In Depth
By First Round
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Category: Management
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Subscribers: 60
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Episodes: 149
Description
Welcome to In Depth, a new podcast from First Round Review that’s dedicated to surfacing the tactical advice founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies and themselves. Hosted by Brett Berson, a partner at First Round, In Depth will cover a lot of ground and a wide range of topics, from hiring executives and becoming a better manager, to the importance of storytelling inside of your organization. But every interview will hit the level of tactical depth where the very best advice is found. We hope you’ll join us. Subscribe to “In Depth” now and learn more at firstround.com
| Episode | Date |
|---|---|
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How Wes Kao coaches founders to influence, lead, and get what they want | Wes Kao (Executive coach, co-founder of Maven)
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May 22, 2025 |
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From reluctant founder to $2B valuation: The story of Persona | Rick Song (Co-founder and CEO)
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May 08, 2025 |
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How a weekend hack became a multimillion-dollar AI startup | Adit Abraham (Co-founder & CEO at Reducto)
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Apr 29, 2025 |
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1Password’s growth story | How they went from bootstrapped to $6B company | Jeff Shiner (CEO)
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Apr 24, 2025 |
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Scrappy tactics and a huge post-COVID pivot | Owner’s unconventional journey to product-market fit | Adam Guild (Co-founder and CEO of Owner)
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Mar 27, 2025 |
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What makes (or breaks) executive hires | A deep dive with Eeke de Milliano (Head of Global Product at Stripe)
|
Mar 06, 2025 |
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Inside Guideline's mission to modernize 401(k)s | Building from first principles, finding strategic edges, and rewiring retirement | Kevin Busque (Co-founder and CEO)
|
Feb 20, 2025 |
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Inside Braze’s blitz to $500M in CARR | Building broad, going global, and outfoxing the competition | Bill Magnuson (Co-founder & CEO) and Kevin Wang (CPO)
|
Feb 06, 2025 |
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Inside Clay's unconventional path to $1.25B: Rethinking GTM, pricing, and enterprise sales | Varun Anand (Co-founder and Head of Operations)
|
Jan 23, 2025 |
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Building a 4 billion dollar data platform: Inside dbt Labs’ unconventional path | Tristan Handy (Co-founder and CEO, ex-RJMetrics, Squarespace)
|
Dec 19, 2024 |
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How Figma taps into taste, simplicity, and storytelling | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO at Figma, ex-Uber, Google, Microsoft)
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Dec 05, 2024 |
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How to find customers in the Dept of Defense: From prototype to the Pentagon | Steve Blank (Hacking for Defense)
|
Nov 14, 2024 |
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Shifting Career Altitudes: Insights from a CPO’s Journey Leading in Nearly Every Function | Anneka Gupta (Rubrik, ex-LiveRamp)
|
Oct 10, 2024 |
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How to find and pull startup growth levers | Matt Lerner (Founder and CEO at SYSTM, Author of Growth Levers)
|
Sep 26, 2024 |
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How to find — and keep — product-market fit | Bob Moore (Co-founder and CEO at Crossbeam, ex-RJMetrics and Stitch Data)
|
Sep 19, 2024 |
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Rebooting Intercom: Eoghan McCabe on Defying Silicon Valley Orthodoxy | Co-founder & CEO
|
Sep 05, 2024 |
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Inside marketing at Stripe, OpenAI and Retool | Krithika Muthukumar (VP of Marketing at OpenAI, ex-Stripe, Retool, Dropbox, Google)
|
Aug 01, 2024 |
|
Developing technical taste: A guide for next-gen engineers | Sam Schillace (Deputy CTO at Microsoft, creator of Google Docs)
|
Jun 06, 2024 |
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How to build and scale winning marketplaces | Casey Winters (Eventbrite, Pinterest, Grubhub)
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May 30, 2024 |
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Lessons from Sentry on scaling DevTools and finding product market fit (again) | Milin Desai (Sentry, VMware, Riverbed)
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May 16, 2024 |
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How to be effective up and down the org chart | Matt MacInnis (Rippling, Inkling, Apple)
|
Apr 25, 2024 |
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Timeless lessons on running software companies that endure | Alyssa Henry (Square, Amazon, Microsoft)
|
Apr 18, 2024 |
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Building products that delight customers | Adam Nash (Daffy, Wealthfront, LinkedIn, eBay, Apple)
|
Apr 04, 2024 |
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A masterclass in founder conviction | Eilon Reshef (Co-founder and CPO at Gong)
|
Mar 28, 2024 |
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Essential lessons for building and scaling DevTools | Dennis Pilarinos (Unblocked, Apple, Amazon, Buddybuild, Microsoft)
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Mar 21, 2024 |
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Scaling and selling AI products for enterprise | May Habib (Co-founder and CEO of Writer)
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Feb 29, 2024 |
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The secret lever Replit pulled to scale ahead of its competition | Amjad Masad (Co-founder and CEO)
|
Feb 15, 2024 |
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Lessons from Gusto & Square on finding your product wedge | Michael Cieri
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Feb 08, 2024 |
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A customer success masterclass | How to design, build, and scale a CS org | Stephanie Berner (LinkedIn)
|
Feb 01, 2024 |
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The human side of world-class engineering leadership | Michael Lopp (Apple, Palantir, Slack)
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Jan 25, 2024 |
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Clay’s path to product-market-fit: Building vertical, creating power users, and understanding founder psychology | Kareem Amin (Co-founder and CEO)
|
Jan 18, 2024 |
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Inside Figma’s early days: How to build a world-class sales org | Kyle Parrish (VP of Sales)
|
Jan 11, 2024 |
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The new PLG playbook | Arming the next generation of product-led companies | Oliver Jay (Asana, Dropbox)
|
Jan 04, 2024 |
|
Mastering modern entrepreneurship | Building lean, starting young, and studying customers | Steve Blank (Author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany)
|
Dec 21, 2023 |
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Winning with open and closed source products | Neha Narkhede (Co-founder at Confluent and Oscilar)
|
Dec 07, 2023 |
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The Bard blueprint | Creating value, shipping fast, and advancing AI ethically | Jack Krawczyk (Google)
|
Nov 30, 2023 |
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A masterclass in engineering leadership from Carta, Stripe, Uber, and Calm | Will Larson (CTO at Carta)
|
Nov 16, 2023 |
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How goal-setting and planning is different for AI products | Anastasis Germanidis (Co-Founder & CTO at Runway)
|
Nov 09, 2023 |
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How Vercel found extreme product-market fit by focusing on simplification | Guillermo Rauch (Vercel's CEO)
|
Nov 02, 2023 |
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The business of growing and monetizing an open source product | Ashley Kramer (GitLab CMO/CSO)
|
Oct 26, 2023 |
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How to leverage intuition, customer support, and raw effort | Colin Zima (Omni & Looker)
|
Oct 12, 2023 |
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Building Zapier from first principles | Contrarian takes on growth, hiring, fundraising | Wade Foster (Co-founder & CEO)
|
Oct 05, 2023 |
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How young outsiders changed the shipping industry by finding product-market fit again and again | Laura Behrens Wu (Shippo)
|
Sep 28, 2023 |
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AI Hot Takes and Unusual Twitter Fundraising Strategies with Dan Siroker (Rewind AI)
|
Sep 14, 2023 |
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A guide to building product in a post-LLM world | Ryan Glasgow and Kevin Mandich from Sprig
|
Sep 07, 2023 |
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An org-design masterclass from a Square GM | Saumil Mehta
|
Aug 31, 2023 |
|
How to supercharge your engineering org | Kellan Elliott-McCrea (Adobe, Dropbox)
|
Aug 17, 2023 |
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The zero to one B2B marketing playbook | Alex Kracov (Lattice, Dock)
|
Aug 10, 2023 |
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Lessons from Loom on product strategy, organizational leadership, and cross-functional performance | Anique Drumright (COO at Loom)
|
Aug 03, 2023 |
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Lessons from Slack on decision making, product-led growth, and taking big swings — Noah Desai Weiss
|
Jul 13, 2023 |
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Lessons in leadership | Scaling an org, developing yourself, and tactical management advice | Jack Altman (Lattice)
|
Jul 06, 2023 |
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Lessons from Stripe on adding new products - Assessing ideas, structuring teams, and tactics for product reviews | Tara Seshan (Watershed, Stripe)
|
Jun 22, 2023 |
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How to design a high-impact growth org for a PLG startup — Webflow & Dropbox’s Melissa Tan
|
Jun 08, 2023 |
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Why is the transition from IC Engineer to Manager so tricky (and how to get it right)? — Marcel Weekes, VP of Product Engineering at Figma
|
May 25, 2023 |
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How to pull off the ‘zoom-in pivot,’ and other lessons in early-stage building with Luminai’s Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran
|
May 18, 2023 |
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The go-to-market guide for open-source companies — Douglas Hanna, COO Grafana Labs
|
May 11, 2023 |
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What this 3-time founding team did differently to find product-market fit faster — Jessica McKellar, CTO of Pilot
|
May 04, 2023 |
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How to measure product-market fit with the REV model — Artem Kroupenev
|
Apr 27, 2023 |
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The early user research playbook for founders — Jeanette Mellinger’s expert advice for validating your idea with high-quality interviews
|
Apr 20, 2023 |
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Claire Hughes Johnson on being a “learning organism” during Stripe’s growth, and more scaling advice for leaders
|
Apr 13, 2023 |
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Notion’s Head of Marketing on building a growth marketing engine at a PLG company — Rachel Hepworth
|
Apr 06, 2023 |
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What makes someone a truly remarkable talent evaluator — Nadia Singer, Figma’s Chief People Officer
|
Mar 30, 2023 |
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How Vanta’s founder bet big on startup security and found product-market fit — Christina Cacioppo
|
Mar 23, 2023 |
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Lessons from Notion on building a thriving decentralized community — Ben Lang
|
Mar 16, 2023 |
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From a narrow ICP to a wide-open market – Lessons from Webflow’s Bryant Chou on using customer empathy to get product-market fit
|
Mar 09, 2023 |
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How to lead with transparency amidst adversity — Don Faul, CEO of CrossFit and former Google, Facebook & Pinterest exec
|
Feb 23, 2023 |
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From kickoffs to retros and Slack channels — Stripe's documentation best practices with Brie Wolfson
|
Feb 09, 2023 |
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Why comms deserves its own spot on the exec team — Aaron Zamost’s lessons from Square
|
Feb 02, 2023 |
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What founders need to know about acquisitions: Shopify’s Daniel Debow on M&A lessons from selling three startups
|
Jan 26, 2023 |
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How to build your culture like a product — Lessons from Anna Binder, Asana’s Head of People
|
Jan 20, 2023 |
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How to scale your career alongside your startup: Mike Boufford’s lessons after 10 years at Greenhouse
|
Jan 12, 2023 |
|
Founders: Here’s how to get your sales pitch in ship-shape — Peter Kazanjy
|
Dec 15, 2022 |
|
Deepak Rao on how X1 pivoted, launched, built a +600K-long waitlist and fundraised in tough times
|
Dec 08, 2022 |
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How to lower barriers to change when building and selling products — Jonah Berger’s advice for founders
|
Dec 01, 2022 |
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How Retool reached $2M in ARR before launch by focusing on developers — David Hsu
|
Nov 10, 2022 |
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How to approach GTM with an engineering lens — Rich Rao’s advice from Google & Meta
|
Nov 03, 2022 |
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What startups can learn from enterprise corporate messaging — Sara Varni’s lessons from Salesforce & Twilio
|
Oct 27, 2022 |
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Finding product-market fit twice — Alma’s Harry Ritter on pivots and staying close to customers
|
Oct 13, 2022 |
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Why everything we’ve been taught about quitting is wrong — Annie Duke
|
Oct 06, 2022 |
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How to scale your co-founder relationship alongside your startup — Manu Sharma & Brian Rieger of Labelbox
|
Sep 29, 2022 |
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A crash course on founder-led customer success — Sydney Strader’s lessons from Catalyst & InVision
|
Sep 22, 2022 |
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The founder’s guide to making your first few hires — Steven Bartel on recruiting at Gem & Dropbox
|
Sep 15, 2022 |
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From product roadmapping to sprint planning: How to ship software at scale — Snir Kodesh
|
Sep 08, 2022 |
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The 5 phases of Figma’s community-led growth — Claire Butler
|
Sep 01, 2022 |
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Airtable’s path to product-market fit — co-founder Andrew Ofstad on building horizontal products
|
Aug 18, 2022 |
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Operations vs. Algorithms: Advice for scaling startups, from Opendoor CTO Ian Wong
|
Aug 11, 2022 |
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Want to go totally asynchronous? Repeat founder Sidharth Kakkar on building a remote team & autonomous culture
|
Jul 21, 2022 |
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Why COO is the most fluid role in the C-Suite — Sara Clemens, former COO of Twitch & Pandora
|
Jul 07, 2022 |
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From PM to VP of Product: Jiaona Zhang’s career advice from Webflow, Airbnb & Dropbox
|
Jun 23, 2022 |
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“When They Win, You Win”: Russ Laraway unpacks his new guide for the modern manager
|
May 26, 2022 |
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Building a highly-technical enterprise product? Essential advice for product leaders — Nate Stewart of Cockroach Labs
|
May 19, 2022 |
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Building & selling a product into government is tricky — Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins shares critical advice for getting it right
|
Apr 28, 2022 |
|
The art of starting a startup — Gagan Biyani’s advice for generating, validating, and executing on ideas
|
Apr 21, 2022 |
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How to handle comp challenges at every startup stage — Kaitlyn Knopp’s advice from Pequity, Instacart, Cruise & Google
|
Apr 14, 2022 |
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A crash course on comms for founders — Nairi Hourdajian’s early-stage advice from Figma & Uber
|
Mar 31, 2022 |
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How founders can get executive hiring right from startup to scale — advice from Lattice’s Jack Altman
|
Mar 17, 2022 |
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IC? Manager? Technical Founder? How to chart your engineering career path — Stripe & Cocoon’s Amber Feng
|
Mar 10, 2022 |
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Never done sales before? Meka Asonye shares GTM playbooks from Stripe, Mixpanel, and backing founders at First Round
|
Mar 03, 2022 |
|
The startup playbook for expanding internationally — Advice from Faire CEO Max Rhodes
|
Feb 10, 2022 |
|
Usage-based? Hybrid? Tiered? Which pricing model is right for you? — Stripe’s Jeanne DeWitt Grosser
|
Jan 27, 2022 |
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The Product Strategy Playbook that Powered Growth at Tinder & TripAdvisor — Ravi Mehta
|
Jan 20, 2022 |
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After building hundreds of startup brands, Arielle Jackson shares 6 early marketing missteps to avoid
|
Jan 13, 2022 |
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Buy or build? Focus on the core product or innovate? Zendesk CTO Adrian McDermott's advice for scaling
|
Dec 09, 2021 |
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The biggest lessons from building Hubspot, from co-founder harmony to engineering the culture — Dharmesh Shah
|
Dec 02, 2021 |
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The story of why Canva worked: Zach Kitschke shares his lessons from early hire to current CMO
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Nov 18, 2021 |
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Take your design org from good to great with these principles from Segment to Twilio — Hareem Mannan
|
Nov 11, 2021 |
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Instacart co-founder Max Mullen gets tactical on crafting company values and intentionally building culture
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Nov 04, 2021 |
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Growing from founder to CEO: Executive coach Alisa Cohn on how to get better feedback
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Oct 28, 2021 |
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Executive hiring is incredibly difficult to get right — Robinhood COO Gretchen Howard shares her playbook
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Oct 21, 2021 |
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Building a hybrid go-to-market motion — GC Lionetti’s lessons from Confluent, Dropbox & Atlassian
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Oct 07, 2021 |
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Creating physical products and getting feedback from toddlers — KiwiCo’s Sandra Oh Lin
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Sep 30, 2021 |
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How to hire the right marketer at the right time for your startup — Mux & Segment’s Maya Spivak
|
Sep 16, 2021 |
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From developer to CMO — Archana Agrawal’s marketing lessons from Airtable & Atlassian
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Sep 09, 2021 |
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How to pivot your way to product/market fit & other 0-1 lessons — Rupa Health CEO Tara Viswanathan
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Sep 02, 2021 |
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Building an operationally-intensive business and avoiding upside down unit economics — Thirty Madison’s Steve Gutentag
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Aug 19, 2021 |
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Don’t have a UX research team? Jane Davis’ tips from Zoom, Zapier & Dropbox to get you started
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Aug 12, 2021 |
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Getting startup employees to stick around & learning from couples therapy — Flatiron’s Alex Buder Shapiro
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Jul 29, 2021 |
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How to find product/market fit before you start building — UserLeap’s Ryan Glasgow
|
Jul 22, 2021 |
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Nick Caldwell on the engineering cultures that power Microsoft, Reddit, Looker & Twitter
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Jul 15, 2021 |
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“Everyone wants a silver bullet” — Selling lessons from Sam Taylor, of Dropbox, Quip & now Loom
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Jul 08, 2021 |
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The do’s and don’ts of scaling from dozens of employees to thousands — McKenna Quint
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Jun 24, 2021 |
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A look at one repeat founder’s frameworks for validating ideas — Pilot’s Waseem Daher
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Jun 17, 2021 |
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Killing stories and creating categories — Comms tips from Shannon Brayton’s 25+ years in tech
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Jun 10, 2021 |
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People leaders aren’t the CEO of culture, they’re product managers — Credit Karma’s Colleen McCreary
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Jun 03, 2021 |
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Go unreasonably deep on complex problems and build with naivety — Bowery Farming’s Irving Fain
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May 26, 2021 |
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The story behind Slack’s marketing and the leap from marketer to CEO — Abstract’s Kelly Watkins
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May 20, 2021 |
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Ask why it won’t work — Rick Song’s lessons from Square and building from 0 to 1
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May 13, 2021 |
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Product Pitfalls From 0 Customers to the Messy Middle and IPO — Eric Berg on Okta, Intel & Fauna
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May 06, 2021 |
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After leading product & growth teams at Instacart, Wealthfront & LinkedIn, Elliot Shmukler is tackling zero to one as founder & CEO of Anomalo
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Apr 29, 2021 |
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A deep-dive into product-led growth & self-serve strategies — Notion’s & Dropbox’s Kate Taylor
|
Apr 22, 2021 |
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Setting up the people function and training for empathy — Lambda School’s Mark Frein
|
Apr 15, 2021 |
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How Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta Parses Through Mountains of Advice as a First-Time Founder
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Apr 08, 2021 |
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Building engineering orgs and new products at Segment, Dropbox & Facebook — Tido Carriero
|
Apr 01, 2021 |
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Essentials to engaging employees & developing high-quality managers — Qualtrics’ Russ Laraway
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Mar 18, 2021 |
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CEO Jeff Lawson Reflects on the Peaks and Valleys of Twilio’s Growth Story
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Mar 11, 2021 |
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Treat Operational Debt like Tech Debt — Leah Sutton on Elastic’s Distributed Work Playbook
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Mar 04, 2021 |
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“My product is the company” — Kevin Fishner on how startups can build better systems
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Feb 25, 2021 |
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Growing a consumer product from scratch to 1 billion users — Google Photos’ David Lieb
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Feb 18, 2021 |
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An inside look at the system that will outlast Bezos—Bill Carr & Colin Bryar on lessons from Amazon
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Feb 09, 2021 |
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From exec roles to board seats — Anne Raimondi’s leadership lessons for the startup C-Suite
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Feb 04, 2021 |
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Plaid & Dropbox’s Jean-Denis Grèze’s playbook for building an engineering culture of ownership
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Jan 14, 2021 |
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Upstart just went public — CEO Dave Girouard shares why it isn’t a typical success story
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Dec 22, 2020 |
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Unpacking all the non-consensus moves in Atlassian’s story — Jay Simons
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Dec 17, 2020 |
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Partnerships lessons from Stripe & Notion — Cristina Cordova on creating win-win deals
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Dec 10, 2020 |
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Start with the story — Drift’s David Cancel on lessons he’s learned as a 5X founder
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Dec 03, 2020 |
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Lessons from a first-time CEO — Steve El-Hage on learning everything the hard way
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Nov 19, 2020 |
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Product lessons from Cash App & Carbon Health — Ayo Omojola on going “unreasonably deep”
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Nov 12, 2020 |
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Molly Graham’s management lessons from Google, Facebook, Quip & Lambda School
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Oct 29, 2020 |
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Preview of In Depth from First Round
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Oct 15, 2020 |