaking to founders about startup ideas (11:16) Why founders loved Crossbeam (19:34) How RJMetrics found market fit then lost it (29:46) Lessons from RJMetrics' exit (38:06) The importance of intellectual honesty (39:33) Building with conviction versus consensus (42:41) Lessons from a three-time founder (50:26) Building and distributing Crossbeam (57:58) The “joint jam” sales tactic (60:35) Unlocking network effects in a software business (63:27) Why Crossbeam merged with its competitor (72:51) Who had an outsized impact on Bob

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 2018. After spending 9 years building the company, Eoghan left Intercom in 2020, but he's since returned, reshaping Intercom and pioneering its pivot to an AI-first service. This episode highlights his unabashed takes on leaning into your intuition as a founder, and his perspectives on the critical junctures in company building. – In today's episode, we also discuss: Eoghan's reflections since leaving Intercom The value of intuition and first-principles thinking The changes Eoghan made upon returning to Intercom How Eoghan increased Intercom's productivity by 41% Tactical advice on hiring top talent Why you can't make small improvements in big categories Crafting a culture of ruthless honesty and transparency Why software branding is in crisis – Referenced: 37signals: https://37signals.com Basecamp: https://basecamp.com Brian Halligan (HubSpot): https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianhalligan David Heinemeier Hansson (37signals, Basecamp): https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-heinemeier-hansson-374b18221 Intercom: https://www.intercom.com Jason Fried (37signals, Basecamp): https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-fried Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com Marc Benioff (Salesforce): https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbenioff Zendesk: https://www.zendesk.com – Where to find Eoghan: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eoghanmccabe/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/eoghan – Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson – Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast – Timestamps 0:00:00 - Founder intuition vs. standard practice 0:25:00 - Silicon Valley knowledge loops 0:28:13 - Building an executive team 0:36:38 - Eoghan's return to Intercom 0:42:02 - Transparent and honest leadership 0:46:42 - Changing Intercom's strategy 0:54:22 - AI and category disruption 1:03:17 - How Intercom thinks about brand 1:10:40 - Eoghan's inspirations

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. – In today's episode, we discuss: Sam's advice for future engineers What's next for AI How to develop technical taste The importance of asking “what if” questions Lessons on market timing Scaling a software company in 2024 – Referenced: Amazon: https://amazon.com Box: https://www.box.com/ Elon Musk: https://twitter.com/elonmusk Google Docs: https://docs.google.com Itzhak Perlman: https://itzhakperlman.com/ Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com Netflix: https://www.netflix.com Tesla: https://www.tesla.com/ The Innovator's Dilemma: https://www.amazon.com.au/Innovators-Dilemma-Clayton-M-Christensen/dp/0062060244 TurboTax: https://turbotax.intuit.com/ Uber: https://www.uber.com/ Walmart: https://www.walmart.com/ Workday: https://www.workday.com/ Writely: https://techcrunch.com/2005/08/31/writely-process-words-with-your-browser/ – Where to find Sam Schillace: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schillace/ Newsletter: https://sundaylettersfromsam.substack.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/sschillace – Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson – Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast – Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:54) Lessons on market timing (07:30) Developing technical taste (09:51) Asking “what if” questions (14:03) Building Google Docs (19:32) The decline of Google apps (20:57) The Innovator's Dilemma facing Microsoft (22:53) The differences between Google and Microsoft (24:42) How to build a winning product (27:46) Becoming an optimist (29:12) Why engineering teams aren't smaller (32:00) Sam's prediction about AI (34:11) Capturing the value of AI (37:43) How you should think about AI (45:33) Advice for future engineers (48:18) What makes a great engineer (49:45) One thing the best engineers do (51:37) Microsoft's new leverage (56:01) Scaling software in 2024 (59:50) The future of AI across several sectors (64:28) What Sam and a violinist have in common

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. – In today's episode, we discuss: What every marketplace founder should think about Why marketplaces are different Finding product market fit Key ingredients to scaling a marketplace Strategies for acquiring demand and supply – Referenced: Airbnb: https://airbnb.com/ Bill Gurley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billgurley/ Blue Apron: https://www.blueapron.com/ Booking.com: https://www.booking.com/ DoorDash: https://www.doordash.com/ eBay: https://ebay.com/ Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/ Expedia: https://www.expedia.com/ Faire: https://www.faire.com/ Fermat Commerce: https://www.fermatcommerce.com/ Grubhub: https://www.grubhub.com/ Lyft: https://www.lyft.com/ Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/ Postmates: https://postmates.com/ Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/ Simon Rothman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonrothman/ Square: https://squareup.com/ Tony Xu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xutony/ Turo: https://turo.com/ Uber: https://www.uber.com/ Zillow: https://www.zillow.com/ – Where to find Casey Winters LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseywinters/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/onecaseman Website: https://caseyaccidental.com/ – Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson – Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast – Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:30) Ingredients for a successful marketplace (05:34) Creating scalable growth loops (08:42) Emerging marketplaces in 2024 (10:56) 2 ways to acquire supply and demand (15:39) What's unique about building a marketplace (18:27) When to focus on the demand side (23:10) Who to hire (26:22) Finding sticky customers (26:27) What Grubhub should've done (30:19) Uber versus Lyft (34:23) One thing all marketplace founders should know (34:45) Finding product market fit (40:45) Single versus multi-category marketplaces (43:02) When to expand (44:22) The best low-frequency marketplace (46:00) The product is supply, not software (50:48) No value in car-sharing (56:11) Improving supply and demand over time (61:04) The “setup, aha, and habit” framework (66:27) Avoid these marketplace mistakes (71:16) 2 people who influenced Casey's thinking

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. — In today's episode, we discuss: The key ingredients of Sentry's success Sentry's developer-centric approach Lessons on pricing, packaging, and product from VMware Being an external CEO at a startup Forging successful relationships with founders — Referenced: Building for the Fortune 500,000: https://blog.sentry.io/building-for-the-fortune-500-000/ Carl Eschenbach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carl-eschenbach-980543/ Chris Jennings: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriskjennings/ David Cramer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmcramer/ FRC's product market fit framework: https://pmf.firstround.com/ Martin Casado: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martincasado/ Pat Gelsinger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patgelsinger/ Raghu Raghuram: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raghuraghuram/ Riverbed: https://www.riverbed.com/ Sentry: https://sentry.io/ Todd Bazakas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/todd-bazakas-b5a2533/ Veritas: https://www.veritas.com/ VMware: https://www.vmware.com/ — Where to find Milin Desai: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milin-desai-464757/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/virtualmilin — Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (03:03) Joining Sentry as an external CEO (06:27) The CEO/founder relationship (09:37) Lessons from VMware (13:04) What PMs did differently at VMware (18:04) Becoming the need, not the want (20:53) Scaling Sentry (23:07) Building for the “Fortune 500,000” (27:02) Open versus closed source product (30:43) The key ingredients to Sentry's success (36:21) How Milin updated his playbook at Sentry (38:49) Focus on packaging, not pricing (40:29) “Build for the many, not the few” (41:53) Sentry's B2D model (45:10) The second product mindset (51:03) Contrarian take on building for enterprise (52:50) Several people who influenced Milin

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. — In today's episode, we discuss: Lessons on culture, org-design, and product from Rippling Characteristics of great CEOs How to a better executive leader Leading with kindness and impatience How to fight entropy — Referenced: Andy Roddick: https://www.atptour.com/en/players/andy-roddick/r485/overview Apple: https://www.apple.com Bain & Company: https://www.bain.com/ Bill Campbell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Campbell_(business_executive) Conscious Business: https://www.amazon.com.au/Conscious-Business-Build-Value-Through/dp/1622032020 Google: https://www.google.com Inkling: https://www.inkling.com/ McCaw Cellular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCaw_Cellular_Communications McKinsey: https://www.mckinsey.com/ Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com Oracle: https://www.oracle.com Parker Conrad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/parkerconrad/ Peter Currie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Currie_(businessman) Rippling: https://www.rippling.com The Effective Executive: https://www.amazon.com.au/Effective-Executive-Peter-Ferdinand-Drucker/dp/0060833459 — Where to find Matt MacInnis: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/macinnis/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/stanine — Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:14) Great CEOs don't worry about their weaknesses (06:31) The third-time founder mindset (08:09) Why every great CEO is impatient (11:54) How executives fight entropy (19:11) Experience ≠ wisdom (21:26) Managing workplace politics (24:02) Why all businesses should dogfood (26:20) Overseeing employee expenses (27:43) The best CEOs don't need coaching (29:55) The hidden cost of advice (40:40) Why execs are “tortured but happy” (44:16) Clear versus first principles thinking (51:09) Finding first principles thinkers (53:13) Why people overcomplicate culture (55:53) Don't make this mistake when interviewing (59:26) The importance of anti-patterns (61:27) Important business values (63:28) How Matt thinks about output (66:33) Rippling's key leadership principle (71:02) Why kindness matters (72:03) Freeing yourself from self-doubt

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. —  In today's episode, we discuss: Lessons from Amazon, Microsoft, and Square “Minimum Remarkable Products” versus Minimum Viable Products Navigating different work cultures in big tech Insider reactions to the disruptive launch of AWS “Pioneer” versus “fast-follower” companies —  Referenced: Amazon: https://www.amazon.com Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com Bill Gates: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamhgates Block, Inc: https://block.xyz Cash App: https://cash.app Fast Company - Back To Square One: https://www.fastcompany.com/3033412/back-to-square-one Gokul Rajaram: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gokulrajaram1 Jack Dorsey: https://twitter.com/Jack James Hamilton: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameshamilton4 Jeff Bezos: https://twitter.com/jeffbezos Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com Oracle Corporation: https://www.oracle.com Sarah Friar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-friar Square: https://squareup.com Tom Szkutak: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-szkutak-4b59817 WSJ - Mobile-Payments Startup Square Discusses Possible Sale: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303825604579513882989476424 —  Where to find Alyssa Henry: LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/alyssa-henry-0905692 Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/alyssahhenry —  Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson —  Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast —  Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:20) Lessons from Microsoft and Amazon (08:29) Noticeable consistencies in the human condition (10:50) Differences in culture at Amazon, Microsoft and Square (13:27) Why “customers come first,” even above employees and community (14:01) Why fast-followers can be less customer-focused (15:50) The challenge of commercializing research projects (18:58) Joining Square and “building a picture” of the org (24:55) Knowing what to replicate from past companies (27:45) Questioning norms in new companies (28:41) The importance of effective communication systems (31:31) How to operationalize company values (33:38) Why shared beliefs are crucial for good company culture (37:05) Building Minimal Remarkable Products at Square (38:13) How to scale an aesthetic (42:46) Org design lessons from Square (50:06) How to align different teams behind business priorities (52:57) Lessons learned from fierce competition (57:39) The “fast follower” vs “pioneer” playbook (61:05) The original thinking behind AWS (66:08) The unlikely origin of Amazon CloudFront and other products (73:47) How Jeff Bezos influenced Alyssa

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. — In today's episode, we discuss: Why founders should build platforms, not apps The importance of “delighting” customers How Daffy is disrupting donor-advised-funds Lessons on strategy from LinkedIn How to think about leadership transitions — Referenced: Andy Rachleff: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachleff/ Bill Gates: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamhgates/ Daffy: https://www.daffy.org/ Daffy's 2023 Year in Review: https://www.daffy.org/resources/year-in-review-2023 eBay: https://www.ebay.com/ Jeff Weiner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffweiner08/ Reid Hoffman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman/ Robinhood: https://robinhood.com/ Ryan Roslansky: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanroslansky/ The Innovator's Dilemma: https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Clayton-M-Christensen/dp/0062060244 Tim Cook: https://www.apple.com/leadership/tim-cook/ Wealthfront: https://www.wealthfront.com/ — Where to find Adam Nash: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamnash/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/adamnash — Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:08) Why the last 10 years have been less disruptive (06:15) Why we think about luck wrong (08:39) How eBay survived the dot com bubble (14:37) The value of building platforms, not apps (22:18) What made LinkedIn successful (27:31) Good company strategy = good product strategy (30:58) Setting LinkedIn's strategy in 2009 (36:41) Why KaChing didn't work (40:56) Pivoting to Wealthfront (43:23) Universal lesson on customer acquisition (45:11) Treating growth like a product problem (49:01) Advice on successful leadership transitions (54:20) How to delegate moral authority (60:24) The problem with metrics and customer requests (66:41) Apple's approach to “delighting” customers (69:16) The 70/20/10 rule you've never heard about (70:29) How Daffy ships “delight features”

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. — In today's episode, we discuss: Why Eilon was so bullish on recording sales calls How Gong knew they had product market fit The importance of design partners Expanding into multi-product offerings Lessons from riding the AI wave since 2015 The future of AI in B2B sales efficiency — Referenced: Act-On Software: https://act-on.com/ Amit Bendov: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amitbendov/ BlueJeans: https://www.bluejeans.com/ Crossing the Chasm: https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-3rd-Geoffrey-Moore/dp/0062292986 Gong: https://www.gong.io/ Mistral: https://mistral.ai/ OpenAI: https://openai.com/ Salesforce: https://salesforce.com/ Webcollage: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/webcollage Webex: https://www.webex.com/ Zoom: https://zoom.us/ — Where to find Eilon Reshef: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eilonreshef/ — Where to find Todd Jackson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddj0/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/tjack — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:32) Eilon's unwavering conviction in Gong (09:34) Initial reactions to Gong's demo (13:48) Keeping the beta lean (15:33) Gong's monetization strategy (16:38) Early signs of product market fit (18:14) The importance of design partners to Gong's growth (21:52) Why VCs were afraid to invest (23:43) Reaching 100 customers (26:10) Eilon's unique product roadmap framework (28:22) Going from $2M to $9M ARR in one year (29:02) The journey to multi-product (30:52) How Gong measures success (34:07) Lessons from building AI products for sales (37:45) Predicting the future of B2B sales (38:48) The concept of “raving fans” (39:31) Why it's “easier” for second-time founders (42:00) Eilon's favorite books (42:45) Gong in 2024

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. — In today's episode, we discuss: Lessons on culture and product from Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft Building and scaling DevTools Finding product market fit and monetizing it Why AI is complicating product market fit How Dennis prioritizes mental health as a founder The common mistake people make when hiring — Referenced: Apple's acquisition of Buddybuild: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/02/apple-agrees-to-buy-buddybuild.html AWS: https://aws.amazon.com Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org Confluence: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence GitHub: https://github.com GitLab: https://gitlab.com Looker: https://looker.com Microsoft Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com Stewart Butterfield: https://www.linkedin.com/in/butterfield/ Stripe: https://stripe.com Twilio: https://twilio.com Unblocked: https://getunblocked.com/ — Where to find Dennis Pilarinos: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennispi Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/dennispilarinos — Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:18) Why building for developers is different (07:28) Buddybuild's origin story (10:40) Early signs of product market fit (12:22) Managing mental health as a second-time founder (21:09) Building and scaling Unblocked (29:52) Dennis' cautious take on AI (34:20) Being customer-obsessed (35:25) Unblocked's decision-making process (38:31) Don't over-index on competency when hiring (43:36) Why great product is everything (45:41) Monetizing product market fit (48:21) The power of positioning (51:48) Why Dennis doesn't do demos (54:45) How to deal with customer feedback (57:29) Stewart Butterfield's impact on Dennis

May Habib is the co-founder and CEO of Writer, a full-stack generative AI platform built for enterprises. The model is trained on a customer's own data to create content that is consistent with their brand style and voice. Writer recently raised $100M at a valuation of around $500M. Prior to Writer, May co-founded Qordoba, an AI writing assistant. —  In today's episode, we discuss: Advice for AI founders in 2024 Why it's difficult to scale AI products for enterprise The secret to finding champions Signs of a healthy co-founder relationship The future of agentic AI —  Referenced: Accenture: https://www.accenture.com ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/ Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com Goldman Sachs: https://www.goldmansachs.com/ Grammarly: https://www.grammarly.com Jill Kramer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jill-kramer-64230840/ L'Oreal: https://www.loreal.com/ Northwestern Mutual: https://www.northwesternmutual.com/ Palmyra: https://writer.com/blog/palmyra/ Retrieved Augmented Generation: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/what-is-retrieval-augmented-generation/ United Healthcare: https://www.uhc.com/ Vanguard: https://global.vanguard.com/ Waseem Alshikh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/waseemalshikh/ Writer: https://writer.com/ —  Where to find May Habib: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/may-habib/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/may_habib —  Where to find Todd Jackson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddj0/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/tjack —  Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast —  Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:34) Writer's origin story (06:30) Building a full-stack generative AI platform for enterprise (11:56) The #1 challenge building Writer (15:41) Writer's approach to finding champion customers (20:29) How Writer is winning the enterprise space (27:11) Signs Writer found product-market-fit (29:26) Scaling LLMs for specific use cases (31:53) Writer's goals for 2024 (33:57) Advice for 0 to 1 founders (35:53) Creating a culture of “connect, challenge, and own”

Amjad Masad is the co-founder and CEO of Replit, an online platform designed for collaborative coding in multiple programming languages. Replit boasts over 30m users, has secured $200M in venture funding, and was recently valued at $1.2B. Before Replit, Amjad was a Software Engineer at Facebook, and a Founding Engineer at Codecademy. — In today's episode, we discuss: How AI is reshaping the software landscape Bridging the gap between ideas and software Why YC almost rejected Replit four times Replit's fundraising difficulties, and how Paul Graham helped The secret lever Replit pulled to scale ahead of its competition Replit's impressive distribution engine — Referenced: 7 Powers: https://www.amazon.com/7-Powers-Foundations-Business-Strategy/dp/0998116319/ Codecademy: https://www.codecademy.com/ Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/ I Am a Strange Loop: https://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp/0465030793 Mythical Man-Month: https://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineering-Anniversary/dp/0201835959 On the Naturalness of Software: https://people.inf.ethz.ch/suz/publications/natural.pdf OpenAI: https://openai.com/ Paul Graham: https://twitter.com/paulg Python: https://www.python.org/ Read Write Own: https://www.amazon.com/Read-Write-Own-Building-Internet/dp/0593731387/ Replit: https://replit.com/ Roy Bahat: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roybahat/ Sam Altman: https://twitter.com/sama The Innovator's Dilemma: https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Management-Innovation/dp/1633691780/ The Little Schemer: https://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/0262560992/ Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/ — Where to find Amjad Masad: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amjadmasad Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/amasad — Where to find Todd Jackson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddj0/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/tjack — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:31) Replit's origin story (08:24) Starting Facebook's JavaScript infrastructure team (10:36) Amjad's unique path to entrepreneurship (16:04) How Replit got its early users (17:00) Replit's fundraising difficulties (17:54) Why YC almost rejected Replit four times (20:23) Building Replit's distribution engine (22:08) Drivers of Replit's growth (27:41) What Silicon Valley gets wrong (30:09) Replit's monetization strategy (32:29) Integrating AI into the platform (36:18) The impact of AI on software engineering (39:40) Defining the new “software creator” role (41:43) How to keep up with developments in AI (46:24) Replit's goals for 2024 (48:11) Advice for founders: defy conventional wisdom (51:12) Amjad's 4 favorite books

Episode 106: On today's episode, I read and breakdown Speed as a Habit by David Girouard, CEO of Upstart and former President of Google Enterprise Apps. This essay was originally posted on First Round Review, one of my favorite startup blogs, and it talks about the importance of speed in decision making and execution when building a business. Original essay: https://review.firstround.com/speed-as-a-habit Send us an email and let us know what you think of the idea! foundersjournal@morningbrew.com #FoundersJournal #Startups #Entrepreneur Listen to Founder's Journal here: https://link.chtbl.com/OV4W93_W Watch Founder's Journal here: https://www.youtube.com/@FoundersJournal/  Subscribe to Morning Brew! Sign up for free today: https://bit.ly/morningbrewyt Follow The Brew! Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/morningbrew/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/MorningBrew Tik Tok - https://www.tiktok.com/@morningbrew Follow Alex! Alex Lieberman (@businessbarista) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Cieri is the Chief Product Officer at Gusto, an HR and payroll platform used by more than 300,000 businesses. With a decade of experience, he has led successful SMB product development and scaled high-performing orgs. Before Gusto, Michael was also the Head of Product at Square, where he led a team of 15+ PMs responsible for $600m in annual revenue. Michael was also the VP of Product Management at Opendoor. — In today's episode, we discuss: Key product strategies used by Square and Gusto The pros and cons of building for SMBs How to build horizontal after creating a wedge The catch with building vertical SaaS How product teams can move faster Developing product sense and intuition — Referenced: Alyssa Henry: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyssa-henry-0905692/ Copilot: https://copilot.microsoft.com/ Gokul Rajaram: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gokulrajaram1/ Gusto: https://gusto.com/ High Output Management: https://amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/dp/0679762884 Marty Cagan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cagan/ Opendoor: https://www.opendoor.com/ Silicon Valley Product Group: https://www.svpg.com/ Square: https://squareup.com/ The Three Horizons Model: https://www.mckinsey.com/enduring-ideas-the-three-horizons-of-growth Toast: https://pos.toasttab.com/ — Where to find Michael Cieri: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcieri/ — Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:41) Why SMBs require unique software solutions (05:58) The level of specificity required when building for SMBs (08:47) Finding Square's form-fitting solution (11:48) Building vertical versus horizontal SaaS (14:34) Inside Square and Gusto's decision making framework (16:15) How to build horizontally from a wedge product (23:00) Using the Three Horizons Model (25:29) How to craft a compelling vision for products (28:51) How to assess Horizon 3 bets (32:08) How to give employees the freedom to try things (34:24) Creating a risk-taking culture (37:27) Essential advice for new PMs (40:27) Common thread with bad product pitches (42:29) Applying the Horizon framework at Gusto (44:46) Developing good product sense (47:43) 5 signs of great product sense (49:03) Why product sense is like athletic ability (51:43) How to ship faster without increasing headcount (56:10) People who had an outsized impact on Michael

Stephanie Berner is a Customer Success Executive at LinkedIn. Since 2018, Stephanie has spearheaded all post-sales functions at LinkedIn Sales Solutions through its period of rapid growth. With a background in building and scaling customer success teams at Box, Medallia, and Opower, Stephanie has extensive experience in delivering exceptional customer experiences across various company stages. — In this episode, we discuss: Common customer success mistakes Creating a world-class customer success org Tactics for hiring exceptional talent How to structure compensation packages Where customer success fits into the wider org Key early-stage customer success metrics and rituals Successful strategies from Box, Medallia, and LinkedIn — Referenced: Aaron Levie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boxaaron/ Box: https://www.box.com/ David Love: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-s-love/ Gainsight: https://www.gainsight.com/ Jon Herstein: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonherstein/ Jonathan Lister: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanlister/ Ken Fine: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmfine/ Medallia: https://www.medallia.com/ Nick Mehta: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickmehta/ Opower: https://www.oracle.com/utilities/opower-energy-efficiency/ — Where to find Stephanie Berner: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanieberner/ — Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:21) Formalizing customer success at a startup (05:01) Hiring ICs before CSMs (06:22) Tactics for hiring standout talent (11:39) 3 questions to ask candidates (15:38) Fail-case patterns among customer success hires (17:49) Considering candidates with non-traditional backgrounds (21:21) Indexing toward a bias for action (24:17) What v1 of customer success looks like (26:03) Key early-stage customer success metrics (28:21) Whether customer success or sales should own renewals (30:40) Where customer success fits into the org (32:14) Why customer success doesn't report to an executive (33:48) Distinguishing a product problem from a customer success one (35:18) Simple way to deal with customer churn (39:21) Tactics to get customers to give honest feedback (40:58) What happens when customer success and product teams collaborate (44:14) Rituals for zero-to-one customer success (48:23) How to structure an early customer success team (52:01) Structuring compensation packages (54:35) Aligning customer success with the business model (60:14) The role of customer success in B2B software (62:17) Common customer success mistakes (67:44) People who had an outsized impact on Stephanie

Michael Lopp is an experienced engineering leader known for building products at iconic companies like Apple, Borland, Netscape, Palantir, and Slack. Since 2002, Lopp — as he's more commonly known — has written about engineering, management, and leadership on his popular blog ‘Rands in Repose'. He is also the renowned author of three books: Being Geek, Managing Humans, and The Art of Leadership. — In today's episode, we discuss: Lopp's “utopia” — where engineers have time to create and invent What makes an excellent engineering leader The flexibility required for managerial roles in different contexts Navigating internal dynamics between design, engineering, and product How to build and grow effective engineering orgs The importance of understanding individual motivations Key lessons from over 30 years in the industry — Referenced: AOL: https://aol.com Apple: https://www.apple.com Borland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland Netscape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape Palantir: https://www.palantir.com/ Phillipe Kahn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philippekahn/ Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/ Slack: https://slack.com Stewart Butterfield: https://www.linkedin.com/in/butterfield/ Tom Paquin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-paquin-240b4b2/ — Where to find Michael Lopp: Blog: https://randsinrepose.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaellopp/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/rands — Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:20) Beginning career at Borland (05:41) The difficulty with shipping software at scale (07:52) Why it's harder to ship today than ever before (09:42) What makes a startup operationally sound (11:23) Why engineers should have concrete time to invent (19:42) How PMs can improve engineering culture (21:35) An engineer's perspective on good product management (23:36) The role of product compared to design and engineering (26:38) How micromanagement kills creativity (29:35) Fostering a debate culture in an org (31:26) Declarative versus prescriptive leadership (36:09) 3 ideas on leadership from Lopp's upcoming book (38:29) Understanding employee motivation (42:28) Advice on discovering what motivates people (46:06) Why teams should reorg every 6 months (48:32) One thing all successful leaders do (52:22) Why sound judgment is crucial for decision-making (53:45) Crystallized lessons from working at software giants (56:19) Why Lopp is afraid of becoming irrelevant (57:58) The number one leadership lesson from Lopp's career (59:32) What Lopp has changed his mind on over time (61:12) People who had an outsized impact on Lopp

Kareem Amin is the co-founder of Clay, a lead-generation software that uses AI to scrape 50+ databases and help companies scale their outbound campaigns. Before Clay, Kareem was the VP of Product at The Wall Street Journal. Kareem also co-founded Frame (useframe.com) which was acquired by Sailthru in 2012. — In today's episode, we discuss: Creating a community of power users How to stay ruthlessly focused and make decisions faster Clay's principles for finding product-market-fit Why a company is the reflection of its founder's personality Aligning your own psychology with the business The mindset change from a first to second-time founder — Referenced: Airtable: https://www.airtable.com/ Clay: https://www.clay.com/ Figma: https://www.figma.com/ Internal Family Systems: https://ifs-institute.com/ NetSuite: https://www.netsuite.com/ Notion: https://www.notion.com Sailthru: https://www.sailthru.com/ — Where to find Kareem Amin: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kareemamin/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/kareemamin — Where to find Todd Jackson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddj0/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/tjack — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:36) Clay's origin story (05:54) Building for a specific customer (10:42) Knowing when to build for a broader customer-base (12:46) The life spiral framework (15:52) How founders can make better decisions (18:57) Kareem's principles for product-market-fit (25:36) Clay's customer journey (30:04) Interesting tactic to find power users (34:00) How to know you have product-market-fit (37:11) The impact of founder psychology on the business (39:41) Mastering commitment to sprints (40:47) How Kareem's own personality affected his company (43:31) Actionable advice to understand founder psychology (46:25) Why focus is misunderstood (47:09) The mindset shift from a first to second-time founder (50:28) What's next for Clay (52:14) The best piece of advice Kareem has actioned

Episode 93: Today, we're talking about product market fit. Product market fit is one of those things that every startup founder obsesses over, but it's always been this elusive thing that can't be measured or quantified. Until now. Rahul Vohra, the founder & CEO of superhuman, which is the fastest email app ever, felt strongly that there had to be a better way to measure product market fit. A way to quantify it and use it as a proactive tool to dictate how you run your business and build your product. So in 2017 he wrote a seminal essay on a step by step process for testing, measuring, and achieving product market fit in your business, an essay that has now become the most read article ever on the popular startup blog First Round Review. In this episode Rahul breaks down his product market fit process, so you can learn how to apply it to your own business. PMF Essay: https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit  Send us an email and let us know what you think of the idea! foundersjournal@morningbrew.com #FoundersJournal #Startups #Entrepreneur Listen to Founder's Journal here: https://link.chtbl.com/OV4W93_W Watch Founder's Journal here: https://www.youtube.com/@FoundersJournal/  Subscribe to Morning Brew! Sign up for free today: https://bit.ly/morningbrewyt Follow The Brew! Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/morningbrew/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/MorningBrew Tik Tok - https://www.tiktok.com/@morningbrew Follow Alex! Alex Lieberman (@businessbarista) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kyle Parrish, Figma's first sales hire, built the company's zero-to-one sales engine from scratch. Figma now has more than 3 million monthly users. Prior to Figma, Kyle spent 5 years at Dropbox in various sales roles. At Dropbox, Kyle successfully launched and scaled the Austin office to 100+ people, and then led the enterprise sales function in San Francisco and New York. — In today's episode, we discuss: The right time to build a sales function Hiring and scaling a successful sales org Building a unique sales culture Career advice for ambitious salespeople Figma's early sales motion How to integrate your first sales hire Navigating the founder/Head of Sales relationship — Referenced: Amanda Kleha: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-kleha-015599/ Asana: https://asana.com/ Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/ Claire Butler: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairetbutler/ Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/ Dylan Field: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanfield/ FigJam: https://www.figma.com/figjam/ Figma: https://www.figma.com/ Kevin Egan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-egan-59719/ Oliver Jay: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverjayleadership/ Praveer Melwani: https://www.linkedin.com/in/praveer-melwani/ Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/ Slack: https://www.slack.com/ — Where to find Kyle Parrish: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kparrish8/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/KyleHParrish — Where to find Brett Berson: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:10) What founders need to figure out before hiring salespeople (03:48) Who to hire as your first salesperson (05:34) Transitioning away from founder-led sales (07:07) Tactics for hiring great salespeople (12:50) The ideal experience sales candidates should have (13:49) Common traits of successful salespeople (18:45) What it was like being Figma's first sales hire (19:59) Interesting tactic to integrate the first sales hire (21:16) How Figma executed its early sales motion (32:27) Why Figma changed its customer narrative (34:03) Building outbound sales strategy at Figma (36:17) Segmented pricing and no discounts (41:55) Kyle's transition from Dropbox to Figma (47:25) Creating a world-class sales culture (51:46) How Figma does sales differently (54:02) Building the initial sales team around a passion for the product (57:12) Figma's unique hiring process for salespeople (60:40) Advice for founders hiring their first salesperson (63:18) The secret to Dylan Field's success (64:33) How to scale yourself as an early hire (66:25) Oliver Jay's impact on Kyle

Oliver Jay is a sales and expansion specialist. Oliver was Chief Revenue Officer at Asana and led the company's global expansion. He grew the team from 20 to 450 people and increased international income to 40% of Asana's total revenue. Prior to this, Oliver built the first business sales team at Dropbox, and led the company's expansion into the Asia-Pacific region while tripling ARR. Oliver is now an advisor and leadership coach focused on assisting founders and executives in scaling their businesses. — In today's episode, we discuss: Common mistakes PLG companies make The “PLG trap” and how to avoid it The playbook for transitioning into enterprise How and when to build an enterprise sales team How PLG companies can break $10 billion market cap Why it's difficult to emulate Atlassian, Slack or Salesforce — Referenced: Airtable: https://www.airtable.com/ Asana: https://asana.com/ Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/ Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/product/ Confluent: https://www.confluent.io/ Daniel Shapero: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dshapero/ Datadog: https://www.datadoghq.com/ Dennis Woodside: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennis-woodside-341302/ Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/ Dustin Moskovitz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmoskov/ Jay Simons: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaysimons/ Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira Justin Rosenstein: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinrosenstein/ Kim Scott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimm4/ Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/ Slack: https://slack.com/ The PLG Trap: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/plg-trap-oliver-jay/ The seed, land, and expand framework: https://www.endgame.io/blog/seed-land-expand-framework Zendesk: https://www.zendesk.com/ — Where to find Oliver Jay: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverjayleadership/ Website: https://www.oliverjayleadership.com/ — Where to find Brett Berson: Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094 — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:23) Differences between PLG and enterprise companies (05:56) Avoiding the “PLG trap” (07:39) Transitioning to enterprise feels like building two companies (10:57) Thinking about user value versus company value (13:58) The relationship between OKRs and executive champions (14:59) Dropbox had almost no company value (15:33) The strategy PLG companies should avoid (18:30) Why Dropbox is worth $10b, not $50b (19:41) The story of Asana's expansion (21:16) Asana's unique customer success team (23:27) How product strategy relates to finding champions (25:03) How Asana structured its GTM org (27:11) What Oliver would have done differently with Asana's GTM (29:45) Getting executive-level buy-in (31:49) Asana's concept of “selling clarity” (33:18) An inside look at Asana's transition into enterprise (37:59) The champion tree framework (40:43) Structuring Asana's early enterprise sales team (44:27) The impact of company size on GTM (47:20) Common sales mistake (48:29) The seed, land, and expand framework (51:43) Oliver's advice to founders (54:13) Why building horizontally may be a mistake (55:32) Common challenges faced by PLG companies (58:30) How PLG companies can break the $10b market cap (60:17) Why emulating Atlassian's playbook is difficult (63:21) People who had an outsized impact on Oliver

Steve Blank, an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, is widely regarded as the father of modern entrepreneurship. Prior to academia, Steve's career spanned eight different startups. Credited with launching the Lean Startup movement with his May 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story, Steve has changed how startups are built, and how entrepreneurship is taught. Steve is also the renowned author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany and The Startup Owner's Manual. — In today's episode, we discuss: Why there aren't more successful startups How to improve entrepreneurship in the USA Misunderstood aspects of the Lean Startup methodology Common traits shared by outlier founders Why successful entrepreneurs are irrational (and need to be) How founders can transition to CEOs Why some second-time founders fail Building in existing versus new markets The Four Steps to the Epiphany in 2023 — Referenced: Alexander Osterwalder: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osterwalder Allen Michels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Michels Ben Wegbreit, Co-founder of E.piphany: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-wegbreit-22192/ Convergent Technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_Technologies Eric Ries: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eries/ Gordon Bell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gordon-bell-3035b43/ JB Straubel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jb-straubel-b694981/ Kathy Eisenhardt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathleen-eisenhardt-5642247/ Roger Siboni, former CEO of E.piphany: https://theorg.com/org/coupa-software/org-chart/roger-siboni Satya Nadella: https://www.linkedin.com/in/satyanadella/ Steve Ballmer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-ballmer-7087a8157/ The lean launchpad at Stanford: https://steveblank.com/2011/05/10/the-lean-launchpad-at-stanford-–-the-final-presentations/ The semiconductor industry - explained: https://steveblank.com/2022/01/25/the-semiconductor-ecosystem/ The three pillars of world class corporate innovation: https://steveblank.com/2022/11/11/the-three-pillars-of-world-class-corporate-innovation/ Tina Seelig: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tinaseelig/ Tom Mueller, Ex-SpaceX Propulsion CTO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-mueller-2094513b/ Why corporate entrepreneurs are extraordinary: https://steveblank.com/2015/08/25/why-corporate-entrepreneurs-are-extraordinary-the-rebel-alliance/ Why entrepreneurs start companies rather than join them: https://steveblank.com/2018/04/11/why-entrepreneurs-start-companies-rather-than-join-them/ — Where to find Steve: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveblank/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/sgblank Website: https://steveblank.com/ — Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:20) Why there aren't more successful startups (06:07) Outlier founders have similar childhoods (10:34) How to be a successful founder CEO (12:00) Why entrepreneurship should be taught in schools (16:39) The importance of curiosity (19:57) The role of instincts in entrepreneurship (22:31) Having profound beliefs in a vision (24:17) Building in existing versus new markets (29:09) What second-time founders can get wrong (33:49) Why founders need to be irrational (39:28) Common traits shared by outlier founders (45:05) Evaluating what makes a startup successful (49:44) Steve's assessment of Satya Nadella at Microsoft (52:26) What it takes to build an incredible company (60:45) The Four Steps to the Epiphany in 2023 (64:36) The origins of The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Neha Narkhede is a co-founder at Confluent, a data streaming software that raised at a $9.1b valuation in 2021. Neha later co-founded Oscilar, a no-code platform that helps companies detect and manage fraud. Before building these two companies, Neha was a Principal Software Engineer at LinkedIn where she co-created Apache Kafka. Neha is ranked #50 on Forbes' list of “America's Richest Self-Made Women 2023” with an estimated net worth of $520m. — In today's episode we discuss: The origins of Confluent, Kafka, and Oscilar How to become a successful second-time founder Advice for monetizing open source product Neha's unique GTM strategies How Confluent ran two businesses within one company Neha's path to founder market fit — Referenced: Apache Kafka: https://kafka.apache.org/ Confluent: https://www.confluent.io/ Confluent Cloud: https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/ Jay Kreps, co-founder at Confluent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaykreps/ Jun Rao, co-founder at Confluent: https://www.linkedin.com/in/junrao/ MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com/ Oscilar: https://oscilar.com/ — Where to find Neha: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nehanarkhede/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/nehanarkhede Website: https://www.nehanarkhede.com/ — Where to find Brett: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:14)The origin story of Kafka (05:24) Co-creating Kafka at LinkedIn (07:31) Why open sourcing Kafka was a masterstroke (11:04) The unique nature of Confluent's Zero to One phase (16:35) Building for a specific customer early on (18:42) Inside Confluent's successful launch (20:12) Establishing Confluent as an enterprise company (22:00) The role of developer evangelism in Confluent's success (23:49) Using developer evangelism in category creation (26:41) Navigating early co-founder dynamics (30:06) Leveraging complementary founder skills (31:56) Advice for future founders (32:45) Building Confluent with monetization in mind (34:38) Monetizing open source products (36:05) GTM for subscription Saas versus consumption SaaS (39:48) The importance of founder-led GTM sales (40:58) Neha's order of operations for GTM sales (42:33) When to build out outbound sales (44:34) Adding SaaS to a software business (48:54) Choosing what to license and what to open source (52:38) How Confluent's co-founders decided on SaaS offering (56:04) Neha's journey as a second-time founder (58:54) Building Oscilar differently to Confluent (63:21) Going from speculation to product realization (69:06) Solving problems people are willing to pay for (71:13) Neha's “proactive research sprint” tactic (72:54) How Neha has applied this tactic

Jack Krawczyk is a Senior Director of Product at Google, building Bard. Bard is Google's collaborative, conversational, and experimental AI tool that's bridging the gap between humans and bots, while addressing ethical considerations around AI. After joining the project in 2020, Jack helped ship Bard in less than four years. Bard sources information directly from the web, and now enables users to inquire about and summarize YouTube videos. — In today's episode, we discuss: Key lessons from Bard's development process Ethics in AI How Bard shipped fast What separates Bard from competitors The future of LLM, Generative AI, and AGI Advice for aspiring AI developers — Referenced: Bard: https://bard.google.com/ ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/ Duet AI: https://cloud.google.com/duet-ai Free courses on machine learning by Andrew Ng: https://www.andrewng.org/courses/ Google Assistant: https://assistant.google.com/ Introducing Google Assistant to Bard: https://blog.google/products/assistant/google-assistant-bard-generative-ai/ Large Language Model (LLM): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model Meena: https://blog.research.google/2020/01/towards-conversational-agent-that-can.html Sissie Hsiao (GM at Bard): https://www.linkedin.com/in/sissie-hsiao-b24243/ Steve Stoute: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevestoute/ UnitedMasters: https://unitedmasters.com/ — Where to find Jack Krawczyk: Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/JackK LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jack--k — Where to find Brett Berson: Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:17) Bard's origin story (03:54) Deciding on the application of Bard (05:59) The ethical considerations around building Bard (10:19) Why Bard launched to the public so early (13:30) Risk-taking at big companies versus smaller ones (16:20) Bard's early user research (21:21) Bard versus ChatGPT (25:01) The cultural and product principles behind Bard (30:56) Insight into Bard's impressive development speed (35:17) Deciding when to ship Bard (41:41) Why Bard is different from other products Jack has built (46:30) Evaluating Bard's original spec (48:02) Insight into Bard's product roadmap (56:00) The toughest challenges Bard has faced (57:50) What's special about team-building at Bard (62:54) Addressing Bard's negative press (67:49) Advice for aspiring LLM companies (69:15) Advice for non-LLM companies (71:05) The biggest barriers to advancing AI (75:45) How product people can use or build with AI (77:24) How AI is changing product leadership (79:20) People who had an outsized impact on Jack

Will Larson is the CTO at Carta, an ownership and equity management platform that raised at a $7.4b valuation in 2021. Prior to joining Carta, Will was CTO at Calm, founded Stripe's Foundation Engineering org, and led Uber's Platform Engineering people and strategy. Will also writes extensively about engineering leadership, and has authored two books in this area: Staff Engineer, and An Elegant Puzzle. — In today's episode we discuss: How to form an engineering strategy Common engineering management mistakes, and how to avoid them Advice for explaining, measuring, and optimizing engineering velocity Will's nuanced approach to organizational policies Why it's sometimes counterproductive to tell someone not to micromanage — Referenced: Accelerate (book): https://www.amazon.com/Accelerate-Software-Performing-Technology-Organizations/dp/1942788339 Calm: https://www.calm.com/ Carta: https://www.carta.com/ DORA: https://dora.dev/ Good Strategy, Bad Strategy (book): https://www.amazon.com/Good-Strategy-Bad-Difference-Matters/dp/0307886239 JavaScript: https://www.javascript.com/ KAFKA: https://kafka.apache.org/ Minto Pyramid (framework): https://untools.co/minto-pyramid Ruby on Rails: https://rubyonrails.org/ SPACE (framework): https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm Stripe: https://www.stripe.com/ — Where to find Brett Berson: Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ — Where to find Will Larson: Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/lethain LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-larson-a44b543/ Personal website/blog: https://lethain.com/ An Elegant Puzzle (book): https://www.amazon.com/Elegant-Puzzle-Systems-Engineering-Management/dp/1732265186 Staff Engineer (book): https://staffeng.com/book — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (03:03) The nuances of taking lessons from old companies (14:28) The value of writing down engineering principles (17:03) How to structure a strategy document (18:48) The 2 parts of any engineering strategy (21:08) Advice for turning strategy into action (23:44) Carta's unique "navigator" model (24:50) The Hidden Variable Problem (29:59) Explaining, measuring, and optimizing velocity (35:28) Useful metrics for engineering orgs (39:08) The balance between micromanagement and understanding details (43:03) Management anti-patterns (45:49) How to execute policies whilst managing their exceptions (47:56) What an excellent engineering executive looks like (53:53) How Will has evolved as an engineering executive (56:56) How to communicate with executives (63:18) Things that derail meetings (66:10) How to approach presentation feedback (67:30) A bad sign when working with direct reports (69:13) Advice for growing as an early-career engineer (71:11) Will's model for developing engineering teams (74:33) Sources of inspiration for Will's views on engineering management

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. — In today's episode we discuss: The origins of Runway The limitations of being “customer-driven” when building in AI How Runway balances research development with product development How goal-setting and planning is different for AI products Advice for early-stage AI founders — Referenced: Containerization: https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/containerization/ Docker: https://www.docker.com/ Green screen tool by Runway: https://runwayml.com/green-screen/ Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/ Hugging Face Spaces: https://huggingface.co/spaces Hugging Face Model Hub: https://huggingface.co/docs/hub/models-the-hub Replicate: https://replicate.com/ Runway Gen-1: https://research.runwayml.com/gen1 Runway Gen-2: https://research.runwayml.com/gen2 Runway's 30 AI Magic Tools: https://runwayml.com/ai-magic-tools/ — Where to find Anastasis Germanidis: Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/agermanidis LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/agermanidis Personal website: https://agermanidis.com/ Personal blog: https://blog.agermanidis.com/ — Where to find Todd Jackson: Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/tjack LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddj0 — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (03:23) The unique story of how Runway's co-founders met (08:27) The origins of Runway (09:28) Forming the initial product (13:55) Turning Runway into a company (14:41)Approach to initial market segments (18:53) Early-adopters (21:20) The limitations of being “customer-driven” (25:54) Forming a vocal community (27:08) Fostering community (29:05) The progression of Runway's tech and use-cases (33:08) How they picked users for early release (34:00) Expanding past the first 100 users of Gen-2 (35:33) Runway's approach to safety and content moderation (36:44) Balancing product development and research development (43:51) Runway's org structure (45:08) Goal-setting amidst constant change in AI (46:50) Why Runway doesn't plan very far ahead (50:26) Advice to early-stage AI founders (53:11) Will AI replace video editors? (55:04) When Runway had the most momentum (56:49) Anastasis' #1 piece of advice

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. — In today's episode we discuss: Guillermo's fascinating path into tech Learnings from building Cloudup and selling the company to Automattic (the company behind WordPress) Vercel's origin story and path to product market fit How to make an open source business successful Vercel's unique philosophy on developer experience Insights and predictions on the future of AI — Referenced: Algolia: https://www.algolia.com/ Apache Zookeeper: https://zookeeper.apache.org/ Apache Kafka: https://kafka.apache.org/ AWS: https://www.aws.training/ C++: https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/definition/C Clerk: https://clerk-tech.com/ Cloudup: https://cloudup.com/ Commerce Cloud: https://www.salesforce.com/products/commerce/ Contentful: https://www.contentful.com/ Debian: https://www.debian.org/ Fintool: https://www.fintool.com/ Figma: https://www.figma.com/ GitLab: https://about.gitlab.com/ IRC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat KDE: https://kde.org/ Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux Mozilla: https://www.mozilla.org MooTools (UI library): https://mootools.net/ Next.js: https://nextjs.org/ React Native: https://reactnative.dev/ Red Hat: https://www.redhat.com/ Redpanda: https://redpanda.com/ Resend: https://resend.com/ Rust: https://www.rust-lang.org/ Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com Servo: https://servo.org/ Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/ Socket.io: https://socket.io/ Symphony: https://symphony.com/ Trilio: https://trilio.io/ Twilio: https://www.twilio.com Vercel: https://vercel.com/ V0.dev: https://v0.dev/ — Where to find Guillermo: Twitter/x: https://twitter.com/rauchg LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rauchg/ Personal website: https://rauchg.com/ — Where to find Todd Jackson: Twitter: https://twitter.com/tjack LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddj0 — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (02:35) Becoming an “internet celebrity” at age 11 (08:30) Guillermo's first company: Cloudup (11:09) Biggest learnings from Cloudup and WordPress (15:06) The insights behind starting Vercel (17:11) Sources of validation for Vercel (20:29) How Vercel formed its V1 product (23:25) Navigating the early reactions from competitors and users (25:58) The paradox of developers and how it impacted Next.js (31:20) Advice on finding product market fit (34:48) The forces behind a trend towards "Front-end Cloud” (38:35) Why people now pay so much attention to the front-end (40:06) How to make an open source business successful (44:54) Insights on product positioning and category creation (48:52) Vercel's journey through becoming multi-product (51:44) Guillermo's take on the future of AI (53:43) Heuristics for building better product experiences (55:49) AI insights from Vercel's customers (57:37) How AI might change engineering in the next 10-20 years (62:43) Guillermo's favorite advice (65:45) Guillermo's advice to himself of 10 years ago

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. — In today's episode we discuss: How GitLab layered a commercial model on top of open source roots GitLab's main marketing metrics Examples, benefits, and downsides of a transparent company culture How GitLab serves enterprise customers, and a passionate developer community Unique marketing lessons from working in an open core company An example of a recent marketing campaign — Where to find Brett Berson: Twitter: https://twitter.com/brettberson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ — Where to find Ashley Kramer: Twitter/x: https://twitter.com/ashleyekramer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleyekramer/ — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Referenced: CISO: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/security/what-is-ciso.html DevSecOps: https://about.gitlab.com/topics/devsecops/ E-Group: https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/e-group/ GitLab: https://gitlab.com GitLab legal team's SAFE framework: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/legal/safe-framework/ GitLab's open core business model: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/stewardship/ GitLab's open source employee handbook: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/ GitLab's open source marketing handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/ GitLab's open source remote handbook: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/all-remote/guide/ Sid Sijbrandij, CEO of GitLab: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sijbrandij/ Tableau: https://www.tableau.com/ — Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (02:34) Marketing in closed vs open source companies (07:40) The role of marketing at GitLab (09:23) The tensions of being a commercial, open source company (12:36) Advice for nurturing community and dealing with disagreements (15:02) GitLab's main marketing metrics (20:26) The thinking behind GitLab's org structure, in and around marketing (28:19) Selling to enterprise as an open core company (29:53) The difference between open core and open source (30:39) Serving many different customer segments (35:10) GitLab's planning process (39:22) An example of GitLab's marketing in practice (42:12) How marketing collaborates with product (45:55) Marketing lessons from working in an open core company (49:46) Examples of GitLab's focus on transparency (52:22) Why GitLab is transparent about their marketing (54:59) 2 examples of GitLab's uniquely transparent culture (58:35) The downsides of being a transparent company (60:13) GitLab's meeting structure and cadence (62:04) Benefits of having an engineering and product background as CMO (71:09) People who made an outsized impact on Ashley's career

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. — In today's episode we discuss: Lessons from Looker When, why and how to invest in white-glove customer support Tactics for scaling high-touch customer support Colin's intuition-based approach to product How Looker hit their goals for 24 quarters in a row The founding story of Omni Colin's hot takes on picking startups, hiring PMs, and more — Referenced: Amazon Redshift: https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/ BigQuery: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery Hotel Tonight: https://www.hoteltonight.com/ Omni: https://omni.co/ Ramp: https://ramp.com/ Rillet: https://rillet.com/ Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/en/ Tableau: https://www.tableau.com/ TechCrunch article on Looker's acquisition by Google: https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/13/google-closes-2-6b-looker-acquisition/ Vanta's founder on the In Depth podcast: https://review.firstround.com/podcast/episode-86 — Where to find Brett Berson: Twitter: https://twitter.com/brettberson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ — Where to find Colin Zima: Twitter: https://twitter.com/drinkzima?lang=en LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinzima/ — Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast — Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (02:30) Colin's unique entry into Looker (04:35) How Colin talks to users (08:20) How Colin's scope at Looker expanded (10:53) Why and how to provide white-glove customer support (20:25) Which companies should invest heavily in customer support? (22:49) Hiring for and hiring from customer support (27:40) The #1 thing for making customer support effective at scale (29:32) The culture of customer support at Omni (32:57) Insights on product strategy (41:33) The role of intuition vs data in product decisions (44:25) The merits and downsides of an intuition-driven approach to product (48:36) Insights from hitting every goal for 24 quarters straight (55:07) The founding story of Omni (58:10) How Colin maintains intellectual honesty as a founder (60:02) How Colin thinks about what to copy vs not copy from Looker (63:25) How to pick which startup to join (66:07) The most underrated trait in early stage startup employees (68:11) Colin's take on founder-market-fit (69:42] Unpopular opinion on how to hire good PMs (72:28) The people who made an outsized impact on Colin's career

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. In today's episode, we discuss: The stories and thinking behind Zapier's most unorthodox decisions How Wade thinks about product market fit How Zapier built their powerful distribution engine The fascinating story of Veterans United, and its impact on Zapier How Wade thinks about fundraising Why Wade lives by “don't hire ‘til it hurts” Key lessons on people management Referenced: Basecamp: https://basecamp.com/ Bingo Card Creator: https://www.bingocardcreator.com Bryan Helmig, Co-founder of Zapier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryanhelmig John Wooden quote: https://www.thewoodeneffect.com/be-quick-but-dont-hurry/ Mailchimp: https://mailchimp.com/ Mike Knoop, Co-founder of Zapier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeknoop Patrick Mckenzie, creator of Bingo Card Creator: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickmckenzie/ PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/ Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/ SMBs: https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/SMB-small-and-medium-sized-business-or-small-and-midsized-business Stripe: https://stripe.com/ Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke: https://www.amazon.com.au/Thinking-Bets-Annie-Duke/dp/0735216355 Tony Xu, CEO of DoorDash: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xutony/ Twilio: https://www.twilio.com/ Veterans United Home Loans: https://www.veteransunited.com/ Zapier: https://zapier.com/ Where to find Brett Berson Twitter: https://twitter.com/brettberson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Where to find Wade Foster Twitter: https://twitter.com/wadefoster LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wadefoster Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast Timestamps (05:46) The fascinating story of Veterans United (06:55) Lessons from Veterans United (08:35) The most important things Zapier got right (10:13) How Zapier built their powerful distribution engine (16:56) Why Zapier didn't move to focusing on enterprise (19:06) How Wade thinks about product market fit (24:26) The role of skill vs luck in Zapier's success (26:23) What was hard about building Zapier (30:03) Key lessons on people management (32:35) Rule of thumb: "don't hire ‘til it hurts” (36:42) Zapier's #1 hiring mistake (42:50) How to test for scrappiness in the hiring process (44:31) Do hiring playbooks transfer between companies? (50:01) The 12 year evolution of Zapier's product (53:20) How Zapier makes product decisions (55:40) How Zapier thought about competition (60:11) How to foster intellectual honesty in yourself and your org (65:35) The people who most impacted Wade's worldviews

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.  In today's episode we discuss: Shippo's pivot-stricken origin story Finding product-market-fit, again and again and again Laura's unique take on founder-market-fit Advice on talking to users The 3 Horizons Framework for prioritizing resources across a core business and longer-term bets The email Laura sends every Sunday because of Frank Slootman's advice Referenced: Amp It Up by Frank Slootman: https://www.amazon.com/Amp-Unlocking-Hypergrowth-Expectations-Intensity/dp/1119836115 Expedia: https://www.expedia.com/ FedEx: https://www.fedex.com/ Frank Slootman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankslootman/ Jerry Colonna: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-colonna-reboot/ Josh Koppelman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jkoppelman/ Khalid Halim: https://review.firstround.com/the-science-of-speaking-is-the-art-of-being-heard LendUp: https://www.lendup.com/ Shippo: https://goshippo.com/ Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/ SMBs: https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/small-business/articles/smb-business/ Stripe: https://stripe.com/ UPS: https://www.ups.com/us/en/global.page 70/20/10 rule from Google: https://www.itonics-innovation.com/blog/702010-rule-of-innovation Where to find Todd Jackson: Twitter: https://twitter.com/tjack LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddj0 Where to find Laura Behrens Wu: Twitter: https://twitter.com/LauraBehrensWu LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurabehrenswu Personal website: https://laurabehrenswu.com/ Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast Timestamps (02:36) The Shippo origin story (06:57) Why they pivoted into Shippo (11:01) How they got their first customers (13:27) The role of timing in Shippo's early success (14:40) The value of being an outsider (17:49) When founder-market-fit is and isn't necessary (19:07) The path to product-market-fit (22:06) What kept the Shippo team persisting (24:41) Advice on talking to users (29:28) Shippo's fundraising journey (34:26) Finding product-market-fit again and again (37:54) The 3 Horizons Framework (45:04) Shippo's culture and early team (49:17) Hiring people you can learn from (50:40) Laura's most impactful hires (52:12) Frank Slootman's "Sunday Email” (55:43) Laura's #1 piece of advice for founders (57:34) The most memorable influences on Laura's career

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. In today's episode, we discuss: Rewind's journey to Product Market Fit Lessons from Optimizely and being a second time founder Dan's one-of-a-kind Twitter fundraising strategy Dan's hot takes on the future of AI Where to build in AI, and what makes a “wrapper” thin versus thick Referenced: Apple's Silicon: https://www.macrumors.com/guide/apple-silicon/ ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/ Dan publicly sharing his own 360 performance reviews: https://twitter.com/dsiroker/status/1689763756459675650 Dan's public Twitter fundraise: https://twitter.com/dsiroker/status/1646895452317700097 Dan's Rewind demo tweet: https://twitter.com/dsiroker/status/1638799931891920897 Google Glass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass Google Wave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html Optimizely: https://www.optimizely.com/ Paul Graham: https://twitter.com/paulg Rahul Vohra's framework for measuring and optimizing Product Market Fit: https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit Rewind AI: https://www.rewind.ai/ Scribe (which morphed into Rewind): https://www.scribe.ai/about The Mom Test book: https://www.momtestbook.com/ Where to find Dan Siroker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/dsiroker LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dsiroker Personal website: https://siroker.com/ Blog: https://medium.com/@dsiroker Where to find Todd Jackson: Twitter: https://twitter.com/tjack LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddj0 Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast Timestamps (02:25) Rewind's origin story (04:04) How Rewind works (07:24) Managing scope when building Rewind (13:47) How Dan thought about early user feedback (17:08) Rewind's cultural mantra for shipping and validating fast (18:35) Product positioning as a category creator (20:39) Lessons from being a 2nd time founder (26:11) Cultural values at Optimizely and Rewind (28:22) How Dan defines and operationalizes Product Market Fit (32:06) Audience segmentation (34:32) Measuring Product Market Fit (36:23) Dan's take on the current AI hype (38:11) What makes a "wrapper" thin vs thick? (39:50) Where founders should and shouldn't build within the AI ecosystem (43:22) Trends in consumer expectations around data privacy (46:59) What AI might look like 10 years from now (51:09) Dan's one-of-a-kind public Twitter fundraise (59:40) What's next for Rewind? (61:26) The influence of Paul Graham (62:47) Dan's #1 piece of advice (64:23) Dan's #1 book recommendation

Join Nate Matherson as he sits down with Camille Ricketts for the fifteenth episode of the Optimize podcast. Camille is the Operating Partner focused on all things marketing, brand, and communications for Emergence Capital, the longest-standing venture firm focused on B2B software. She's also known for being Notion's 10th hire, joining Notion as the first marketer when the team was just 10 people, and running content and marketing for First Round Capital, where she founded and built First Round Review. In this episode, Camille and Nate discuss her extensive background from her time with First Round Capital to Notion's 10th employee to becoming a member of The White House's US Digital Service. Camille gets tactical, sharing strategies and tips for creating user onboarding and tutorial content, generating case studies, and leveraging cross-functional teams. As a special bonus, Camille and Nate dive deep into Notion's go-to-market approach, revealing insights into building successful creator marketing campaigns. Closing out the episode is our popular lightning round of questions! For more information please visit www.positional.com, or email us at podcast@positional.com.Resources:Join Positional's Private Beta Here: www.positional.comCheck in with Nate on LinkedIn & TwitterCheck in with Camille on LinkedIn & Twitter & Emergence CapitalWhat to Listen For:02:30 Camille's Background04:49 Experience being Notion's 10th employee05:54 Was content always a priority at Notion?09:00 How do we create and distribute tutorial content?11:34 Driving success with pre-built templates for users13:30 What is a Director of Community?15:15 Notion's GTM strategy: Influencer Marketing21:26 Where did SEO fit in Notion's GTM strategy?23:12 How do you get a customer to agree to do a case study?25:35 Cross-functional teams drive the best results for content marketing25:58 Camille's White House experience (US Digital Service)27:38 Should VCs be creating content?28:39 Lightning question round

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. In today's episode, we discuss: Key lessons from the Sprig founding story Product development in the pre vs. post-LLM world How to overcome AI skepticism How to evaluate new models and how to know when to switch Why you need an ML engineer Sprig's “AI Squad” team structure How Sprig upskills all team members on AI Referenced: Auto-GPT: https://github.com/Significant-Gravitas/Auto-GPT Chat GPT: https://chat.openai.com Google's BERT model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BERT_(language_model) Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira Jobs to Be Done Framework: https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done Langchain: https://www.langchain.com/ Sprig: https://sprig.com/ Where to find Ryan Glasgow: Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanglasgow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanglasgow/ Where to find Kevin Mandich: Twitter: https://twitter.com/kevinmandich LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinmandich/ Where to find Brett Berson: Twitter: https://twitter.com/brettberson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast Timestamps (02:50) Intro (04:57) What attracted Kevin to Sprig (05:53) Kevin's background before Sprig (07:56) How Ryan gained conviction about Kevin (09:55) Key technical challenges and how they solved them (18:46) How to overcome AI skepticism (21:47) The early difficulties of building an ML-enabled product (25:06) Evaluating new models and knowing when to switch (35:09) Using Chat GPT (37:23) Product development in the pre vs. post-LLM world (39:53) The impact of AI hype on Sprig's product development (45:36) Balancing AI automation with user-psychology (48:47) Do recent LLMs reduce Sprig's competitive advantage? (51:00) The importance of "selling the vision" to customers (54:40) How Sprig structures teams (57:25) How Sprig upskills all team members on AI (60:25) 3 key tips for companies trying to navigate AI (66:05) Major limitations with LLMs right now (70:27) The future of AI and the future of Sprig

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. In today's episode we discuss: The principles of effective org design Signs your company needs a re-org Square's GM-led org design, and the reasoning behind it Lessons on incentive-design, pricing, planning, and decision-making at scale The step-by-step process behind a recent re-org at Square 5 lessons from Alyssa Henry, CEO at Square Referenced: Alyssa Henry, CEO at Square: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyssa-henry-0905692 Saumil's 6 key principles for effective re-orgs: https://medium.com/@saumil/avoid-the-reorg-from-hell-with-six-key-principles-f8c9cbdfb0bd Saumil's blog post about “Building Better Products with Escalation”: https://medium.com/swlh/well-that-escalated-quickly-building-better-products-with-escalation-feb259d733c9 Square: https://squareup.com/gb/en Where to find Saumil Mehta: Twitter: https://twitter.com/saumil Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saumilmehta1/ Blog: https://medium.com/@saumil Where to find Brett Berson: Twitter: https://twitter.com/brettberson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ Where to find First Round Capital: Website: https://firstround.com/ First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/firstround Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast Timestamps [00:02:22] Intro [00:04:20] The principles of effective org design [00:04:32] #1 Align on goals [00:06:14] #2 Separate design considerations from human considerations [00:08:03] #3 Define clear reasons each team exists [00:09:21] #4 Design for durability [00:09:49] #5 Be very intentional with comms [00:10:14] Some stories behind the principles [00:13:55] How to know when you need a re-org [00:16:14] Managing inevitable tradeoffs in org design [00:20:45] Square's "GM-led" structure [00:23:05] Why Square centralized GTM [00:25:39] Managing pricing and packaging across a complex org [00:29:28] Examples of Square's written principles [00:31:19] How Square determines what each GM owns [00:38:35] Collaboration across GMs and products [00:40:32] Key lessons on planning and decision-making at scale [00:43:15] Designing incentives across a massive org [00:49:03] Two reasons GM structures go wrong [00:52:03] 6 Step re-org walkthrough [00:52:37] Step 1: Triggering the re-org [00:53:59] Step 2: Sketching a proposed org design [00:56:17] Step 3: Checking against key criteria [00:59:22] Step 4: Finalizing approach with leadership [01:00:04] Step 5: Planning comms [01:01:58] Step 6: Executing comms [01:04:20] Signals a re-org worked vs failed [01:07:13] 5 lessons from Alyssa Henry, CEO at Square

Today's guest is Rahul Vohra, founder and CEO of Superhuman, the startup that has rebuilt the inbox from the ground up creating the fastest email experience ever made.  To date, Rahul has raised over $108 million from some of the best in the business including a16z, IVP, First Round, Tiger Global Management and from celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher, Will Smith and Arianna Huffington. Rahul previously founded Rapportive, a much-loved product that added social profiles to Gmail; it became the first Gmail plugin to scale to millions of users, kickstarted a whole ecosystem of email enhancements, and was ultimately acquired by LinkedIn. In this episode, we talk about Rahul entrepreneurial journey, how he founded Superhuman. We then discuss how to measure product market fit, and why you have to figure out positioning before pricing.   Resources: Rahul on finding product-market fit on First Round Review: https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/

Stephanie is joined today by a very special guest, Andrea Goulet. Andrea founded Empathy In Tech as part of writing her book Empathy-Driven Software Development (https://empathyintech.com/). She's also the founder of the community Legacy Code Rocks (https://www.legacycode.rocks/) and the Chief Vision Officer of two companies: Corgibytes (https://corgibytes.com/) and Heartware (https://www.heartware.dev/) (which provides financial support to keep Empathy In Tech running). Stephanie has strong opinions about the concept of "Makers and Menders" that the Corgibytes folks have written/spoken about, especially around those personas and gender stereotypes. Andrea joins Steph to evolve the conversation and add nuance to the discussion about legacy code/maintenance in our community. This episode is brought to you by Airbrake (https://airbrake.io/?utm_campaign=Q3_2022%3A%20Bike%20Shed%20Podcast%20Ad&utm_source=Bike%20Shed&utm_medium=website). Visit Frictionless error monitoring and performance insight for your app stack. Makers and Menders from Corgibytes (https://corgibytes.com/blog/2015/08/14/makers-vs-menders/) Empathy in Tech (https://empathyintech.com/) Legacy Code Rocks (https://www.legacycode.rocks/) Forget Technical Debt — Here's How to Build Technical Wealth (https://review.firstround.com/forget-technical-debt-heres-how-to-build-technical-wealth) Equal Partners by Kate Mangino (https://bookshop.org/p/books/equal-partners-improving-gender-equality-at-home-kate-mangino/18336353) Sustainable Web Development Episode (https://www.bikeshed.fm/368) Transcript: AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn., And today I'm joined by a very special guest, Andrea Goulet. Hi, Andrea. ANDREA: Hello, thanks for having me. STEPHANIE: So here on The Bike Shed, we like to start by sharing something new in our world. Could you tell us a bit about yourself and anything new going on for you? ANDREA: Yeah, so I have a background in strategic communications, and then kind of made a windy journey over to software. And so, for the past 13 years, I've been focused on modernizing legacy systems. And legacy is kind of a loose term; something you write today can be legacy. But essentially, we kind of help modernize any kind of software, any language, any platform, any framework. And so, over the course of doing that, in the work that I did before I came to software, I had a very technical understanding of empathy and communications and had just done a lot of that. And I just noticed how much that mattered in creating healthy and sustainable codebases. So now I'm kind of taking that experience, and I've got a book contract called "Empathy-Driven Software Development." So I've been working on just diving into a lot of the really deep research. So that's been kind of my focus for the past two years. And it's been really surprising because there were things that were positioned as truths, and then it's like, wait a second, neuroscience is completely upending everything. So it's been a fun learning journey. And I'm excited to share some of the things that I've learned over the years, especially [laughs] in the past two years with this book. So that is the new thing with me. And it's...I was telling you before it just feels like a constant new thing. Anybody who's written a book...it's the hardest thing I've ever done, so... [laughs] STEPHANIE: Yeah, that sounds tough but also kind of exciting because you're learning so many new things that then kind of shape how you view the world, it sounds like. ANDREA: Yeah. Yeah, it really does. And I think I really like diving into the details. And I think what started this was...my business partner, Scott, at the time, really embodied the stereotypical 2010 software developer down to the scruffy beard and dark-rimmed glasses. And what I found incredibly interesting was he had this belief of I'm good with machines, but I'm bad with people. And he just had this really deeply ingrained. On the flip side, I had this belief of, oh, I'm good with people, but I'm bad with machines. I'll never learn how to code. And I found that really interesting. And personally, I had to go through a journey because we went on...it was the first time either of us had ever been on a podcast. So this was about ten years ago. And at the end of the podcast, Scott was the only one on there. And he said, you know, the person asked about his origin story and about our company Corgibytes. And he was like, "Yeah, you know, Andrea is amazing. She's our non-technical founder." And by that time, I had been coding next to him for like three years. And I was like, why the heck would you call me non-technical? And I just felt this...what is it that I have to do to prove it to you? Do I have to actually go get a CS degree? I know I'm self-taught, but does that mean that I'm not good enough? What certificates do I need? Do I need to sit down next to you? Do I need to change my lifestyle? Do I need to look like you? So I was really upset [laughing] and just thinking through, how dare you? How dare you label me as non-technical? And Scott is very quiet and patient, great with people, I think. [laughs] And he listened and said, "I use the words that you use to describe yourself. When we were in a sales meeting right before that phone call, I paid attention to how you introduced yourself, and I pretty much used the same words. So when you call yourself technical, I will too." That shattered my world. It shattered my identity because then it put the responsibility of belonging on me. I couldn't blame other people for my not feeling like I didn't belong. That journey has just been so profound. This is what I see a lot of times with empathy is that we have these kinds of self-identities, but then we're afraid to open up and share. And we make these assumptions of other people, but, at the same time, there's real-world evidence. And so, how do we interpret that? In addition to this, Scott...like, part of the reason I called myself non-technical was because all of the people I saw who were like me or had my background, that's the word that was used to describe someone like me. And when I would go to a conference, you know, I have a feminine presentation. And this was ten years ago. My very first conference was 300 software developers, and there were probably about 295 men. And I was one of five women in the room. And because I looked so different and because I stood out, the first question that anybody would ask me, and this was about 30% to 40% of introductions, was, "Are you technical or non-technical?" And I had to choose between this binary. And I was like; I don't know. Am I technical? Like, is it a CEO that can code? I don't know. But then I have this background. And so I would just default to, "No, I guess I'm non-technical," because that's what felt safe because that's what they assumed. And I just didn't know, and I didn't realize that I was then building in this identity. And so then, as part of trying to create a warm and inclusive organization, we did one of the unconscious bias surveys from Harvard. And what astonished me when I did that myself was that I didn't have a whole lot of bias, like, there was some. But the most profound bias was against women in the workplace, and it stood out a big one. I was like, how is it that I can be someone who's a fierce advocate, but then that's my own bias against people like me? What the heck is going on? So really exploring all of this. And I think Scott and I have had so many different conversations over the years. We actually ended up getting married. And so we have a personal reason to figure a lot of this stuff out too. And when we start to have those conversations about who am I and what's important to me, then all of a sudden, we can start creating better code. We can start working together better as a team. We can start advocating for our needs. Other people know what we need ahead of time. And we're not operating out of defensiveness; we're operating out of collaboration and creativity. So the book and kind of everything is inspired by my background and my lived experience but then also seeing Scott and his struggles, too, because he had been told like, "You're a geek. Stay in the computers. Stay in the code. You're not allowed to talk to customers because you're bad at it," and flat out was told that. So how do we overcome these labels that people have put on us, and then we've made part of our own identity? And which ones are useful, and then which ones are not? Because sometimes labels can create a sense of community and affinity and so how do we know? And it's complicated, but the same thing, software is complicated. We can take skills like empathy and communication. We can look at them schematically and operationalize them when we look at them in kind of detail. So that's what I enjoy doing is looking under the hood and figuring out how does all this stuff work? So... [laughs] STEPHANIE: I did want to respond to a few things that I heard you say when you're talking about going to a conference and feeling very much in the minority. I went to my first RailsConf in 2022, my first RailsConf in person, and I was shocked at the gender imbalance. And I feel like every time I used the women's restroom; I was looking around and trying to make a connection with someone and have a bit of a kinship and be like, oh yes, you are here with me in this space. And then we would have a conversation and walk out together, and that felt very meaningful because the rest of the space, you know, I wasn't finding my people. And so I feel that very hard. I think this is also a good time to transition into the idea of makers and menders, especially because we have been talking about labels. So you all talked about this distinction between the different types of work in software development. So we have greenfield work, and that is writing code from scratch, making all the decisions about how to set up an application, exploring a whole new domain that hasn't been codified yet. And that is one type of work. But there's also mender-type work, which is working in existing applications, legacy code, refactoring, and dealing with the complexity of something that has stood the test of time but may or may not have gotten a lot of investment or care and bringing that codebase back to life if you will. And when I first heard about that distinction, I was like, yes, I'm a mender. This is what I like to do. But the more I thought about it, I started to also feel conflicted because I felt pain doing that work as well. ANDREA: Oh, interesting, yeah. STEPHANIE: Especially in the context of teams that I've been on when that work was not valued. And I was doing maintenance work and fixing bugs and either specifically being assigned to do that work or just doing it because I knew it needed to be done and no one else was doing it. And that had caused me a lot of frustration before because I would look around and be on a team with mostly White men and be like, why aren't they picking up any of this work as well? And so I was thinking about how I both felt very seen by the acknowledgment that this is work, and this is valid work, and it's important work, but also a little bit confused because I'm like, how did I get here? Did I pigeonhole myself into doing this work? Because the more I did it, the better I got at it, the more comfortable and, to whatever degree, enjoyed it. But at the same time, I'm not totally sure I was given the opportunity to do greenfield work earlier in my career. That could have changed where my interests lie. ANDREA: Yeah, it is. And it's funny that you mentioned this because I actually I'm a maker. But yeah, I created this community, and I'm known for this thing. And I had a very similar experience to how do I exist as someone who's different in this kind of community? And I think part of it is, you know, there's a great quote by George Box, who is a statistician, and he says, "All models are wrong; some are useful." And I think that's kind of the whole idea with the maker-mender is that it is a signal to be like, hey, if you like fixing stuff...because there is so much shame, like, that's what we were responding to. And Scott had the opposite problem of what you have experienced, where he was only allowed to work on greenfield work. They were like, "No, you're a good developer. So we want you working on features. We won't let you fix the bugs. We won't let you do the work that you like doing." And so that's why he wanted to create Corgibytes because he's like, "This work needs to be done." I am so personally passionate about this. And when we were having these conversations 13 years ago, I was talking to him about product/market fit and stuff like that. And I was like, "You like fixing software, and there's a lot of software out there to be fixed." I just was very, very confused as to why this kind of existed. And we had been told flat out, "You're never going to find anybody else like Scott. You're never going to be able to build a company around people who find a lot of joy in doing this work." And I think that this comes down to identity and kind of the way that Legacy Code Rocks was built too. A lot of the signaling that we put out there and the messaging and stuff really came from Scott's feeling of, like, I want to find more people like me. So being in the women's bathroom and like, how do I find more menders? Or how do I find people...because we were walking through a Barnes & Noble, and it was like a maker fest, maker everything. And he's like, "I don't have a community. There's nowhere for me to go to create these meaningful connections," exactly like you were saying. "I have maybe two people in my network." And then we were at a conference in 2015. We were at the large agile conference. And it was one of the first ones that I've been to that had a software craft track. And we met like 20 people who were really, like, I just saw Scott light up in a way that I hadn't seen him light up because he could geek out on this level that I hadn't seen him do before. And so when I asked, like, "How do you guys stay in touch afterwards?" And they're like, "Oh no, we don't. We don't know how to build a community." And it's like, well, okay, well, we can get that started. To your response of like, how do you operate when it is presented as a binary? And it's like, am I this, or am I this? This kind of gets down to the idea of identity-wise, is it a binary, or is it a spectrum? I tend to think of it kind of like an introvert-extrovert spectrum where it's like there is no wrong or right, and you can move in different places. And I think being able to explain the nuances of the modeling around how we came up with this messaging can get lost a lot of times. But I'm with you, like, how...and that's kind of something now where it's like, okay, maybe my role was to just start this conversation, but then everybody's having these ideas. But there are people who genuinely feel seen, you know. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's really interesting because what I'm hearing is that when there's this dominant narrative of what a developer should be, and should be good at, and what they should do, it's kind of like what you were saying earlier about how hard it was for you to claim that identity yourself. People who feel differently aren't seen, and that's, I think, the problem. And I'm very, very interested in the gender aspect of it because one thing that I've noticed is that a lot of my female developer friends do do more of that mending work. So when you talk about feeling like there was no community out there, it just wasn't represented at the time, you know, a decade ago for sure. And still, even now, I think we're just starting to elevate those voices and that work. I wanted to share that at thoughtbot; we have different teams for different business verticals. And so we do have a rapid validation prototyping team. We do have a greenfield like MVP, V1 product team. And then we also have a team, Boost, the team that I'm on. That is more team augmentation, working with legacy code and existing systems. And it was not lost on me that Boost has the most women. [laughs] ANDREA: Yeah, because you have the concept of cognitive load and mental load. STEPHANIE: Yes. ANDREA: Women at home end up taking a lot more of this invisible labor that's behind the scenes. Like, you're picking the kids up from school, or you're doing the laundry, or all these things that are just behind the scenes. And this was actually something...so when Scott and I also got married, that's when I first became aware of this, and it was very similar. And it was, okay, how do I...because Scott and I, both in our business and in our personal partnership, we wanted it to be based on equity. And then also, like, how do I show up? And for me, the hardest thing with that was letting go of control where it's like, it has to be a certain way. It's hard for me to comment on the broader enterprise level because what I see at Corgibytes is we have gender parity. That's been pretty balanced over the course of our..., and we're a small boutique company, so it's different. But then, in the larger community of Legacy Code Rocks, it tends to be more male. There are actually fewer women in there. And I think, too, like there's this idea of testers and QA, like, I think that falls in there as well, and that's heavily dominant. And I think sometimes it's like, oh...and I think this kind of comes to the problem of it, like, it's the way that we think about the work in general. And this might be useful just to think about kind of the way that it came about was, you know, makers and menders was we were putting together [laughs] actually this talk for this conference that we went to. And my background in marketing, I was trying to wrap my brain around when is it appropriate for mending? And I had my marketing degree. It's like, oh, the product lifecycle. And Scott's retort was, "It needs to be a circle. We're agile, so it needs to be a circle." And I was like, this doesn't make any sense. Because look, if you have maturity and then you have it...oh my gosh, it'll link back to innovation, and then you can do new stuff. And so yeah, I think when we describe makers and menders, and this is true with any label, the idea in the broader model is that makers and menders aren't necessarily distinct, and your team should 1,000%...everyone should be contributing. And if you only have one person who's doing this work, you're at a detriment. That's not healthy for your codebase like; this should be baked in. And the mender is more of like, this is where I get my joy. It's more of an opt-in. But I think that your observation about the invisible labor and how that gets translated to maintenance work is accurate. A lot of times, like when Scott was describing his thing, it's like, there's the movie "Office Space." I might be dating myself. But there's this guy, Milton, and it's like, "Just go to the basement." He was told maintenance is where good software careers go to die. [laughs] And so over the years, it's like, how do we celebrate this and make it more part of the maker work? And it's similar to how introverts and extroverts...it's like, we all work together, and you need all of it. But there is an extrovert bias. And extroverts are seen more as, oh, they have leadership traits and stuff. But increasingly, we're starting to see, no, actually, that's not the only way that you can be effective. So I think it's hard. And I think it does come down to belonging. And I think that there are also different cultural impacts there. And it comes down to just a lot of different lived experiences. And I so appreciate you sharing your point of view. And I'm curious, what would help you feel more like you belong? Is it the work and the environment that you're in that's kind of contributing to this feeling? Or is it other things in general or? STEPHANIE: Okay, so I did want to address real quick what you were saying about mental load and household labor because I think I really only started thinking about this after I read a book called "Equal Partners" by Kate Mangino, where she talks about how to improve gender equality at home, and I loved that book so much. And I suddenly started to see it everywhere in life and obviously at work too. And that's kind of what really drove my thinking around this conversation, maintenance work being considered less skilled labor or things that get offloaded to someone else. I think that really frustrates me because I just don't believe that's true. And to get back to what you were asking about what would make me feel more seen or valued, I think it's systemic. But I also think that organizations can make change within their cultures around incentives especially. When you are only promoted if you do greenfield work and write thousands of lines of code, [laughs] that's what people will want to do. [laughs] And not even just promotions, but who gets a kudos in Slack? Or when do you get positive encouragement? As a consultant, I've worked on different client teams that had different values, and that was when I really struggled to be in those environments. I have a really strong memory of working on a greenfield project, but there was another male developer who was just cranking out features and doing all of this work and then demoing it to stakeholders. But then there was one feature that he had implemented but had faked the data. So he hadn't finished the backend part of it but just used fake data to demo the user interface to stakeholders. And then he moved on to something else. And I was like, wait; this isn't done. [laughs] But at that point, stakeholders thought it was done. They thought that it was complete. They gave him positive feedback for finishing it. And then I had to come in and be like, "This isn't done. Someone needs to work on this." And that person ended up being me. And that was really frustrating because I was doing that behind-the-scenes work, the under-the-hood work for something that had already been attributed to someone else. And yeah, I think about that a lot and what systems or what the environment was that led to that particular dynamic. MID-ROLL AD: Debugging errors can be a developer's worst nightmare...but it doesn't have to be. Airbrake is an award-winning error monitoring, performance, and deployment tracking tool created by developers for developers that can actually help cut your debugging time in half. So why do developers love Airbrake? It has all of the information that web developers need to monitor their application - including error management, performance insights, and deploy tracking! 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You literally have nothing to lose. Head on over to airbrake.io/try/bikeshed to create your FREE developer account today! STEPHANIE: Do you have any advice for leaders who want to make sure there's more equity for people who like to do mending and legacy code work? ANDREA: Yeah, absolutely. I am so grateful for your questions and your perspective because this is not something that's talked about a lot, and it is so important. I wrote an article for First Round Review. This was in 2016 or 2017. And it was called "Forget Technical Debt — Here's How to Build Technical Wealth," and so if you want to link to it in the show notes. It's a really long article and that goes into some of the specifics around it, but it's meant for CEOs. It really is meant for CEOs. And I do think that you're right; some of it is that we have lionized this culture of making and the work that is more visible. And it's like, oh, okay, great, here's all the visual design stuff. That's fantastic, but then recognizing there's a lot of stuff that's behind the scenes too. So in terms of leaders, I think some of it is you have to think about long-term thinking instead of just the short-term. Don't just chase the new shiny. Also, you need to be really aware of what your return on investment is. Because the developers that are working on maintaining and making sure that your mission-critical systems don't fail those are the ones that have the highest value in your organization because if that system goes down, your company makes money. Greenfield work, yes, it's very...and I'm not downplaying greenfield work for sure. I'm definitely, [laughs] like, I love doing that stuff. I love doing the generating phase. And at the same time, if we only look towards kind of more the future bias...there's a great book that we were featured in called "The Innovation Delusion" that talks about this more in general. But if we only look at the visible work that's coming, then we forget what's important now. And so for leaders, if you're running a software company, know where your mission-critical systems are and recognize the importance of maintaining them. That's the very first step. The second step is to recognize the complexities of a situation, like, to think about things in terms of complex systems instead of complicated systems. And I'll describe the difference. So when I came to software, I had been working in the creative field, like in advertising, and branding, and copywriting, and all that. And we got inputs. We kind of ran it through this process, and then we delivered. And we did a demo and all of that stuff. It was when is the timeline? When is it done? Big air quotes. And we were pretty predictably able to deliver on our delivery day. Sometimes things would go wrong, but we kind of had a sense because we had done the same pattern over and over again. You don't get that in legacy code because the variables are so immense that you cannot predict in the same way. You have to adopt a new strategy for how do you measure effectiveness. And the idea of measuring software productivity in terms of new features or lines of code, like, that's something that goes all the way back to Dykstra [laughs] in the 1970s around, is that the right way? Well, a lot of people who code are like, "No, that's not." This is a debate that goes back to the earliest days of computing. But I think that the companies that are able to build resilient systems have a competitive advantage. If a leader wants to look at their systems, whether that is a social system and the people in their organization or whether or not it's their software if you look at it from a systems thinking, like, there are interactions that I need to pay attention to not just process, that is super key as well. And then the last one is to recognize, like, one of our core values is communication is just as important as code. I would be remiss to neglect empathy and communication in part of this, but that really is so important. Because when we position things in terms of...and I don't know as much about thoughtbot and kind of the overall strategy, but kind of an anti-pattern I have seen just in general in organizational behavior is that when you structure teams functionally and silo them, you're not getting that diversity of thought. So the way that we approach it is, like, put a mender on a maker team because they're going to have a different perspective. And then, you can work together to get things out the door faster and value each other's perspectives and recognize strengths and shadows. So, for me, as a maker, I'm like, I've got a huge optimism bias, and we can go through all this stuff. And for Scott, it's like he struggles to know when he's done. Like, for me, I'm like, cool, we're 80% done. I got it. We're good to go. And for Scott, he'll work on something, and then it's like, I have to stop him. So recognizing that we help each other, that kind of thought diversity and experience diversity goes across so many different vectors, not just makers and menders. But I think, to me, it's about reframing value so that you're not just thinking about what it is right now in this moment. And I think a lot of this comes down to investor strategy too. Because if you've got an investor that you're trying to appease and they're just trying to make short-term monetary gains, it's much harder to think in terms of long term. And I think it's developers understanding business, business understanding the struggles of developers and how they need lots of focus time, and how estimating is really freaking hard, and why if you demand something, it's going to be probably not right. And then coming up with frameworks together where...how can I describe this in a way? So to me, it really is about empathy and communication at the end of the day when we're talking about interactions and how do we operationalize it. STEPHANIE: I like what you said about reframing value because I do believe that it starts from the top. When you value sustainability...my co-host, Joël, had an episode about sustainability as a value in software development. But then that changes, like I mentioned before, the incentive structures and who gets rewarded for what type of work. And I also think that it's not only diverse types of people who like doing different types of work, but there is value in doing both. And I know we talked about it being a spectrum earlier, but I strongly believe that doing the legacy code work and experiencing what it's like to try to change a system that you are like, I have no idea why this decision was made or like, why is the code like this? That will help inform you. If you do do greenfield work, those are really important skills, I think, to bring to that other type of work as well. Because then you're thinking about, okay, how can I make decisions that will help the developers down the line when I'm no longer on this project? ANDREA: Exactly, which is a form of empathy. [laughs] STEPHANIE: Yeah, it is a form of empathy, exactly. And the reverse is also true too. I was thinking about, okay, how can working in greenfield code help inform working with legacy code? And I was like, oh, you have so much energy when the world is completely open to you, and you can make whatever decisions to deliver value. And I've really struggled working in legacy code, feeling like I don't have any options and that I have to repeat a pattern that's already been set or that I'm just kind of stuck with what I've been given. But I think that there is some value in injecting more of that agency into working with legacy code as well. ANDREA: Well, and I think, too, I think you hit it on the head because, like I said, with the mental load at home, it was like, I had to be okay with things failing where it's like, it wasn't exactly the way I would do it, and I had to be okay with that. Like, oh, the dishes aren't put in the dishwasher exactly the same way I would do it. I'm not going behind it. And like, okay, it's not perfect. That's...whoo, it's going to be okay. And I think that's kind of what we experience, too, is this idea of we have to figure out how we work together in a way that is sustainable. And I think that, similar to my experience with the technical, non-technical piece, there is an onus. Now, granted, I want to be very careful here to not...there is trauma, and there is absolutely horrific discrimination and abuse. And that is not what I'm talking about here in terms of power dynamics. I am talking more about self-identity and self-expression. And I think that if you are in a community like makers and menders, yeah, we're less represented. There is a little bit of an onus, the technical, non-technical, like the onus of understanding what non-technical means and where I can push back is really important work for me to do. Because what I was surprised with was everyone there, like, when I started asking...so my response ended up being, "Help me understand, why did you ask that question?" And I took ownership of the narrative. And it was like, oh, well, what I found was that most of the people were like, if you're a recruiter, I don't want to waste your time with a bunch of stuff that you don't want to talk about. And then being able to say, "Oh, okay, I can see that, and you assumed that I was a recruiter because of the way I looked. And I understand the intention here. Next time, if I'm at a software conference, assume that I know how to code and assume that I'm here for a reason." And a great opening question is, "What brought you here?" I'm like, oh, okay, when we ask a close-ended question, we position things as a binary, like, are you technical or non-technical? That creates a lot of cognitive dissonance, and it's hard. But if I open it up and say, "What brought you here?" Then I can create my own narrative. There is an aspect of setting boundaries and pushing back a little bit like you said, agency. And that can be really hard because it gets at the core of who you are, and then you have to really explore it. And what I found, at least, is in the majority, there have been exceptions, but in the majority of the male-dominated groups that I've been in in my career in software, the majority are very welcoming and want me to be there. But I feel inadequate, and it's more impostor syndrome than I think it is people being discriminatory. Learning about the differences between that and where is my responsibility and where's your responsibility in this that's a tough tension to play. STEPHANIE: Absolutely. And I think that's why it's really important that we're having a conversation like this. I think what you're getting at is just the harm of the default assumption that is chronic, [laughs] at least for me sometimes. And you mentioned earlier the history of computing a little bit. And I was really excited about that because I did a little bit of digging and learned about women's history in computing and how after World War II, programming, you know, there were so many women. In fact, I think by 1960, more than one in four programmers were women, and they were working on mission-critical work like for NASA for, you know, during World War II for code-breaking. And I read that at the time, that work was deemed boring and tedious, and that's why men didn't want to do it. They wanted to work on hardware, which was what was the cool, creative, interesting work. And the computing work was just second class. That's changed, but in some ways, I'm thinking about, okay, where are we now? And to what degree are we kind of continuing this legacy? And how can we evolve or move beyond it? ANDREA: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And in some of the research for the book, one of the things I learned is a lot of people know the name, John von Neumann. He created the von Neumann architecture, that is the foundation of all the hardware that most of us use today. And the very first kind of general purpose digital computer, ENIAC, all...I think it was eight of the people who were programmers for that were women. That team was led by John von Neumann's wife, Klára, and you never hear about Klára. You have to go digging for that. And The Smithsonian actually just about 8, 10 years ago did a big anniversary and then realized none of those women were invited to the press conferences. They were not invited. And so there is kind of this...similar to generational wealth, it's the thing that gets passed down. Like, if you're in the rooms in the early days...there was a quote by John Backus, who created FORTRAN and the Backus–Naur principle, where he talked about programming in the 1950s. He has an essay, and he was like, yeah, I mean, an idea was anybody who claims it, and we never cited our sources. And so it was whoever had the biggest ego was the one who got credit. And everyone's like, great; you're a hero. And so I think that's kind of the beginning of it. And so if you weren't invited into the room, because in the 1950s, in addition to gender, there was legislation that prevented...we weren't even allowed to use the same bathrooms. You had White bathrooms and Black bathrooms. So you had very serious barriers for many different people getting into that room, and I think that gets to the idea of intersectionality as well. So the more barriers that you had, the harder it was going to be. And so then you get the stereotypes, and then you get the media who promotes the stereotypes. And so that is what happened to me. So I grew up in the '80s and '90s, and just every movie I watched, every TV show portrayed somebody who was, quote, "good" with computers in a very specific way. I didn't see myself in it. So I was like, oh, I'm not there. But then, when I talk to Scott, he's like, "Oh, I never saw that. I never saw the discrimination. I just saw this stuff." That's part of it is that if you were in that position where discrimination, or difficulties, or stereotypes had been invisible to you, the onus is on you to learn and to listen. If you are in a situation where you feel like you have been in the minority, the onus is on you to find ways to become more empowered. And a lot of times, that is setting boundaries. It's advocating for yourself. It's recognizing your self-worth. And those are all things that are really hard. And saying, hey, if we want to be sustainable, everyone needs to contribute. I'm happy to train everyone, but this is not going to work. And being able to frame it, too, in terms of value, like, why? Why is it a benefit for everyone building that empathy? And you're right, I mean, there are absolutely cultures where...who was it? I think it was Edward Deming. And he said, "A single person is powerless in the face of a bad system." And so if you're in a system that isn't going to work, recognizing that and can you move into a different system? Or can you change it from within? And those are all different questions that you've got to ask based on your own fortitude, your own interests, your own resources, your own situation. There is no easy question. But it's always work. And no matter who you are, it's always work. [laughs] STEPHANIE: Yeah, yeah. I joined as co-host of this podcast just a few months ago. And I had to do a lot of reflecting on what I wanted to get out of it and what my goals were. And that's why I'm really excited to have you on here and to be using this platform to talk about things that are important to me and things that I think more people should know about or think about. So before we wrap up, Andrea, do you have anything else you want to say? ANDREA: I want to reinforce that if you feel joy from mending, it's awesome. And there are communities like legacycode.rocks. We have MenderCon, and it's a celebration of software maintenance. So it can be really great. We have a virtual meetup every Wednesday. And there's a kind of a core group of people who come, and they're like, it's like therapy because there are a lot of people who are in your situation where it's like, I'm the only person on my team who cares about automated tests, and I have no idea like...and just having people who kind of share in that struggle can be really helpful, so finding your community. And then I think software maintenance is really, really critical and really important, and I think we see it. Like, we're seeing in the news every day in terms of these larger systems going down. Just recently, Southwest Airlines and all of these flights got canceled. The maintenance work is so, so valuable. If you feel like a mender and you feel like that fits your identity, just know that there is a lot of worth in the work that you are doing, an immense amount of worth in the work that you are doing, and to continue to advocate for that. If you are a maker, yes, there is absolutely worth in the work you're doing, but learn about menders. Learn how to work together. And if you are a leader of an organization, recognize that all of these different perspectives can work together. And, again, reframe the value. So I am so grateful that you framed the conversation this way. It's so important. I'm very, very grateful to hear from you and your point of view. And I hope that you continue to push the narrative like this because it's really important. STEPHANIE: Aww, thanks. And thank you so much for being on the podcast. ANDREA: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeeeeee!!!!! ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.

For our first episode of 2023, our guest is Mike Boufford, CTO of Greenhouse, an applicant tracking system and recruiting platform.  Mike has a unique career as an engineering leader. He wrote the first line of code at Greenhouse in May 2012, and he's still there — over a decade later. This isn't the typical path of non-co-founding engineers, who usually get layered or leave to start their own ventures. In our conversation today, we focus on how founders build an environment that makes early employees want to stay, and importantly, how leaders can build the career skills and self-awareness they need to succeed at a startup long-term. Mike shares more on: How his own motivation changed over time and how he managed his relationship with the company's co-founders.  The techniques he used to prepare himself for every next phase of growth and how his role would have to change in 18-24 months. Why he read two books on every other executive's area of the business when he joined the leadership team. Mike also refers to his First Round Review article in the interview, which we definitely recommend reading: Why This Engineering Leader Thinks You Shouldn't Aim for Zero Regrettable Attrition. You can follow Mike on Twitter at @mboufford. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson. 

Our guest is Peter Kazanjy, co-founder of Atrium and author of “Founding Sales: The Early Stage Go-to-Market Handbook.” As an early-stage founder, there's something comforting about the build stage. You're tinkering with the nascent product, honing your MVP and dreaming up the possibilities of how much folks are going to love what you create. But once you get out of that comfort zone of quietly building and start trying to sell, things tend to get infinitely more complicated. In today's conversation, Pete lays out the roadmap for getting founder-led sales right in the early days. From small exercises to build up your selling muscles, like his “turbo rapport” challenge to thornier topics like self-diagnosing if your selling narrative is working, he's got tons of advice for breaking down the art of a sales call. Pete also shares tailored guidance for folks who are facing the additional hurdle of creating a new category (and trying to create a new budget), with the playbooks he used building Atrium. You can follow Peter on Twitter @Kazanjy. Check out his articles for First Round Review, including his lessons on building a customer advisory board. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson

Camille Ricketts began her career in journalism, at the Wall Street Journal, in 2006. In 2010 she joined Tesla, where she worked in communications alongside Elon Musk. She transitioned into marketing and became the Head of Content and Marketing at First Round Capital and then went on to become the very first marketing hire at Notion. In today's episode, we dig into community-led growth—what it is, and when and how to pursue it. We get super-specific on how Notion championed their most loyal users and built a passionate community, and the incredible outcome it had for the company's growth. We also talk about how to create great content, and how content can drive growth for your business and brand.—Find the transcript for this episode and all past episodes at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/episodes/. Today's transcript will be live by 8 a.m. PT.—Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting this podcast:• Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments: https://www.geteppo.com/• Flatfile—A CSV importer that says yes instead of error: mismatch: https://www.flatfile.com/lenny• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security: https://vanta.com/lenny—Where to find Camille:• Twitter: https://twitter.com/camillericketts• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/camillericketts/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—People referenced:• Ivan Zhao: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanhzhao/• Simon Last: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-last-41404140/• Lexie Barnhorn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexisbarnhorn/• Ben Lang: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benmlang/• Claire Butler: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairetbutler/• Jessi Craige Shikman at First Round: https://firstround.com/person/jessi-craige-shikman/• Brett Berson at First Round: https://firstround.com/person/brett-berson/• Josh Kopelman at First Round: https://firstround.com/person/josh-kopelman/#mystory• Shaun Young on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunyou/• David Pierce at The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/authors/david-pierceAdditionally, Camille would love to shout out Nate Martins and Andrea Lim, who ran Notion's content program:• Nate Martins: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nate-martins/• Andrea Lim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawlim/Content and companies referenced:• Community & Content Resources: https://tinyurl.com/yrxbb542• Station F: https://stationf.co/• Figma: https://www.figma.com/• Canva: https://www.canva.com/• Stripe: https://stripe.com/• Stripe Atlas: https://stripe.com/atlas• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/• First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/• Jobs to be done framework: https://jobs-to-be-done.com/jobs-to-be-done-a-framework-for-customer-needs-c883cbf61c90• The Only App You Need for Work-Life Productivity: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-only-app-you-need-for-work-life-productivity-1521640800• Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/Referenced in lightning round:• Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It: https://www.amazon.com/Obviously-Awesome-Product-Positioning-Customers/dp/1999023005• April Dunford on Lenny's podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/april-dunford-on-product-positioning-segmentation-and-optimizing-your-sales-process/• April Dunford's guest post in Lenny's newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/positioning• Harry Stebbings's podcast, 20VC: https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/podcast/• Lenny on 20VC: https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/lenny-rachitsky/• Tár: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14444726/• Fleishman Is in Trouble: https://www.hulu.com/series/fleishman-is-in-trouble-710e51f8-3387-404d-8b07-e7c9b766d11c• Notion: https://www.notion.so/• Arc: https://arc.net/• Superhuman: https://superhuman.com/• Cron: https://cron.com/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Camille's background(05:43) What it was like working with Elon Musk(07:38) Working at Notion in the early days(12:16) What is community-led growth?(15:48) How Notion measured the impact of marketing efforts(16:35) The most successful community efforts at Notion(18:24) Why metrics aren't always necessary for community growth (19:52) When it makes sense to invest in community-led growth(21:34) How creators make money using Notion(23:12) The Ambassador Program and Champions Program at Notion(27:20) Why founders should consider investing in community and delay monetizing some features(31:03) Companies that have done well in building community(32:54) How to determine the level of community engagement appropriate for your company to invest in(34:00) Using Camille's 2x2 grid to implement community(36:42) How to launch an ambassador program(41:22) Advice for founders who want to build community(47:17) How Lenny got his first 500 newsletter subscribers(48:58) Examples of Camille's most impactful content marketing(51:20) Content-market fit: how to determine the needs of your reader (53:37) Content categories and the time it takes to create top-notch content(57:02) The future of comms and how the press helped Notion grow(1:01:35) Lightning round—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

For our 60th episode, we're doing things a little bit differently — with a new guest host! Welcome to Todd Jackson, who's filling in for Brett Berson this week. Todd is also a Partner at First Round, and the episodes he hosts will mostly focus on product, given his previous product roles, from the VP of Product & Design at Dropbox and Director of Product Management at Twitter, to being a PM at Facebook and Google, leading Newsfeed and Gmail. He was also a founder — his startup Cover was backed by First Round in 2013 and later acquired by Twitter. (For more on Todd and his advice for company building, check out his article in The First Round Review from a couple years ago.) Today, Todd chats with Jiaona Zhang, the VP of Product at Webflow. (She goes by JZ though, so you'll hear that throughout their conversation.) You might remember her popular Review article, Don't Serve Burnt Pizza (And Other Lessons in Building Minimum Lovable Products) Before joining Webflow, JZ was the Senior Director of Product Management at WeWork, a Product Lead at Airbnb, and a PM at Dropbox and at Pocket Gems, a mobile gaming company. JZ also teaches product at Stanford and mentors a lot of rising product leaders, so she's the perfect person to talk to about building a career in product. As the framework for the entire conversation, we start with why she doesn't think of it as a career ladder, but rather as three distinct phases: contributing as a PM, managing PMs, and then leading the function. Here's a preview of what Todd and JZ cover: The PM role. Advice on breaking into the function, what you should look for when you're a candidate interviewing for PM roles, and the mistakes that are easy to make early on. The managing phase, including how to think more strategically as you get more senior, archetypes to look for when hiring, and her advice for first-time managers.  The executive phase. JZ talks about thinking of your org as a product, and she shares super tactical pointers for working with your CEO, your peers on the exec team, and the board. Whether you're trying to break into product, grow in your career, or you're a founder looking for hiring advice, there's tons in this conversation for you. You can follow JZ on Twitter at @jiaonazhang. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @tjack.

Adam Milgrom grew up in a very entrepreneurial family and being the third generation of business builders, he always know that he would somehow be involved in selling stuff. However early he had an epiphany that he would only be successful if he was selling stuff that he really believed in and which would make the world a better place. Since then, he has been committed to combining his interest in technology with the desire for impact, being a serial angel investor and now partner of Giant Leap Australia's first 100% impact venture capital fund. Along with previous podcast guest Rachel Yang, Adam using his expertise across consumer marketing, ecommerce and innovation to invest in exceptional, rapidly scalable businesses that blend financial returns with deep social and environmental impact. Adam is generous with his time and incredibly consistent in his focus on creating value for others, so make sure you listen to the end of the interview where Adam shares a fabulously curated list of resources for founders and business builders. Links Hex – education startup, CEO Jeanette Cheah Humans of Purpose podcast with Mike Davis Brave New Work podcast First Round Review podcast and startup materials Venture Deals, book by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson Startup Funding, Australian directory of VC's

Today's episode is with Gagan Biyani, co-founder and CEO of Maven, a company that empowers the world's experts to offer cohort-based courses directly to their audience. After being early at 3 startups that achieved over $1 million in run-rate in their first six months of going live, Gagan has learned some valuable lessons and seen a wide range of outcomes — from Udemy going on to IPO in 2021, to Sprig shutting down in 2017. In our conversation, we dive deeper into the process of starting a startup. We start on generating ideas and open-ended exploration. We talk about key signals to look for in the market and the competition, as well as the mistakes he sees many aspiring founders make. Next, he recaps his concept of minimum viable tests for validating early versions of your idea. As we mention in the episode, Gagan wrote a popular article on The First Round Review last year, where he shared much more detail about his “Minimum Viable Testing Process.” Then, we dig into how you start bringing the idea to life, from exploring different potential business models, to selecting your co-founders and managing that relationship as the company grows. If you're eager to hear even more on finding startup ideas from Gagan, he's teaming up with The Hustle's Sam Parr to run an Ideation Bootcamp on the Maven platform — learn more and sign up here by May 2nd if you're interested. You can follow Gagan on Twitter at @gaganbiyani. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.

With us today is the co-founder and COO of Equip Health –  Dr. Erin Parks.  Erin and her co-founder – Kristina Saffron, have created a home-based program (a real departure from the very traditional facility-based programs) to help people recover from eating disorders.  Today we'll learn more about these devasting issues and how the Equip Health team is changing the treatment delivery and recovery in this area.   Show Notes:  Favorite Book:  Essentialism by GregMcKeown.  Podcasts:  The Essentialism Podcast; Work/Life with Adam Grant; Startup from Gimlet Media, In Depth from First Round Review.   Contact the team at Equip Health in one of the following ways: B: https://www.facebook.com/joinequip Twitter: @joinequip and @erinparksphd Instagram: @equiphealth and @drerinparks Linked In: @Equip (https://www.linkedin.com/company/equip-behavioral-health) and @erinparksphd

Pete Kazanjy (LinkedIn, Twitter) is a serial founder, and seasoned early stage Saas executive, advisor, and investor. Pete founded TalentBin, a category-defining talent search engine and recruiting CRM, which exited to Monster Worldwide in early 2014. Pete currently is the founder of Atrium, a proactive sales performance analysis solution, author of Founding Sales, the definitive Startup Sales Handbook, and founder of Modern Sales, the nation's largest sales operations, leadership, and enablement community. At TalentBin, Pete went from product and product marketing founder generalist, to first sales rep, first sales manager, first VP of Sales, all the way to leading new product sales for 600+ sales reps at Monster worldwide. After Monster, he wrote a book on startup sales for founders and other first-time sellers, Founding Sales, documenting all the mistakes he made along the way, and solutions to them, so future founders can accelerate their go to market acumen. Pete also founded and runs the canonical invite-only nationwide sales operations and management peer education community (Modern Sales), featuring 13,000+ members from a who's who of sales operations, enablement, management, and leadership from 5k+ leading sales organization's. Additionally, Pete is a well known expert in early stage go to market and “founder selling” - helping organizations figure out their early critical positioning and selling activities. He has done substantial speaking and writing on the topic, including being a frequent contributor to First Round Review and Saleshacker, and advises a number of enterprise software companies on establishing and optimizing their sales and success motions.  Most recently, Pete founded a stealth HR Technology company in the performance management category, seeking to bring data centricity to the world of performance instrumentation and management. Prior to TalentBin, Pete worked in product marketing and product at VMware, having graduated from Stanford in 2002. This Episode is brought to you with the support of Netsuite and Shopify.  --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/uncharted1/support

Today's episode is with Amber Feng, who is the co-founder and CTO of Cocoon, and was previously an engineering leader at Stripe for eight years. In today's conversation, we pull on threads from Amber's engineering career to weave together lessons for other engineers charting their own path. Although Amber's spent the majority of her career at Stripe, she's had all sorts of different experiences — from individual contributor, to engineering manager, to heading up entire orgs, and then back to individual contributor again. We begin by discussing the unexpected traits that differentiate the most high-achieving engineers up and down the org chart. We also get into the debate that most engineers face during their career — whether to hone your craft and become an expert IC, or go the management route. Amber's gone back and forth between the two, and shares the advice she gives to other folks who are considering where their strengths may be best leveraged. Finally, we turn the page to the most recent chapter in her career journey — becoming a first-time founder. She shares the lessons from Stripe's Patrick Collison that she's applying to her own company Cocoon and shares words of wisdom for other engineers with interest in starting their own company from 0 to 1. You can follow Amber on Twitter at @amfeng You can read the First Round Review article Amber mentioned with the co-founder questionnaire here: https://review.firstround.com/the-founder-dating-playbook-heres-the-process-i-used-to-find-my-co-founder You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson

Today's episode is with Meka Asonye, a Partner at First Round Capital. This week marks the one year anniversary since he joined, making the transition from seasoned GTM leader to full-time early-stage investor. Prior to First Round, Meka served as the VP of Sales & Services at Mixpanel, where he ran the more than 100-person global revenue team and owned the customer lifecycle from first website visit to renewal. Meka also spent four years at Stripe as it scaled from 250 to 2000 people and matured its sales org. When he first joined in 2016, he served as one of the payments company's early account executives, leading their first attempts to go upmarket and land enterprise logos. For the next three years, he headed up Stripe's Startup/SMB business. In today's conversation, Meka starts by digging into his playbook for founder-led sales, from what a great first customer conversation looks like, to how to self-diagnose what went wrong. He also shares advice for founders making their first hire, including the leveling mistake that's easy to make, and what to ask in the interview and in reference calls. He also offers thoughts on comp and the leading indicators to look for after onboarding. We then dig into structuring early pilots, from what makes for a good design partner, to how to make sure your ICP is well defined enough. We also cover helpful tactics for customer success, which Meka finds is often the most overlooked aspect of go-to-market. Throughout the conversation, we also touch on how Meka's experiences have translated into his first year as a VC. We end on his advice for startup folks looking to transition into venture. To read more of Meka's go-to-market advice for founders, check out his article in the First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/this-gtm-leader-turned-investor-crowdsources-early-lessons-from-stripe-figma-and-more  You can follow Meka on Twitter at @BigMekaStyle. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.

Today's episode is with Max Rhodes, the co-founder and CEO of Faire, an online wholesale marketplace that connects independent retailers and brands. Prior to starting Faire in 2017, Max spent several years at Square, where he was a founding member of Square Capital, the first product manager on Square Cash, and a Director of Consumer Product for Caviar. In today's conversation, we dive deep into how startups can get international expansion right. After launching in the U.K. and Netherlands in March 2021, Faire company expanded into countries like France, Germany, Italy and the Nordic region. They're now in 15 markets, with over 700 employees in 10 offices around the world.  After sharing the company's origin story and initial strategy, Max offers a helpful analogy that helped him decide when to go international, and details some lessons he learned from other companies like DoorDash and Airbnb. Next, Max takes us through the nuts and bolts of how the Faire team approached their first international launch, from staffing and operations, to how they thought about local competitors. Max also walks us through the operating cadence and strategic planning process that powered Faire's international growth. We also talk about the human side of scaling internationally, and the growing pains that come along with it.  To help mitigate the effects, Max shares how he's implemented the concepts from the First Round Review article on “Giving away your Legos.” Read the article here: https://review.firstround.com/give-away-your-legos-and-other-commandments-for-scaling-startups  You can follow Max on Twitter at @MaxRhodesOK. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.

Today's episode is with Arielle Jackson. For the past 7 years, she's helped hundreds of companies build their positioning and brands from the ground up, both as our Marketing Expert in Residence here at First Round and in her own consulting work. Before helping early-stage startups, Arielle started her career in Product Marketing at Google, where she helped launch and grow Google Books and AdWords before leading marketing for Gmail. She then joined Square, where she led the launch of the Square Stand. She then headed up marketing & communications at Cover, an Android app that was acquired by Twitter. Given that she's worked with so many companies, Arielle is a pro at spotting common patterns when it comes to early marketing, so today we spend our time digging into the challenges and missteps she's seen so many founders run into. From category creation and company purpose, to messaging, brand personality and launch strategy, Arielle details both common pitfalls to avoid and the exercises and frameworks that she shares with founders in her consulting work. Whether it's about not falling into the trap of focusing too much on other startup competitors, relying on emotional instead of functional benefits, or coming with unrealistic PR expectations, Arielle has tons of examples to bring these concepts to life.  If you are looking to learn more, Arielle has turned the brand strategy work she does at First Round into a cohort-based course, powered by Maven. The course runs in February and applications close on Jan 28th – find out more and apply here. Additionally, here are the resources we talked about in the episode Arielle's First Round Review articles: - Positioning Your Startup is Vital — Here's How to Nail It - ​​Three Moves Every Startup Founder Must Make to Build a Brand That Matters - So You Think You're Ready to Hire a Marketer? Read This First. The books on the subject that Arielle recommends: - Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind - Play Bigger: How Rebels and Innovators Create New Categories and Dominate Markets - Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life - Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions You can follow Arielle on Twitter at @hiiamArielle. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.

June 3rd, 2021: First Round Review; Second Round Preview by Twofiveandten

How has productivity app Doist acquired 25 million customers without tracking KPIs or using paid ads? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Doist Head of Marketing Brenna Loury shares the company's unusual growth story. An all remote company from its start, Doist has experienced steady growth as a result of a clear vision and mission, a product-led approach, and deep empathy for the customer. Today, the company is experiencing 100% year over year organic growth, has more than 50,000 email subscribers, and more than 25 million customers. Incredibly, it wasn't until the past year that they began measuring and tracking KPIs, looking at Google Analytics, or using paid ads. In this episode, Brenna breaks down the three things that are the secrets to Doist's growth. Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to hear what Brenna has to say. Resources from this episode: Visit the Doist website Follow Brenna on Twitter Connect with Brenna on LinkedIn Transcript Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Brenna Loury, who is the head of marketing at Doist. Welcome to the podcast Brenna. Brenna (00:24): Thank you so much for having me, Kathleen. I'm so excited. Honestly, I have been listening to your podcast all week in preparation and I can't wait to be here. It's such an honor. Thank you. Kathleen (00:35): I'm really excited to talk to you because I am a big fan in general of not always playing by the rules. And so quick preview. What we're going to talk about today is how you can not play by all the rules of marketing and still get great results. But before we do that Brenna, can you tell my audience a little bit about yourself and about Doist? Brenna (01:00): Sure, definitely. So I have been with Doist since pretty much the very beginning of the company. My background. I studied communication and business in college and for one reason or another ended up graduating and then going to live in Chile for a while. And I was working for the Chilean ministry of economy and a program called startup Chile as the head of communications and PR. And that's actually where I ended up meeting Amir who is the founder of Doist. He was participating in the program at the time. And then I left the ministry of economy to go start my own sort of boutique PR firm for tech startups in the Latin American scene. And Amir was one of my first clients with ToDoist. It was about 2012. And he was getting getting ready to launch the first versions of Todoist for iOS and Android. And I was helping on the PR side of things. So that's how I got involved with Doist and have worn a lot of different hats ever since. And yeah, I just, I started taking on more and more responsibilities and eventually became a full-time employee of Doist in 2014 and have been growing the marketing team ever since. Kathleen (02:32): And tell me more about what Doist is. Brenna (02:34): Yeah. So Doist well, we're, we're a fully remote productivity software company. We've been fully remote since day one. Today we're about a hundred people in, I think, I think over 35 countries at this point. And so we create tools that help people live more productive and healthier lives. And so our main as I mentioned before is called Todoist. It's a personal productivity app that has been on the market since about 2007. We have about 25 million users of Todoist these days. And in 2017 we launched Twist, which is a team communication app that we created out of our needs to communicate remotely. So yeah, those are our two products then we've been remote since the very beginning. So it's been kind of an interesting ride in the last year with COVID to see, you know, the whole world switching to remote and yeah, it's, it's been very interesting so far. Kathleen (03:40): Yeah. You guys were really ahead of the curve with with your remote team and and so I think it would be, I feel like we could do a whole nother podcast just on like what companies that are transitioning to remote should know. But but one fun fact for anyone listening, because obviously they cannot see you, but Brenna is literally going on maternity leave. Like what tomorrow? Brenna (04:10): So today is Wednesday and my last day is Friday and my due date is in two weeks from yesterday. Kathleen (04:18): So you are just on the cusp. Will this be your first? Brenna (04:21): My second. Yeah. So I'm trying to combat pregnancy brain at as much as I can. So I'm hope I'm coherent enough for everybody today. Kathleen (04:31): Oh, I think you're going to do just fine. And that's exciting. So congratulations. I remember the last few weeks they tend to go a lot slower than you want them to Brenna (04:42): Yeah. Counting down the minutes basically. Kathleen (04:44): Yeah. Yeah. Well, one, like I said, when we started out, the reason I was so excited to chat with you is that you guys have an unusual story. You've grown considerably, as you mentioned, you have a huge user base, you've introduced additional products. But you really have not followed the traditional marketing playbook. So I guess let's just start out by, by having you share, like what, what have you done for marketing and what do you credit to your success? Brenna (05:15): Yeah. I personally really love talking about our story with marketing because it has a lot of different aspects that I think today would kind of be impossible. So it's hard honestly, to make sort of a playbook out of it, but it is really fun to look back and see what worked for us back in the day, because like I mentioned so to Doist was created in 2007 by Amir. He posted the app while he was in college. And then a few years later, I think it was in 2011, he kind of started noticing that the app was taking off. People were starting to pay for it. So to be honest, we have been a profitable company from day one which is why we've never raised any VC funds. So that's another part of being against the status quo in our history. Brenna (06:16): But in terms of marketing, it has been a fascinating ride because we started out super small team and we are still a small team like today we're a hundred people and we manage two different software apps and three different brands. So we don't have like this crazy bandwidth that a lot of other larger companies have at their disposal. So when I started my expertise was in PR and for those of those people listening, like the PR landscape has changed dramatically. Like very, very much since I was working in this in 2012. So PR was a huge portion of our initial success, I think because we really invested a lot of resources in that. And by resources, I mean, like me writing out press releases, which today, like you can't even imagine, you know, writing a press release. Haven't done that in years, but so we started out with PR and a lot of journalists really engaged with Todoist and began writing about it organically, which I think contributed to a lot of our initial momentum. And from there, Kathleen (07:39): Sorry to interrupt you, but a question. In those early years, when you were working on the PR, you know, I I'm sure a lot of my listeners do PR. My take on it is that it's worth doing a press release if you genuinely have something newsworthy, like, you know, there are definitely things that happen that, that, that are easy to get coverage for because they're, they're big news. You know, that could be well and big news is all relative, but like that could be raising a S a substantive round of venture capital. Like what you said you did not do. It could be you know, integrating with another platform that's more well known. There, there are a lot of different things could be getting a huge client. What was it that you were doing your press releases on that, that enabled you to garner coverage? Brenna (08:29): Yeah, so I'm, I'm having a flashback right now of like the first few press releases that we wrote. And I think that the first big one was when we launched our first mobile apps and this was in November of 2012. So if you kind of like take a walk back, you know, at that time there weren't like a ton, the app ecosystem just is not what it is today. And so there were far fewer companies that had mobile apps especially for like the personal productivity space. So we were one of the first ones who actually created apps for both of these two platforms at the same time. And yeah, I'm trying to think back to the, to the other ones that we would, that we would write. It was always product based. We've always been a very like product led company. And a lot of, most of our marketing is, is led by the advances that we make in the product. Kathleen (09:37): Fair to say that the coverage was driven by news around innovation? Brenna (09:41): Yeah, definitely. I mean, we never had any press release that yeah, like you said before, we never raised any funds or we never had any like fancy people to our board. We don't have a board. So every press release we did was based around product news. But today, you know, I wouldn't even like almost dream of writing a press release for one of our product updates. Even when we do a massive product update, we don't do press releases anymore. But that's partly because we have close relationships with journalists and things are just very different these days, to be honest, like Product Hunt didn't exist back in the day. Kathleen (10:23): I just did a Product Hunt launch a week ago actually. And it's, it's true. It's interesting. Like we, we wound up number one product of the day and I did get lots of reporters reaching out to me. So it, it's funny how there are these other channels. Brenna (10:38): Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I mean, that worked really well for us and PR has, you know, it was a huge piece of the pie chart of our marketing, but today it's, it's considerably smaller to be honest. Kathleen (10:56): So I stopped you, you were talking about how back in the day you were doing press releases, you were getting press coverage and then you were going to kind of go onto something else. And so I want to, I want to go back to that. Brenna (11:06): Yeah. So I think a lot of, you know, one sort of fun anecdote about marketing and Doist is, you know, this is the year 2021, and it was only in 2020 that we began like barely dipping our feet in paid advertising. So, you know, from when I started working on marketing at Doist in 2012, until 2020, we never spent a cent on paid advertising. All of the other marketing campaigns were really focused on like creating a community around our existing users like announcing these big product updates to tech blogs and things like that. And for us, that was, it worked really well. Like we have grown organically and never invested anything into paid ads. And I'm, I'm looking forward to talking more about like, you know, how we how our mindset around empathy for the user and, you know, putting ourselves in their shoes has helped us grow in this like very unconventional way. Kathleen (12:18): Let's dig into that because you and I talked about that a little bit when we first met, and I think this is something that I, that I find really interesting because there, a lot of people talk about authenticity and empathy and things like that, but, but there's no handbook for it and you kind of can't fake it, you know? So, so let's break down. What do you mean when you say empathy for the user and, and describe to me how that plays out in your marketing? Brenna (12:44): Definitely. So it's, it's, it's really interesting because we have these two different brands, right? So we have these two pretty separate apps. So Todoist and Twist. For Todoist in particular, what we've learned along the way is that people tend to download like this, you know, task management productivity app in kind of times of like personal crisis, to be honest, you know, if, if or not necessarily crisis, but like, you know, something big is happening in somebody's life. You know, they're getting married or starting a new job, or you know starting a new semester at school and they really need a way to get themselves organized. So there's this kind of driver that leads people to, to sign up for the app and really putting yourself in their shoes and understanding what they're going through in that moment has been, has been key for us. Brenna (13:38): And it's similar with our other app called Twist because it's also this sort of like light bulb moment that people have for those who are listening that don't know, Twist is a team communication app. That's based like very heavily around asynchronous communication. It's very much like an anti Slack, anti Microsoft teams tool that allows people to disconnect and spend, you know, a couple of hours working on what they need to work on without getting distracted. And so, you know, when people start searching for this app, it's clear that like something in their workflow or in their teamwork is not working and trying to meet those people at that sort of moment of that light bulb moment or that moment of crisis and providing them the education and the resources that they need to kind of come to this conclusion a little bit sooner and get onboarded into our products. I think has been yeah, pretty beneficial for us. Kathleen (14:41): So how does that play out in your marketing? Like, I would love it if you could share some examples of say, you mentioned the example, for example, of somebody who who's going to college and they need to get, or getting married and they need to get organized. How do you, how do you weave that into your marketing strategy? Brenna (14:58): Yeah, so we have a big portion of our marketing is content marketing. We have a blog that I am very proud of. My team is very exceptional. So we create a lot of content that is very in depth and like very comprehensive in terms of like creating a guide for students, for example, or, you know, for Todoist in particular, we have like a bank of templates, you know, if somebody is starting a new semester in school, like how can you organize your tasks to make the most out of your education, for example. So we do work pretty heavily with like we're really into SEO, sorry, I'm having like a brain of disfunction there. Like SEO is very important for us. We have increased the organic traffic to our blog, like a hundred percent compared to like 2020 compared to 2019. So that's great. Just really giving people the resources that they need to like have this light bulb moment and then take action on it as best as they can. Kathleen (16:17): So to that point, and this is sort of interesting, like we have a lot of content marketers that listen and they get basic SEO, but but the debate I hear a lot is around like how top of funnel do you go? And so I'm curious, we'll use the example of the person who's getting married. Are you publishing content around how to get organized for getting married or is it other topics around getting married? Like what does that strategy look like? Brenna (16:47): Yeah. So if we're going to use that example it would be something like the keyword would be, you know, wedding checklist or wedding checklist template, something like that. And then we would create content around, like, you know, this to-do is template that you can import into your own to do is and probably, you know, interview some productivity specialists that may be active in the, you know, wedding planning space, who knows. But we, we are pretty particular around like the breakdown of our content attacking like the different stages of the funnel, because we do have a lot of active users of our apps that, you know, want to know what's going on and what is the latest news product updates and to do list. And then also kind of like killing two birds with one stone, I guess, in terms of finding people who are exploring these topics and, and might need a tool to, to them. Kathleen (17:50): So when you say you're particular about how you break down, I guess I would characterize it as like the customer journey or the steps in the funnel. How, what do you mean by that? Brenna (18:01): Yeah, so we have different sort of categories of content on our blogs. So for example, a post that we published recently was around how to plan your day. So the keyword there is, you know, I think just planning your day basically. So that's anybody who is looking for some guidance on like how to deal with the work that they have to manage. So that will be the top of funnel, obviously like anybody who's Googling, you know, how, how do I plan my day? And then in the middle, we'll have content that is, you know, more related to our products, maybe some news about like new integration partners or things like that. And then at the bottom of the funnel, we do we do regular product updates as with these like what's new campaigns. So we'll gather, you know, two or three months of product updates and package them into a campaign called, like what's new in Todoist, or what's new in Twist, where all of our existing users can go in and read about what we've been up to and what's new in our apps. Kathleen (19:08): So is that all on the one blog or do you have separate blogs for your like educational content versus your product content? Brenna (19:15): Yeah. This is a fun question we really grappled with for a while, at the very beginning, we had separate blogs and ultimately we ended up bringing those under one umbrella under our Doist brand. So it's just you know, the newest blog and that encompasses all of our, you know, everything basically. But we do have separate sites. For example, we have a compilation of like productivity guides and a productivity quiz for Todoist users and that lives on its own site. And we also have a set of guides for remote working and that lives on the Twist domain, but everything else, yeah, it's under the Doist umbrella. And that was honestly like a really, really hard decision to make back in the day. Because the audiences are, you know, while we create productivity software, like the audiences, not aren't necessarily like seeking the same content at the same time. And then we have this other audience on top of that, that is looking for content related to like thought leadership around remote work. So it's, it's kind of a lot of puzzle pieces to fit together and doing that well is yeah, it's, it takes a lot of thought actually. Kathleen (20:34): So I really want to pick your brain on this selfishly, because I'm in the same boat, I worked for a company that has two products that loosely fall under the umbrella of digital engagement security, but they are very different products for very different audiences. And so, and I'm sure there are people listening that have this situation too. I'm I'm curious, I guess first, why did you decide to put it all together? Brenna (20:56): Yeah. it's, it was a tough decision. Like we deliberated about it for a long time. And even to this day, I think there are some times where we're like, Oh, should we have done that? You know, would these things live better in their own domains? But at the end of the day, like we use our dual brand umbrella to kind of guide everything that we do. So that means like do us as a company, we are really like, our mission is to help people live more productive, calm, fulfilling lives. And part of that is, you know, the way you work part of that is the way that you manage your day, you manage your time. And so these things kind of like loosely fallen together. And our reasoning was that like, you know, if somebody is interested in being more productive in their day and they're a Todoist user, like what's to stop them from being interested in content that will help them be more productive in terms of teamwork as well. So it was really driven by our company's mission and our vision for the future that we ourselves want to work in. So I think your brand, like the parent brand really dictates, like if those should, should live together or separately, Kathleen (22:18): That makes sense. And how do you functionally manage creating blog content and also I'm assuming you have some email marketing thrown in there, like how do you manage all that in a way that you don't leave, like part of your audience feeling alienated or, or how do you prevent unsubscribes too? Because that's always a worry if you're creating content for lots of different audiences at different times in their lives, it's very hard to solve for everyone all at the same time. Brenna (22:49): Yeah, that is very, very true. We have a very talented content team. I have to give all the credit to them to be honest. They're just very thoughtful about this and methodical about how we package our content together to make it as appealing as possible. And in terms of email marketing with our blog like not taking into account the email marketing that we have for our different products, but just for our blog. For example, we only send one newsletter a week, so we're not sending people a newsletter every time we publish a new blog post, because we figured if we did that, then that would be kind of spammy. Like, you know, if I'm a Todoist user and I'm receiving like a an email about a new Twist feature, like what, I don't know, it just, it doesn't compute. Brenna (23:48): So that's why we decided to package all of those into just one single weekly newsletter. And the way that our team does that is like finding a common theme and then kind of like cherry picking the different content from our products, thought leadership and packaging that together in a way that is coherent and doesn't necessarily feel like, okay, look, here's this section about Todoist. Here's a section about Twist. Here's a section about remote work. It takes like a lot more thought than just, you know, going post by post. And I think that has worked well for us, our newsletter blog newsletter list just crossed, I think the 50,000 subscriber milestones. So that was exciting for us. And yeah, I think it's working and you send it out every week, every week. Yeah. And, and that's new. We had just sent it out every two weeks, but you know, our content team is kind of on a roll these days. Brenna (24:55): And so we figured it we could, we could bump the cadence and I guess that is sort of another component of our unconventional marketing. Like we are really entrenched in the mentality of like, not spamming our users. Like we don't send people push notifications. We only were like very, very mindful about the communications that we send out to our users and you know, try not to bother them during their day because we know that they're busy and I have a lot of stuff going on and they don't need to be reminded that, you know, Todoist or Twist exists all the time. So that has something that has just been ingrained into all of our brains on the marketing team. And I think it's, it's different because a lot of other companies don't operate, operate that way. And a lot of the marketing playbooks, like, I don't think take that into account. Kathleen (25:55): Yeah, yeah, yeah. You definitely have to be careful. So you're, it sounds like you're investing a lot of time and effort into content. You mentioned that, that that's a big focus for you. How are you getting your content out in front of your audience beyond, you know, organic search? Brenna (26:13): That's a great question. And honestly, I think that's something that we could do better. It's the content that we have on our blog is really top-notch. And I think, you know, the, the increase in organic traffic speaks for itself, and that has been really gratifying to see, but at the same time like we also have never experienced with like, or never experimented with running ads based on our content or doing performance marketing with our content. At this point it's pretty much just our, like the email newsletter that I had mentioned are on our social media channels. And then also we do kind of pepper in our, our content into the, like the product email life cycle as well. So we try and find useful places where our content would fit like in the user life cycle and include it there, but it's a challenge for us. Like our team is very small. We only have two people who work on content full-time and they're writers and editors and, you know, coordinators at the content calendar doing a little bit of everything there, right. The newsletter. And it's, it's honestly hard to find the bandwidth to like, explore all these other different channels. But that is definitely on our radar for this year. Kathleen (27:39): And, and what percentage of your marketing effort goes towards acquiring new customers versus marketing to the customers you already have? Brenna (27:50): Yeah, that's, that's a great question. Honestly we focus most of our marketing on our existing users because Todoist, for example, has grown essentially organically since day one. Twist is a little bit of a different story that has been more of an uphill battle. But because we haven't had to kind of focus on filling the funnel for new users. We've tried really hard to like aim most of our marketing efforts at people who are already using our product. Kathleen (28:29): Do you have any referral campaigns? Like where, where do most of your new customers come in from? Are they just finding you in the app store? Brenna (28:37): Especially before people find us in the app store, we have like many thousands of downloads a day, so it's, we're almost like we don't want to fill the funnel anymore. We have this like very strange problem of like, we have a lot of downloads and new users and trying to figure out how to best onboard them and everything is, is a challenge for us, for sure. So yeah, a lot of our, our users come just from the web, from the Apple app store, Google play, and then for Twist it's a lot more word of mouth and people find us a lot more frequently through our content marketing because it's, yeah, it's a very different user journey that people have to go through. So they're both very different, like you know, marketing to us is, it's somewhat of a challenge because the journeys for the products are so different. And they require like very, very different tactics. And I think it's interesting. Kathleen (29:42): That you're in the app stores because I mean, I, I have not done any marketing for an app before. And my understanding is that it is very much its own beast. I would imagine that getting reviews is a big piece of that. And so can you talk a little bit about any efforts you've put into increasing your visibility in the app store? Brenna (30:00): Yeah, definitely. So we have experimented with that more frequently in the last few years before we would just kind of like, you know, throw our screenshots up and have our app description and not do too much about it. Like we didn't have any prompts in our apps, like asking users to, to write reviews. But we do now. And that has been very useful for us to find like this very specific moment in the user journey to ask people to give that feedback. Definitely a trial and error process. But yeah, having the reviews is, is key. And then we also do spend a lot of time on the screenshots and graphics themselves making those look beautiful and it's a science in itself of like, you know, how many characters and, you know, what should, what should be on the, on the screenshot and how much does the app to show. And it's kind of a science and we have started experimenting with Apple search ads. So that's new for us this year as well. And it's going pretty well, but yeah, the app stores are our huge source of new users for us. Kathleen (31:23): Now, so, so recap for me your results, because I feel like that's what makes the story so interesting. You talked about a hundred percent year over year traffic growth, I think it was from your content. Are there other results in the, in the form of like user acquisition or any other growth metrics that would be good to add to that? Brenna (31:44): Yeah. I mean to date, I, yeah, we have had like over 25 million people sign up for Todoist. So that has been exciting. Like one really cool marketing campaign that always sticks with me that we did was in 2016, I believe. And that's when our users crossed the 1 billion completed tasks threshold. So that was a really exciting moment. And we created a really special marketing campaign around that, like asking our users, what is the most important thing that Todoist has helped you achieve in your life? And the answers we got were just like, so mind blowing and emotional and really touching to be honest. And, and that it has all been done like organically, to be honest. So, and we're also very much an anomaly in that we don't track our data or ROI of marketing really at all. Brenna (32:52): We've never really had to, until we started investing money in ads this year. So we've never really been a data-driven company. Like a lot of the work that we've done has been based on our gut feeling and you know, how we want our users to interact with our apps and like our hopes and dreams that we have for them in terms of like living a more productive, fulfilling life. So I guess that is another, another weird aspect of working at Doist is like, we, we just, last year, I think started like looking at Google analytics and things like that. So I don't know, like not a lot. I worry that people can't take much out of this this playbook because it is so unconventional and different than like a regular startup. Kathleen (33:47): But there's some really important lessons here. And as I listened to you talk, I think there's like three that really stand out to me. And this is a very strong illustration of how you can, you know, follow the classic marketing playbook and still not see results, or you can not follow the classic marketing playbook as you did and see great results. And so the three things that stand out to me are number one, a very clear why, like you said earlier on that you have this really clear vision of the world that you want to live and work in, and that you, and you want to share that with your users and you want to attract the people that, that share that feeling. And so I feel like defining that sort of vision, mission, and values, and being really clear about it and, and putting some emotion behind it is something that every marketer really, really needs to start with, because that makes everything else that much easier. Brenna (34:46): Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you totally hit the nail on the head, Kathleen like everything that we do at Doist, like any marketing initiatives that we do, we have this like a campaign brief and at the top of the campaign brief, it's always like a section that starts out with why, why is this great for the user? Why is this going to improve their life? And that goes from like even the biggest marketing projects we have to like the smallest sort of like release announcements that we do. So that is huge for us. And I think it's a huge like kudos to our founder, Amir. He has been very clear about that since day one. And so again, like I had mentioned this phrase before, but like, this is just embedded in our DNA. Everything we do starts with why and everything we do is formulated under this umbrella of like, what is the future that we want to live and work in and how can we like fast track this future for more people as well? Kathleen (35:51): I love that. And that comes through very clearly when we hear you talk. I would say the second thing that jumps out at me is you talked about being a product led company, and I've always said, and I strongly believe that the best marketing in the world cannot make up for a poor product. Right. And so having a focus on the product first and letting the product honestly do the work for you, having a great product, focusing on continuing to improve it, continuing to add functionality that solves for the needs of your users. Like that's big, and that's not just a marketing thing, that's a company thing. And, and I would say the vision mission values as a company thing too. Brenna (36:27): Definitely. Yeah. And in terms of the product, I think there are a few other takeaways that I could mention that might be useful for people. Like one other sort of unconventional thing that we have done is like, we always translated all of our apps into, I think, like almost 20 different languages. So all of our apps, all of our help center content, all of our lifecycle marketing. Part of our company's DNA is being like a, a global company. Like I said, we've been remote from day one. Our, our team is spread out all across the world. And so we are really passionate about like providing products for users in the language that they speak. So that has been one really important driver of growth, I think for us. And then just in terms of like always trying to like innovate and not rest on your laurels, like, you know, a lot of our competitors in the productivity space have been acquired and or, you know, kind of fallen off the wayside. Like everybody knows that like the, you know, the to-do list app space is very extensive. But just continuing to kind of like keep our heads down, focus on like what we want to see out of the app and not looking at competitors has, has worked out really well for us. Kathleen (37:54): That the third thing that to me jumped out of this conversation was this sort of like obsessive focus on the customer and the journey that they're on and you referred to it as empathy for the customer. And, and to me, that, and how that plays out in terms of solving for the needs of the customer through content. Like those two seem very married together, having deep empathy for the customer and then creating content that solves for them. I feel like when you add these three things together, the clear vision and why, the product led approach, and then the deep empathy for the customer, how that translates into a content driven approach. Like you have basically thrown out all the rest of the marketing rulebooks, but you did those three things really well and it allowed you to not do the others. Kathleen (38:47): Like, honestly, that's where your success sounds like it came from. And I love that because the three, those three things are things that transcend trends. It's, they transcend technology and it transcends tactics. So like a lot of marketers get caught up in what's the latest, you know, Google algorithm or what's happening with Facebook ads and what's, what's, you know, clubhouses new, should I be on that? And all of those things are like channel changes and tactics and technology changes. But if you stay true to the three core things we talked about, which are timeless and marketing, then none of the rest of it really matters, it seems to me. Brenna (39:28): Yeah. I mean, for sure, like our brand you know, since I started at Doist, like, we have been kind of like maniacally protective of our brand. And in fact, I was listening to your podcast earlier today with Nandini Jammi about like the you know, not letting your company's ads run on these like not great websites. And that for us has been like a really great North star ever since beginning. And that allows us, like knowing what we want out of our brand. And like knowing that the products that we create, you know, we want people to be more productive. So for us, that's like, okay, well, productivity probably doesn't mean that like, people are going to be on Facebook all day. So what's the point of like running ads, because that's essentially against like everything that we're going for. So for us, that has been kind of essential in our process of elimination in terms of marketing tactics. Kathleen (40:34): I love that. I love this whole story. You know, we're going to run out of time, so we've got to change gears now. And I have two questions for you that I ask all of my guests, which you've probably heard since you've been listening. First one being, of course, we talk a lot about inbound marketing on the podcast. So is there a particular company or individual that you think is doing really amazing inbound marketing work? Brenna (40:57): Yeah, so besides my team, because I am so proud of them, everything that they do I guess my best example, these days would be Peloton. I know it's like such a hot topic. These, you know, with the COVID and, you know, people ordering bikes and stuff, it's like very trendy these days, but coming on the heels of what you just mentioned, like, I don't notice that many brands that do like this Y based marketing as well as Peloton, like as a user. I really appreciate the communication that they have with us. And I feel like it's very authentic. Like there, I find one of the few brands that walk the walk and talk the talk. Like if they say that they are investing in diversity, like you can really tell that they're investing in diversity. And they have just done like this insane job of like building a community around the product. And getting people like super hyped up into like all of the different offerings that they have. I appreciate us as a user. They like do beta testing and invitations that make you feel like you're part of the product roadmap. But more importantly, I feel like it's a brand that I just, I really appreciate their authenticity and their dedication to like putting their money where their mouth is. Kathleen (42:31): Well, I too am a Peloton user. And so you can ride with me at kathslat, if anybody wants to join. I'm usually on it every morning from what is it, like 5:45 to 6:30 AM? Otherwise it doesn't happen, but no, I totally agree with you. And in fact, I posted something on LinkedIn recently about how they're like a marketing masterclass, because it's community, it's gamification, it's the personal brands of their instructors that they've, they've led with. The instructor brands which I think is really smart because people like to glom onto people. There's so much to the Peloton model that I, I totally agree with you. Brenna (43:13): Yeah. It's kind of like a never ending story I would love to read. If somebody would be interested in writing like a book on Peloton marketing, I would totally buy that. Kathleen (43:22): Yes. As would I. All right. Other question, marketing changes really quickly. How do you keep up to date and stay educated? Brenna (43:32): Yeah, I actually like every Wednesday, I block off a time in my calendar for learning. So this is very important for me. It's very important. Like part of our team ethos at Doist is to maintain like your professional acumen. So there are a few sites that I regularly peruse on my Wednesdays on my learning Wednesdays. One is the blog that Open View Partners writes. So they're, they're kind of experts in product led growth. So they tend to have pretty good content about that. Reforge, which they focus on growth marketing, Brian Balfour. He's really good. Yeah. Marketing examples. Awesome. Just like really bite sized marketing content that's super actionable. First Round Review, which is another VC fund that has a really fantastic blog. And then anything by your previous guests, April Dunford, who I'm like, I think I've read her book like two or three times. So I'm a big fan of hers, but honestly, when I was thinking of this question, I do feel like I struggled to find like really well done content about marketing that is big picture and like, not necessarily focused on like the minutia of marketing. Like I would really love to read more content. That's like bigger picture branding, positioning, product marketing. And I, I find that it's challenging to find that these days, to be honest. Kathleen (45:18): Yeah, there, and there is a sea of marketing content. There's so much of it. And so we didn't have to find the gems is tough, which is why I'm asking this question and, you know, hearing what other people have, have zeroed in on in terms of the needle in the haystack. Brenna (45:34): Yeah, it's, it's, it's a challenge. Like there's a lot to sift through. So if anybody wants to share me their gems, you can find me on Twitter at BrennaKL. And I would definitely like to read some new content these days. Kathleen (45:48): You know, it's funny, I should put together an article with all of the answers to this question that I've gotten from different people and share it out because it is a huge challenge. So thank you for sharing your sources. You just mentioned one way people can find you that is on Twitter. Any other particular ways people should reach out and connect with you online, or how can they learn more about Doist? Brenna (46:11): Yeah. So Twitter is the best place for me. For the time being I will be completely disconnecting from work as of this Friday, but otherwise you can learn about Doist, Todoist, and Twist at Doist.com. And yeah. Thank you again, Kathleen, for having me on it was a real pleasure. Kathleen (46:35): This was a lot of fun. Thank you for sharing your story. And, and if you're listening and you learned something new or enjoyed this episode, of course, I would love it if you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast a review. And if you know somebody who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, please tweet me at @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Brenna. Brenna (47:00): Thank you for having me.

Today’s conversation is with Elliot Shmukler, founder and CEO of Anomalo, which is a platform that validates and documents all of your data. Elliot founded Anomalo after a storied career as a product and growth leader at some of the most interesting companies around. Most recently, he was Instacart’s Chief Growth Officer, driving fast and profitable growth and geographic expansion. His jam-packed resume also includes stops at Wealthfront as the VP of Product and Growth and as a product leader at LinkedIn and eBay.    In today’s conversation, we pull on threads from his newest role as a founder of a startup going from zero to one, including his biggest surprises in the transition from executive to CEO. We also touch on how he prioritizes his time at a startup still in the earliest stages of company-building, and how to avoid wasting your time on prospects that are not all that interested in actually buying.    Next, we turn our attention to his history of picking incredible companies to work for — from the questions he asks as a candidate to the decision-making frameworks he borrows from his poker playing. Finally, we end with his biggest lessons from the best CEOs he’s worked with, including habits that set the best communicators apart from the pack, and the tactics for keeping office politics at bay so the best ideas are able to surface.    All sorts of folks will find something worthwhile in today’s conversation — whether you’re a founder still in the early phases of customer discovery, an executive with long-term goals to start your own company, or someone earlier in their career that wants to get better at spotting the next unicorn.    You can follow Elliot on Twitter at @eshmu.   You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson   To learn more about how Elliot uses A/B testing as a management framework, check out this article on First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/how-a-b-testing-at-linkedin-wealthfront-and-ebay-made-me-a-better-manager   And check out “The Goal,” which Elliot cited as the most influential management book he’s ever read: https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0884271951

Today’s episode is with Marco Zappacosta, co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack. He’s spent the last 13 years building the company into a billion-dollar business  — and it’s his first and only job after graduating college.   In today’s conversation, Marco dives into the company milestones that require a return to first principles versus pulling from a tested playbook, and the mental models he leans on when parsing through the mountains of advice he gets as a first-time founder and CEO. He connects these dots to how he manages Thumbtack’s board so those quarterly meetings are a critical resource, not just a time suck — and why he shares the board deck with the entire company.   He also candidly reflects on Thumbtack’s COVID-related layoff last year, and what he specifically did as CEO to make sure the folks that remained still had confidence in the company and his leadership moving forward.    Finally, he opens up his playbook for choosing what to spend his time on as a busy CEO with only so many hours in the day — and perhaps more importantly, how he stays accountable for these priorities.   Today’s conversation is a must-listen for company-builders across all industries and growth stages, as well as folks that have hopes to someday occupy these same seats.    To learn more about how Marco and Thumbtack approach executive hiring, check out the article on First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/assembling-an-executive-leadership-team-is-daunting-let-thumbtacks-ceo-help   You can follow Marco on Twitter at @mlz.   You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson 

Today’s episode is with Russ Laraway. After starting out in the Marine Corps, Russ made his way into the world of startups, joining Google in 2005 where he led teams for 7 years and was recognized as one of the company’s best managers. Russ then went to Twitter, where he founded and ran the SMB advertising business. Afterwards, he teamed up with Kim Scott to co-found Candor, Inc to help people implement the concepts from Radical Candor and have better relationships at work.    In 2018, he joined Qualtrics as the Chief People Officer, a position he stepped away from this past January to focus on helping the company’s customers think differently about employee experience. Russ also has a book on this topic coming out soon — and we can’t wait to read it.   In today’s conversation, we dig into how startups can drive employee engagement and develop high-quality managers. Russ reaches across his career to serve up some incredible wisdom, whether you’re a first-time manager or a seasoned leader.   He starts by sharing his direction-coaching-career framework, along with his thoughts on where companies go wrong on OKRs. He also gets really tactical, sharing the typical phrases he relies on when delivering feedback, his go-to questions for soliciting what folks on his team really think, and underrated questions to include in employment engagement surveys. Finally, Russ gives us 13 recommendations for leadership reads for managers.   For more of his thinking on talent development, we recommend reading his article from a few years ago in the First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/three-powerful-conversations-managers-must-have-to-develop-their-people    You can follow Russ on Twitter at @ral1 and you can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @twitter.com/firstround and @twitter.com/brettberson 

In this episode we speak to Chloe Lipp Wellman, a thought leader in corporate wellbeing and the Associate Director of Wellbeing, Culture and Transformation at Sprinklr, about the pandemic’s impact on mothers, gender equality and mental health, and how the best companies create a culture that supports wellbeing. Chloe also shares her view on the relationship between inclusion and wellbeing, including the mental toll of covering or code-switching.    Deloitte’s report on covering which reveals that 45% of straight white men cover (oops, not 55% as Fiona stated on the show!): https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/about-deloitte/us-about-deloitte-uncovering-talent-a-new-model-of-inclusion.pdf    First Round Review article - Jessmina Archbold on why self-care is more about boundaries than bubble baths: https://review.firstround.com/making-self-care-tactical-why-you-should-focus-on-boundaries-not-just-bubble-baths    Connect with Chloe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chloelipp    Check out Chloe’s consulting business: https://www.chloelippwellman.com/ 

 In this interview Alex Pinter talks about how brands can win in the digital age! In building his two companies, playersvote and trayn he knew that only with a good branding strategy he can win his target customers' hearts! He provides insights about how he did it!

Today’s episode is with Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Twilio. He’s spent the last 13 years building and running the company, including leading through a successful IPO in 2016.    In today’s conversation, Jeff looks back on some of the peaks and valleys in Twilio’s journey, and his own evolution as the CEO. He dives into some of the initial wins, like going against conventional wisdom to launch a second product in the early days of Twilio. He’s equally game to unpack some of the mistakes along Twilio’s path — like when one of their biggest customers, Uber, significantly scaled back their investment in Twilio’s products.    Jeff also opens up the pages from the playbook he pulled from his time at Amazon, chiefly Twilio’s “write it down” company value, and makes his case for why PowerPoint is a terrible decision-making tool. He takes us inside Twilio’s C-suite, including why they do post-mortems when things go right — not just when they go wrong. He also sketches out his “aha” moment that his executive team needed to argue more.    Today’s conversation is a must-listen for company-builders across all industries and growth stages, as well as folks that have hopes to someday occupy these same seats.    Jeff’s new book is titled “Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century.” https://www.amazon.com/Ask-Your-Developer-Software-Developers/dp/0063018292   To learn more about how Twilio approaches company values, check out this article on First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/draw-the-owl-and-other-company-values-you-didnt-know-you-should-have   You can follow Jeff on Twitter at @jeffiel.   You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @twitter.com/firstround and @twitter.com/brettberson 

Today’s episode is with Kevin Fishner, Chief of Staff at HashiCorp. As the first business hire at the cloud infrastructure automation company, he previously built out the sales, marketing and product management teams. Now as chief of staff, he’s focused on building a strong foundation of company-wide systems, now that the team has grown to over 1000 people. In today’s conversation, Kevin shares a detailed look at how they run meetings, set and track progress toward goals, and make decisions through writing at HashiCorp.  He also shares incredibly tactical advice for making annual planning more effective, including the unique business simulation they run, their scorecard system, and the weekly and quarterly meetings that help them stay focused on important KPIs. While today’s episode is clearly a must-listen for fellow chiefs of staff and founders spinning up a company from scratch, managers and leaders of all kinds will walk away with several takeaways on how to make their teams more effective. Because so much of what he shared is so detailed, we’ll be sharing some templates and visuals to go along with Kevin’s interview over on the First Round Review, so be sure to check that out.  You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @twitter.com/firstround and @twitter.com/brettberson 

Today’s episode is with David Lieb, the Director of Google Photos. Previously, he was the founder/CEO of Bump, an app that allowed users to swap contact information by physically bumping phones. Bump was acquired by Google in 2013, and formed the basis for the design of Google Photos, which launched in 2015 and passed the 1 billion users mark in 2019. In today’s conversation, David takes us through that journey of building a consumer product from scratch and scaling it to over a billion users in just four years. He shares the mistakes they made while building Bump, what he learned from navigating big company politics at Google, and how they pinpointed the problem in the photo-sharing space. From the precise questions they asked in user interviews, to how they stack ranked for the canonical users, there’s tons of wisdom in here for early product builders. There’s also lessons from operating at Google’s scale as well, including how his approach to planning and org design have evolved. Learn more about the Spotify “squads’ model that David mentioned in the org design section here: https://medium.com/pm101/spotify-squad-framework-part-i-8f74bcfcd761    You can follow David on Twitter at @dflieb, and you can learn more about his approach to building products on First Round Review: https://firstround.com/review/cognitive-overhead-is-your-products-overlord-topple-it-with-these-tips/    You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @twitter.com/firstround and @twitter.com/brettberson 

Today’s episode is with Anne Raimondi, Chief Customer Officer at Guru, and independent board member at Asana, Gusto and Patreon. Previously, she was part of the founding team at Blue Nile, spent five years in product marketing at eBay, and led marketing as an early employee at SurveyMonkey, before pivoting to operations as an SVP at Zendesk.  In today’s conversation, Anne pulls on threads from across her impressive career as a founder, operator, executive and board member to deliver spot-on advice for folks with an eye for the C-suite. From what enables the best executives to scale up, to how she’s approached her own 30, 60, 90-day plans as a brand-new hire — she doles out plenty of prescriptions for getting this critical transition right and avoiding common traps. She also opens up her playbook for approaching executive recruiting, interviewing and hiring, and when to mine executive talent internally rather than defaulting to external hires. Finally, she opens up about her board work, sharing the essential ingredients for productive, impactful boards across every growth stage.  Today’s conversation is a must-listen for executives, founders and board members looking to level up their leadership frameworks — and for folks who someday hope to step into these same shoes. You can follow Anne on Twitter at @anneraimondi and you can learn more about her approach to diagnosing and repairing team trust on First Round Review: https://firstround.com/review/use-this-equation-to-determine-diagnose-and-repair-trust/ You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @twitter.com/firstround and @twitter.com/brettberson 

Today’s episode is with Dave Girouard, the CEO and co-founder of Upstart, an AI-powered lending platform that recently went public. Before founding Upstart, Dave was President of Google Enterprise, and spent 8 years building Google's billion dollar cloud apps business. Here at First Round, we first came to know Dave when we invested in Upstart’s seed round back in 2012, and we’ve found him to be one of the most tenacious and focused founders we’ve ever backed. In today’s conversation, Dave gives us an inside look at how the business was built and what other startups can learn from its early days. In addition to unpacking the initial idea and subsequent business model pivot, Dave gets into what it felt like flying under the radar of Silicon Valley, why he “sucked at fundraising,” and how he and his co-founders have stuck together for almost a decade.  From his “Are you Airbnb or Paypal?” test and why you should look at your career in landscape mode, to the three mental models he leans on to manage his psychology as a founder, Dave shares helpful frameworks that any startup leader can learn from. We also dive into his “management by exception” philosophy, what he learned from Google, how he runs his leadership team, and why he leans on references, not interviews, when hiring execs.   You can follow Dave on Twitter at @davegirouard and you can read his First Round Review articles that we mentioned in the episode here:  https://firstround.com/review/speed-as-a-habit/  https://firstround.com/review/how-does-your-leadership-team-rate/  https://firstround.com/review/a-founders-guide-to-writing-well/    You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @twitter.com/firstround and @twitter.com/brettberson 

Public relations is an art. And incorporating a PR strategy into your blog can be tough to do. You want to make sure your news & announcement-related blog posts are still adding value to your readers.  In this 9-minute audio version of our blog post, “How to Use Your Company Blog for PR & News (the Right Way),” Amanda Natividad, Head of Marketing for Growth Machine, shows you how. Show Notes: 1:35 - How to know: press release or blog post? 4:23 - How company news should fit within your content strategy  6:00 - How to write that news-y blog post Links: How to Use Your Company Blog for PR & News (the Right Way) How to Get Executive Buy-in for Content Marketing (0:06) PR Newswire (0:36) Business Wire (0:37) 4 Signs You’re Ready for Link Building (1:06) First Round Review (5:06) Zendesk’s Blog (5:24) Ahrefs' Red-highlighted Boxes (8:32) Charts of Glycemic Responses (8:41) Growth Machine on Twitter (9:26) Contact Growth Machine (9:31) Find us on Twitter: Amanda: @amandanat Growth Machine: @growthmachine__

Our third episode is with Steve El-Hage, Founder and CEO of Drop (formerly Massdrop). Drop is an electronics brand that creates products based on feedback from enthusiast communities. Steve and Drop aren’t household names — you’ve very likely never heard of them. But we think his gritty growth journey is one of the best untold stories in Silicon Valley.  Put simply, it was a heads-down, 8-year grind with wild swings. After dropping out of school and starting Drop as a first-time founder when he was just 22, Steve and his co-founder were short on cash and Silicon Valley connections — but they quickly spun up an interesting business that generated tons of traction early on. After wrapping up their first fundraise, the challenges started to set in, from revenue immediately dropping off a cliff and key hires not working out, to painful pivots, severe burnout, and all the obstacles that come with scaling faster than you can handle. As Steve puts it, he “learned everything the hard way” on the journey from founder to CEO. In today’s conversation, Steve unpacks those lessons and gets candid about the misfires. He also shares tactical advice for hiring folks overlooked by the market and getting more out of your startup’s advisors. It’s a must-listen for leaders looking to build teams and companies that can go the distance. Even if you’re not an aspiring CEO, there’s still plenty of inspiration to go around. You can follow Steve on Twitter at @stevelhage and you can learn more about his approach to engaging users on First Round Review: https://firstround.com/review/How-To-Build-The-Product-Your-Users-Actually-Want/  You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson

Our first episode is with Molly Graham, a seasoned exec and builder who particularly excels at helping startups to go not from 0 to 1, but from 1 to 2. We’ve interviewed her four times on First Round Review — which might be a record — because the advice she has to share and the experiences she can draw from are unbelievably helpful to founders and startup leaders. She helped build and scale Facebook, Quip, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in their early days, and is now the COO of Lambda School. While on The Review she’s shared advice on everything from managing your emotions and struggling with scaling, to codifying your culture and setting up your first comp system, today’s conversation is focused on a different topic — management.  This is a topic Molly has strong opinions on—she’s seen time and time again across her career how so many startup mistakes come down to general management issues. We cover everything from the traps that are easy to fall into, to why you should be spending more time with your highest—not your lowest—performers, to the managers she’s learned the most from, so there’s tons of insightful advice and practical tactics for both first-time managers and seasoned leaders alike. You can read more about Molly’s approach to scaling startups on First Round Review. We particularly recommend following her advice to ‘give away your Legos’ https://firstround.com/review/give-away-your-legos-and-other-commandments-for-scaling-startups/ And here’s the article on compensation that Molly mentioned in the interview: https://firstround.com/review/A-Counterintuitive-System-for-Startup-Compensation/    You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson 

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. We’ll 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. I hope you’ll join us. Subscribe to “In Depth” now and learn more at firstround.com

Women in LeadershipIn this episode, herdacious host Lorelei chats with Cara about common trends women in leadership experience. Cara emphasizes the impact a diverse work culture has on a company’s performance, and how women, in particular, can lead that effort. While it's well known that women are under-represented in the leadership realm, Cara details some tips for recruiters to mitigate bias and hire based on individual skill and experience. For women seeking those roles, Cara advises us to wield data in ways that support our success. The roles are already changing; with a little practice and intention, we’ll be viewing the world from the top.Host: Lorelei GonzalezCo-host: Cara McCartyCara McCarty is the VP of People at Cognite, a global industrial AI (SaaS) company, and Co-founder of Code Pilot. In 2019, Code Pilot was one of the fastest growing training & recruitment platforms for developers and was acquired by AngelList, the second largest talent marketplace in the world. Cara is also a top-rated mentor at the Founder Institute, nominated as an ABJ Profiles in Power, and you can listen to her founders journey on the podcast "Establishing Your Empire" on iTunes with Daran Herrman. Prior to Cognite, Cara partnered with founders and leaders to support complex organizational and high-growth people initiatives for successful outcomes -- including WorldFirst, Acquisition and RetailMeNot, IPO. Things you will learn in this episode (chapter markers available): Why diversity, equity, and inclusion are important 2:45 Leadership differences within companies 4:50Hiring without bias 7:57Common gender pitfalls 11:09Shortage of women in leadership (but not for long) 13:45What makes a great leader? 15:27 Tips for recruiting talented women 17:50Femme fact: Breast Cancer Awareness Month 19:37Resources mentioned in this episode: Mother, Daughter, Sister, Bride: Rituals of Womanhood by Lisa Ling (book)Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck (book)How I Built This with Guy Raz (NPR podcast)First Round Review (website)Link to show transcript here.Episode sponsors: HERdacity Moonray Looking for additional resources on this topic? Check out our blog post “Why Women Need to Take Credit for Their Work”Loved what you heard on herdacious and want to share with friends? Tag us and connect with HERdacity on social media:Twitter: @herdacityFacebook: @HERdacity Instagram: @herdacityLinkedIn: HERdacity For up to date information on HERdacity events, webinars, podcasts, and community activities, join our newsletter here. Disclaimer: While we appreciate our sponsors' support in making this show possible, herdacious content is curated with integrity and honesty.Support the show (http://herdacity.org/donate/)

When you hear the terms, “Privilege or White Privilege”, what comes to mind for you? Do you immediately think of white people and attach the stigma of racism with it? If you answered yes, or your answer leaned towards yes...then YOU my friend, need to pause and disrupt your thinking. Because, the irony is that you, yourself, just exhibited negative unconscious biased behaviors. But, don’t beat yourself up, we ALL do this to some extent. It’s human nature. The key is to make the choice to CHANGE. In this episode, Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Equitable Design & Impact at Culture Amp discusses and shares how we should all be using our individual privileges to help other marginalized groups. Especially in this current “awakened environment” of racial and economic inequities.   Highlights: [02:54] Aubrey’s story [08:36] Taking chances [11:55] Solidifying identity as a Latina women [14:22] First experience in the tech industry [16:00] Addressing microaggressions [21:08] Making difficult decisions quickly [24:48] Supporting each other during the pandemic [28:21] Working remotely and being seen [32:25] Overcoming limiting beliefs [35:19] Aubrey’s favorite success habit   Quotes: “When you have something, work hard, because you've taken a seat from someone who may also deserve it, but didn't get it. And that's out of respect for those folks.” – Aubrey Blanche “I try to connect back to my journey to find compassion, but also remember that most people are fundamentally good and have been very poorly taught.” – Aubrey Blanche “Be compassionate to everyone, we are all doing the best we can and we don't always know what else is going on in the background.” – Aubrey Blanche “How do we constantly think of who's going to be the worst impacted and then think about what we can do to help.” – Aubrey Blanche “This is the greatest remote work experiment in human history.” - Aubrey Blanche “This is a time where no one really knows what the rules are. Decide what the rules are, tell people what the rules are, and then dare them to challenge you that you're wrong.” - Aubrey Blanche “Define the terms of the engagement for yourself. Because the fact is, the ones that are defined are going to keep you down because they're supposed to.” - Aubrey Blanche “What you say about yourself is what you believe in, it will become true because that's where your energy is going.” - Aubrey Blanche “You're brilliant, you're worthy, and the world needs what you're going to create.” - Aubrey Blanche   About Aubrey Blanche: Aubrey Blanche is The Mathpath (Math Nerd + Empath), Global Head of Equitable Design & Impact at Culture Amp, and a startup investor and advisor. Through all her work, she seeks to question, reimagine, and redesign the systems and practices that surround us to ensure that all people can access equitable opportunities and build a better world. Her work is undergirded by her training in social scientific methods and grounded in the fundamental dignity and value of every person. Her professional expertise covers a broad range of equitable enterprise operations, from talent lifecycle programs and accessible product development to event design and communications & media. She is the inventor of the balanced teams approach to building proportional representation and a culture of belonging in the workplace, as well as the Balanced Teams Diversity Assessment in the Atlassian Team Playbook. She works to open source these methods for all practitioners and business leaders, and releases thought leadership and tools to create positive change at here at aubreyblanche.com. She is an advisor to a variety of groups seeking to build a more just world, including Aleria Research and Joonko. Her work has been featured in Wired, the Wall Street Journal, the Australian Financial Review, USA Today, Re/Code, First Round Review, and more. She also has previous academic affiliations with Stanford and Northwestern, and an appointment at the Equity by Design Lab at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Despite the accolades listed here, she asks that you engage with her work to judge her competence: traditional proxies of merit and/or competence help reinforce the systems that keep incredible people from the opportunities they deserve. Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adblanche/ Twitter: @adblanche Website: https://aubreyblanche.com/ Medium: https://medium.com/@adblanche  

In deze aflevering gaat Rens in gesprek met de ervaren product manager, CEO en investeerder Robert Gaal. Robert heeft een lange carrière achter de rug waarin hij meerdere bedrijven verkocht en uiteindelijk als Product Manager terecht kwam bij Google in Silicon Valley. Na een tussenstop waarbij hij in Amsterdam de co-workingspace TQ op poten zette, is hij nu de oprichter en CEO van de startup Cooper. Gaan we een tijdperk in waarin we online echt waardevolle connecties bouwen? Waarom is verhalen vertellen zo belangrijk en waarom oefent Robert dit door stripboeken te maken? En hoe werkt het slopende sollicitatieproces bij de Amerikaanse zoekgigant Google? Behind the Product is een podcast van Young Creators. Host: Rens Gingnagel Redactie: Jan-Paul Beukema Edit: Randal van der Linde Bij Behind the Product proberen we iedere aflevering te verbeteren. Alle feedback wordt gewaardeerd en is welkom op podcasts@youngcreators.co Shownotes Cooper - https://cooper.app/ Writing Comics, Alan Moore - https://www.amazon.com/Alan-Moores-Writing-Comics-1/dp/1592910122 Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud - https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Comics-Invisible-Scott-McCloud/dp/006097625X/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=scott+mccloud&qid=1588761806&s=books&sr=1-1 Techstars - https://www.techstars.com/ Double opt-in en forwardable intro - https://hbr.org/2019/12/how-to-ask-for-an-email-introduction Thing testing - https://www.instagram.com/thingtesting/ The Dip, Seth Godin - https://www.amazon.com/Dip-Little-Book-Teaches-Stick/dp/1591841666 Philosophize this! Podcast - http://philosophizethis.org/ Marcus Aurelius Meditations - https://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Thrift-Editions-Marcus-Aurelius/dp/048629823X The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday - https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Stoic-Meditations-Wisdom-Perseverance/dp/0735211736 First Round Review - https://firstround.com/review/ Superhuman on First Round Review - https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/ Twitter organization on First Round Review - https://firstround.com/review/Twitter-Engineering-SVP-Chris-Fry-on-the-Power-of-Stable-Teams/ Without Fail podcast - https://gimletmedia.com/shows/without-fail/episodes

This is Listen to the Editors, a series of interviews with journal editors to unveil the trends in research for Operations and Supply Chain Management. In this episode, we are interviewing two of the guest editors for the Journal of Operations Management (JOM) Special Issue on Covid-19, Chris Voss and Xiande Zhao. The host for this show is Iuri Gavronski, Associate Professor for the Graduate Program in Business for the UNISINOS Jesuit University. Listen to the editors is an initiative of the Operations and Supply Chain Management division of the Academy of Management. We post our interviews monthly in our division website. You can discuss any of the topics of this episode using our interactive tool, https://connect.aom.org. Using the discussion section of our site, you can also post suggestions for questions, journal editors you would like to hear from, and requests for clarifications. You can also subscribe to our podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or with the Podcast Addict app on Android. Website for the Journal: ======================== https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/18731317 Call for Papers: ================ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/pb-assets/assets/18731317/JOM%20CFP%20-%20COVID-19%20and%20Global%20Supply%20Chains-1586282145923.pdf Editors’ Bios: ============== Dr. Hau L. Lee is the Thoma Professor of Operations, Information and Technology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His areas of specialization include global value chain innovations, supply chain management, global logistics, inventory modeling, and environmental and social responsibility. He was the founding director of the Stanford Institute for Innovations in Developing Economies, and is a co-director of the Stanford Value Chain Innovation Initiative. He has published widely in journals such as Management Science, Operations Research, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Supply Chain Management Review, Production and Operations Management, IIE Transactions, and Interfaces, etc. He has served on the editorial boards of many international journals. From 1997-2003, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Management Science. In 2006, he was President of the Production and Operations Management Society. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2010. Dr. Xiande Zhao is JD.COM Chair Professor in Operations and Supply Chain Management at China Europe International Business School (CEIBS). His recent research interests mostly focus on supply chain and business model innovations, supply chain finance, digital supply chain, and supply chain optimization using big data. He has published over 150 journal articles in leading journals including Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Journal of Consumer Research, European Journal of Operations Research, International Journal of Production Research and International Journal of Production Economics. He is an Associate Editor for Journal of Operations Management, Decision Sciences, and a Senior Editor of Production and Operations Management. He is also the co-Chief Editor for Journal of Data, Information and Management. He is the founder and honourable president of Association of Supply Chain and Operations Management (ASCOM), and was the President of Asia Pacific Institute of Decision Sciences (APDSI). He also received more than 10 academic awards including the Jack Meredith best paper award from Journal of Operations Management. Dr. Xiang Li is a professor with the School of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Chemical Technology. His recent research interests mostly focus on transport management, logistics management, and optimization under uncertainty, big-data analytics and applications. He has published over 80 articles in international journals including Transportation Research Part B, Transportation Research Part C, Information Sciences, European Journal of Operational Research, Omega, Computer and Industrial Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, and so on. He is the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Data, Information and Management, Associate Editor for Information Sciences, Transportmetrica B, Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, and editorial board member for International Journal of General Systems. He was the president of International Conference on Intelligent Transportation and Logistics with Big Data (2017, 2018, and 2019). Dr. Chris Voss is Professor of Operations Management at Warwick Business School and Emeritus Professor of Operations Management at London Business School where he has served as deputy dean. His recent research has included supply-chain management, service supply chains, architecture and modularity, e-services, and service innovation. He has published in leading journals including Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Supply Chain Management, Production and Operations Management, IEEE Transactions, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Decision Science Journal, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, International Journal of Journal of Production Economics, and Journal of Service Research. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Service Research. He was co-founder and long-term chair of the European Operations Management Association, and serves on several editorial boards. He has received many academic awards including distinguished scholar of the OM division of the Academy of Management. Deadlines: ========== The full-paper submission: January 31, 2021 First Round Review and decisions: April 30, 2021 Second Round Revision Submission: July 31, 2021 Final round review and decisions: September 30, 2021 Acknowledgements: ================= Background music: ================= “Night & Day” by Dee Yan-Key is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Dee_Yan-Key/years_and_years_ago/08--Dee_Yan-Key-Night___Day 2020-04-14 - Episode 014

In this episode, my guest is Camille Ricketts, Head of Marketing at Notion. Camille is the former head of Content and Marketing at First Round Capital, and you may also know her from First Round Review. Her CV is very impressive as she’s previously worked for Tesla, VentureBeat, and The Wall Street Journal. There is so much value in today’s podcast, it’s difficult to know where to start. You’ll learn how to identify which customers make exceptional user stories and how to ensure that they understand what you expect from them. Camille also explains how to use the three-tier interviewing system to encourage your customers to give thorough, specific answers. We Covered: What is wrong with typical online user studies The benefits of producing one in-depth story instead of 50 shallow ones Ensuring all content produced is useful The consequences of shallow user stories on your brand Using the inverted triangle to organize your story How to convince people to be on your blog or podcast The importance of being a good storyteller The benefits of recording interviews to make full use of the content How to be the painkiller and not the vitamin Preparing your customer in advance of the interview Resources: Notion Tesla First Round Review VentureBeat The Wall Street Journal Obviously Awesome by April Dunford This Is Marketing - Seth Godin Writing & Self-Publishing a Marketing Book: A No-Bull Guide 5 Proven Methods for Positioning Your New Product Hubspot

Jessi Craige is the Editor at First Round Capital, where she oversees marketing and leads the First Round Review, a long-form online magazine dedicated to profiling leaders in tech and sharing startup insights to transform the way people build companies. As a senior in college at Georgetown's School of Forensic Science, Jessi was caught in the “DC Bubble” working in the public sector. During this time Jessi thought she needed to work in the private sector to gain a different experience. It was during that transition where she met Will Smith, a Georgetown Alum, who was working at McCrystal Group. Instead of joining McCrystal Group as a consultant, she was brought on as a research assistant in a new book project, Team of Teams. This was the springboard that led Jessi to the content marketing world. You can read more about this episode here: https://bwmissions.com/blog/jessi-craig-podcast Follow Bryan Wish on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/bryanwish/ Follow Bryan Wish on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bryanwish_?s=11 Follow Bryan Wish on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bryanwish_/ Join our Mission: bwmissions.com/join/ Join our Community: my.community.com/bwmissions

¿Para qué diseñar el producto si luego no le acompaña la cultura y la marca? Tener marca y cultura en condiciones es cansado pero realmente vale la pena y afecta al negocio. En este SaaS Product Chat profundizamos en esto de crear productos con marca y por qué las personas que gestionan marca tienen que alinearse con los que dirigen producto en un momento en el que los factores diferenciadores y fidelizadores no son solo los features del producto que lances sino la percepción de valor que el usuario tenga al interactuar con él.Estos son los enlaces a los temas de los que hemos hablado:Consejos accionables de alguien que ha posicionado la marca de Airbnb, Dropbox o Thumtack antes de ser lanzada: https://firstround.com/review/what-i-learned-from-developing-branding-for-airbnb-dropbox-and-thumbtack/Tips en Content Marketing por expertas de First Round Capital y Andreessen Horowitz: https://blog.ycombinator.com/content-marketing-tips-from-experts-at-first-round-capital-and-andreessen-horowitz/PR & Marketing en First Round Review: https://firstround.com/review/pr-and-marketing/Julie (Keslik) Supan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliesupan/A weekly conversation about design process and culture: https://designdetails.fmBreaker usa Buglife para que usuarios reporten bugs y ayuden a mejorar la app. Simple captura. Integración con Slack o GitHub disponibles. https://www.buglife.com/Brand and Digital Design Handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/brand-and-digital-design/Figma: https://www.figma.comInVision: https://www.invisionapp.comNotion: https://www.notion.soPendo.io: https://www.pendo.ioAbstract: https://www.abstract.comvLex: https://vlex.esSíguenos en Twitter:Danny Prol: https://twitter.com/DannyProl/Claudio Cossio: https://twitter.com/ccossioEstamos en todas estas plataformas:Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/saas-product-chat/id1435000409ListenNotes: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/saas-product-chat-daniel-prol-y-claudio-CABZRIjGVdP/Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/36KIhM0DM7nwRLuZ1fVQy3Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS8zN3N0Mzg2dg%3D%3D&hl=esBreaker: https://www.breaker.audio/saas-product-chatWeb: https://saasproductchat.com/

First Round Review recently ran article polling CEOs and Hiring Managers about what their favorite interview questions are and it really sparked with Michael and Mylene. They share some of what they think the best interview questions are and what some of the best answers might be.  Before that, tough, we welcome Kate Lawrence, the new administrative coordinator for the graduate student team to talk about her role, her other career as an exhibiting artist and some of the interview questions she's face.Enjoy!Show Notes:40 Favorite Interview Questions from Some of the Sharpest Folks We Know