Today’s episode is with Eric Berg, CEO of Fauna, which is an adaptive operational database platform. In joining Fauna as its CEO in the summer of 2020, he brought a wealth of experience as a product leader. Most recently, he was the Chief Product Officer at Okta, scaling the company from 10 employees and zero customers to its eventual IPO in 2017. He started his career in product at Intel, working under the legendary Andy Grove, as well as a five-year stint as a product leader at Microsoft. In t...
May 06, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Apr 29, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is with Kate Taylor, who recently joined Notion as their Head of Customer Experience. Previously, Kate spent 8 years at Dropbox, leading their SMB revenue and scaled sales operation before leaving in 2020. Prior to that, she started her career as a sales rep at Salesforce. In today’s conversation, Kate shares a wealth of advice for building out product-led growth and self-serve motions. She shares tons of nuances around going up market, competing with sales and product planning, ...
Apr 22, 2021•57 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is with Mark Frein, the Chief People Officer & Head of Alumni Programs at Lambda School. Previously, Mark served as the Chief People Officer at both InVision and Return Path. He also ran his own leadership development consultancy and taught on HR topics as an adjunct professor. Mark has an invaluable perspective and tons of advice to share after setting up several people orgs in a range of different companies. In this conversation, Mark shares his approach to the CPO role and his...
Apr 15, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast 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 ...
Apr 08, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is with Tido Carriero, the Chief Product Officer at Segment, a customer data platform which was recently acquired by Twilio. Before that, he built out the engineering teams that worked on the core product and the initial business product at Dropbox. Tido started out his career in 2008 as an early member of the Facebook ads engineering team, and went on to become an eng manager on the Pages team, a transition from IC to leadership that he talks about in this episode. In today’s co...
Apr 01, 2021•58 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Qu...
Mar 18, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Mar 11, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is with Leah Sutton, SVP of Global HR at Elastic. Leah’s been in the HR space for over 20 years, and now leads everything from HR operations to recruiting and employee engagement for Elastic’s fully-distributed employee base, which includes over 2,000 spread across 40 countries and 48 states. In today’s conversation, we look closely under the hood of what Leah calls Elastic’s “distributed by design” company DNA. She walks us through her learnings tackling challenges companies now...
Mar 04, 2021•57 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast 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 thro...
Feb 25, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Feb 18, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is with Bill Carr and Colin Bryar, two long-time Amazon executives who just published a new book, “Working Backwards,” which provides an inside look at how the leadership principles and business processes that have made the company so successful. Bill started at Amazon in 1999, and went on to launch and run the Prime Video, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Music businesses before he left the company in 2014. Colin joined Amazon in 1998, as the Director for Amazon Associates and Amazon ...
Feb 09, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast 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 advic...
Feb 04, 2021•1 hr 18 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is with Jean-Denis Grèze, Head of Engineering at Plaid, which securely connects your bank to your apps. Before joining Plaid, Jean-Denis served as Director of Engineering at Dropbox, and even had a stint in law school and one year as a lawyer under his belt before diving deep into the world of CS. While he says becoming a lawyer was a “four-year detour he probably didn’t need,” there’s a lot to be said for how it’s shaped his engineering career and management philosophy. As he pu...
Jan 14, 2021•57 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Dec 22, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is with Jay Simons, who’s currently a partner at Bond and serves on the boards of Hubspot and Zapier. But before that, he had a long run as the President of Atlassian, which develops software collaboration tools like Jira, Confluence and Trello. In today’s conversation, Jay dives into Atlassian’s growth story, from what’s misunderstood or not talked about enough, to the strategic choices that went against the grain. He shares an inside look at how Atlassian built a product that c...
Dec 17, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is with Cristina Cordova, Notion’s Head of Platform & Partnerships. Previously, she was the 28th employee and the first partnerships hire at Stripe, where she cultivated partnerships with companies like Shopify, Squarespace and Apple, built out the BD org, and led their new Corporate Card effort. After a decade in partnerships, Cristina has bagged big deals, honed her negotiation skills, built out teams — and made plenty of mistakes she hopes others can learn from. In today’s con...
Dec 10, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is with David Cancel. David has been a CEO and founder of multiple different companies throughout his career. He’s also been a software engineer, a serial CTO, and the Chief Product Officer at Hubspot, giving him a unique lens into company building and leadership at different levels. In today’s conversation, David unpacks those lessons and tells us why he’s so focused on storytelling these days as the co-founder and CEO of Drift, a conversational marketing and sales platform. Fro...
Dec 03, 2020•51 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast Our third episode is with Steve El-Hage, co-founder and CEO of Drop, an electronics company that creates products powered by feedback by a massive community of enthusiasts and experts. Reflecting on his 8-year, heads-down grind since becoming a first-time founder at 22, Steve shares the lessons that he figured out the hard way, from revenue dropping off a cliff and painful pivots, to hiring blunders and severe burnout.
Nov 19, 2020•2 hr 32 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast Our second episode is with Ayo Omojola, VP of Product at Carbon Health. Previously, he was the founding product manager on the banking team for Cash App at Square, where he co-created the Cash Card and helped build out Square’s technical banking infrastructure. He’s also a former founder of a Y Combinator-backed startup and an active angel investor, which gives him a unique lens into finding and evaluating startup ideas. Tapping into Ayo’s experience working in the heavily regulated spaces of he...
Nov 12, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast 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. W...
Oct 29, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast 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 “...
Oct 15, 2020•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
