Today’s episode is with Nairi Hourdajian, the VP of Communications, Content and Community Marketing at Figma. Prior to joining Figma, Nairi was the Chief Marketing Officer at Canaan, an early-stage venture capital firm. In 2013, she became Uber’s first communications person and spent the next 3 years building out the function. Before getting into tech, Nairi came from the world of politics. She was a VP at Glover Park Group, a communications consulting firm started by former Clinton officials, a...
Mar 31, 2022•58 min•Ep. 54
Today’s episode is with Jack Altman, co-founder & CEO of Lattice. There were so many topics we could have gotten into with Jack as it relates to scaling as a founder and CEO, but we decided to dive deep on executive hiring, a huge challenge for founders. The conversation starts with how the hiring profile for executives changes as the company grows. Jack is a strong believer that you should focus on hiring someone who’s a great fit for the next 18-24 months, not the next 5 or 10 years. (Here's t...
Mar 17, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 53
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 ind...
Mar 10, 2022•57 min•Ep. 52
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 mature...
Mar 03, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 51
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 Ma...
Feb 10, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 50
Today’s episode is with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Head of Americas Revenue and Growth for Stripe, where she’s responsible for all sales functions and leads the company’s enterprise strategy. She joined Stripe after a career in sales at Google and also serving as Dialpad’s Chief Revenue Officer. In today’s conversation, we dive super deep into all things pricing. To start, Jeanne outlines the trade-offs when it comes to usage-based pricing versus SaaS pricing, and how usage-based gets your company m...
Jan 27, 2022•50 min•Ep. 45
Today’s episode is with Ravi Mehta, who is formerly the Chief Product Officer at Tinder, and taught product strategy as an Executive in Residence at Reforge. In today’s conversation, we dive exceptionally deep into product strategy, starting with what Ravi sees as the most common disconnect between product strategy and what product teams actually work on day-to-day. In the bulk of our discussion, we walk through the core tenants of what he calls the product strategy stack, which includes the com...
Jan 20, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 48
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 ...
Jan 13, 2022•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 47
Today’s episode is with Adrian McDermott, CTO of Zendesk. Adrian started at the company back in 2010, when they were only 50 employees. Since then, he’s led product management and engineering teams as the company has gone public and scaled to over 5000 employees. Our discussion digs into the challenges that come from scaling startups. We start off by diving into a common decision point: whether to continue with what's working or try to make a change. Adrian goes much deeper than the “what got yo...
Dec 09, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 46
Today’s episode is with Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder and CTO of Hubspot. In today’s conversation, we deeply explore some of the marquee moments along the 15-year journey building Hubspot. To start, Dharmesh unpacks the very specific way he and his co-founder Brian Halligan approached evaluating their compatibility as co-founders. He’s got tons of advice for other potential founding pairs to increase the likelihood of success and smoother sailing. Next, he points to some of the foundational buil...
Dec 02, 2021•54 min•Ep. 45
Today’s episode is with Zach Kitschke, CMO of Canva, an online design and publishing tool. Since launching in 2013, Canva has grown from an Australian startup to a global company, with 60 million monthly active users, over 2,000 employees, and a $40 billion valuation. Zach was one of Canva's first employees, leading comms efforts around their initial launch and fundraise. But since then, he’s done everything from answering support tickets and cooking the team lunch, to serving as a product lead ...
Nov 18, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 44
Today’s episode is with Hareem Mannan, who was a product design leader at Segment for nearly four years, and joined Twilio as a Senior Director of Product, Enablement & Design following the company’s acquisition of Segment. In today’s conversation, we deeply explore Hareem’s three pillars of what makes a great designer. To summarize, they are a product quality ambassador, serve as the glue across product areas, and intricately understand the go-to-market motion. We peel back the layers for each ...
Nov 11, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 43
Today’s episode is with Max Mullen, co-founder of Instacart. He started as a generalist, running everything from product to payroll, but as the company has grown over the years, he’s come to focus on one particular area: culture. Since Max is also an active angel investor, he’s also been able to partner with tons of founders and help them think about architecting their own culture at the early stages — which is exactly what we dive into in today’s episode. In the first half of our conversation, ...
Nov 04, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 42
Today’s episode is with Alisa Cohn, an executive coach with nearly 20 years of experience working with companies like Etsy, Venmo, InVision, The Wirecutter, Google and IBM. Her new book, From Start-Up to Grown-Up: Grow Your Leadership to Grow Your Business, just came out this week. In our conversation today, we focus on what founders and startup leaders can learn from Alisa’s experiences as a coach. We start by getting into self-awareness, and how tough it can be for executives to get truly cand...
Oct 28, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 41
Today’s episode is with Gretchen Howard, COO of Robinhood. Gretchen joined Robinhood in early 2019 as the company’s COO and just its second executive hire. She climbed aboard the Robinhood rocketship after 5 years building CapitalG, Alphabet’s investment fund. In today’s conversation, we dive really deep into what she’s learned about executive hiring. To start, she explains how to align the hiring profile to the trajectory of the business to make sure you’re investing in the right places. She al...
Oct 21, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 40
Today’s episode is with Giancarlo 'GC' Lionetti, the former CMO of Confluent and VP of Self-Serve Growth at Dropbox. (GC also previously spent 6 years at Atlassian, as a sales engineer and product marketing manager for developer tools.) He describes his career as more of a maze than a ladder, and this functional diversity combined with his deep experience at standout B2B companies gives him a unique perspective. In today’s conversation, we dig deep into why he advocates for a hybrid go-to-market...
Oct 07, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 36
Today’s episode is with Sandr Oh Lin, founder and CEO of KiwiCo, which creates hands-on learning kits for children. Sandra started KiwiCo over ten years ago, after a career with executive positions at PayPal and eBay. She was looking for ways to give her own kids more hands-on projects to exercise their creativity, which led her down the path to become an entrepreneur and create KiwiCo. Today, KiwiCo has expanded to include 8 different lines of crates that are shipped out monthly. In the first h...
Sep 30, 2021•58 min•Ep. 38
Today’s episode is with Maya Spivak, the Head of Marketing at Mux, which is an API for developers to build video experiences. Maya recently joined Mux after five years at Segment, where she was the company’s second marketer and its Head of Global Brand Marketing and Communications, as well as a stint at Wealthfront as a marketing director. In today’s conversation, she takes a magnifying glass to the core components of a startup’s marketing org. She starts by breaking down the three pillars of ...
Sep 16, 2021•57 min•Ep. 37
Today’s episode is with Archana Agrawal, CMO of Airtable, a low-code platform for building collaborative apps. Archana joined Airtable last year after 7 years at Atlassian, where she eventually became the company’s Head of Enterprise and Cloud Marketing. She also sits on the board for MongoDB and Zendesk. We start today’s conversation by dissecting some of the messaging challenges facing horizontal products like both Airtable and Atlassian, and her tips for narrowing in on the right persona. She...
Sep 09, 2021•56 min•Ep. 36
Today’s episode is with Tara Viswanathan, co-founder and CEO of Rupa Health. Tara started Rupa Health in early 2018, but the product vision today looks very different from what she first built. As she’ll talk about over the course of today’s interview, she went through plenty of sometimes painful pivots on the path to finding product/market fit for Rupa. Tara is incredibly candid about all of the things she had to learn the hard way as a first-time founder going from zero to one. For the first h...
Sep 02, 2021•57 min•Ep. 35
Today’s episode is with Steve Gutentag, the co-founder and CEO of Thirty Madison, a healthcare company focused on widening access to specialized care for chronic conditions. After previously starting two other companies with his co-founder Demetri Karagas, they launched Thirty Madison in 2017 with Keeps, a men’s hair loss solution. The team has since gone on to launch several new brands, including Cove (for migraines), Evens (for GI issues), and Picnic (for allergies). With the acceleration in t...
Aug 19, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 34
Today’s episode is with Jane Davis, the Director of UX Research and UX Writing at Zoom. She previously led UX Research and Content Design at Zapier, and managed the growth research team at Dropbox. Throughout the episode, Jane tackles the thorniest customer development questions and walks us through the end-to-end research process in incredible detail, covering everything from clarifying your goals and asking the right questions, to selecting participants and synthesizing insights. We start by g...
Aug 12, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 33
Today’s episode is with Alex Buder Shapiro, the Chief People Officer at Flatiron Health, a company that focuses on accelerating cancer research and improving patient care. Alex first joined Flatiron back in 2016, after an 8-year stint on Google’s People Operations team. Before her promotion to Flatiron’s executive team this past March, Alex previously ran the HR business partner and employee relations team as the startup rapidly scaled. We kicked things off by talking about resolving conflict at...
Jul 29, 2021•58 min•Ep. 32
Today’s episode is with Ryan Glasgow, the founder and CEO of UserLeap, a product research platform that helps PMs, user researchers, and growth marketers launch microsurveys to uncover customer insights faster. Before founding UserLeap in 2018, Ryan was a PM and early team member at Weebly (which was acquired by Square) and Vurb (which was acquired by Snapchat). We start by rewinding the clock back to the 6-month period before Ryan started the company — when he was validating his idea and assess...
Jul 22, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 31
Today’s episode is with Nick Caldwell, VP of Engineering at Twitter. Previously, Nick was at Microsoft for 15 years, eventually becoming GM of Power BI. Nick has also held roles as Reddit’s VP of Engineering and Looker’s Chief Product and Engineering Officer. Between Microsoft, Reddit, Looker, and now Twitter, Nick’s worked for companies with vastly different cultures. And in today’s conversations, we comb through the biggest lessons from each of these orgs. With Microsoft, we unpack what Nick b...
Jul 15, 2021•59 min•Ep. 30
Today’s episode is with Sam Taylor, VP of Sales and Success at Loom. Previously, Sam was Dropbox’s first enterprise sales rep, and also served as Quip’s first sales leader. In today’s conversation, we dig into the key learnings from each stop in Sam’s career so far. Starting with his earliest experience at Dropbox, he walks us through his aha moment that sales is an insight driver — which includes his lessons on pricing and packaging, as well as plotting the feature roadmap as Dropbox moved up m...
Jul 08, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 29
Today’s episode is with McKenna Quint, who was most recently the Head of People at Plaid and also built and led the people team at Cruise Automation. Currently, she’s co-founder and general partner at Quint Capital, a seed-stage fund. In today’s conversation, we focus on the people challenges that inevitably crop up when you’re going from a couple dozen employees to a couple thousand. We start by discussing when startups should draw from established playbooks in the people space versus when to s...
Jun 24, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 28
Today’s episode is with Waseem Daher, co-founder and CEO of Pilot, a company that specializes in bookkeeping, tax prep, and CFO services for high-growth startups. In addition to Pilot, Waseem co-founded two other startups with the same group of co-founders, including Ksplice, which was acquired by Oracle in 2011, and Zulip, which was acquired by Dropbox in 2014. In today’s conversation, we pay particular attention to the earliest days of Pilot. Waseem takes us behind the scenes of the ideation s...
Jun 17, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 27
Today’s episode is with Shannon Brayton, a Silicon Valley veteran with more than two decades of experience shaping corporate narratives and leading teams at companies like LinkedIn, OpenTable, eBay, Yahoo!, and Intuit. She recently joined Bessemer as the venture capital firm’s first-ever CMO. In today’s conversation, Shannon shares the comms and leadership lessons she’s picked up along the way. In addition to sharing her broader philosophy around the role of comms and her thoughts on why it’s on...
Jun 10, 2021•59 min•Ep. 26
Today’s episode is with Colleen McCreary, the Chief People Officer at Credit Karma. With more than 20 years of experience in HR, operations, recruiting and M&A, Colleen has headed up the people function at companies such as Vevo, The Climate Corporation, and Zynga. She’s also seen the early-stages and scaled through multiple IPOs and acquisitions, which means she has a great perspective on the people problems founders tend to run into as their businesses grow. We kick this conversation off with ...
Jun 03, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 25
