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PODCAST

In Depth

Welcome to In Depth, a new podcast from First Round Review that’s dedicated to surfacing the tactical advice founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies and themselves. Hosted by Brett Berson, a partner at First Round, In Depth will cover a lot of ground and a wide range of topics, from hiring executives and becoming a better manager, to the importance of storytelling inside of your organization. But every interview will hit the level of tactical depth where the very best

business management

All Episodes

84:09

How to build a company you’ll run forever | Zack...

In Depth ·

2025/11/06

Zack Kanter is the founder and CEO of Stedi, an API-first healthcare clearinghouse. After bootstrapping a wildly profitable auto-parts business, he sold it to tackle "the most complicated problem" he'd ever encountered: business-to-business transaction exchange. He spent years building EDI infrastructure, threw away the entire codebase eight times, and found extraordinary traction in healthcare. Stedi recently raised a $70M Series B co-led by Stripe and Addition. In this conversation, Brett and Zack

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83:01

Go hard early: How lessons from Verkada shaped...

In Depth ·

2025/10/23

Jake is the founder and CEO of Serval, an AI-driven IT automation and service management platform that just raised $47M in Series A funding this week. Before founding Serval, Jake spent over five years at Verkada, where he led multiple products from 0-1 and helped scale the company across hardware and software. His years at Verkada taught him that winning in enterprise means delivering consumer-quality experiences to business buyers — a lesson that shapes how Serval turns complex IT automation into

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59:18

The pivot that paid off: How fal found explosive...

In Depth ·

2025/10/22

Gorkem Yurtseven is the co-founder and CTO of fal, the generative media platform powering the next wave of image, video, and audio applications. In less than two years, fal has scaled from $2M to over $100M in ARR, serving over 2 million developers and more than 300 enterprises, including Adobe, Canva, and Shopify. In this conversation, Gorkem shares the inside story of fal's pivot into explosive growth, the technical and cultural philosophies driving its success, and his predictions for the future

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69:07

From dorm room to life-saving AI | Prepared’s story |...

In Depth ·

2025/10/01

Michael is the co-founder and CEO of Prepared, the AI assistant for 911 calls that helps dispatchers capture information faster, translate emergency calls in real time, and deliver lifesaving context to first responders. Founded out of Yale in 2019, Prepared grew from a school safety app into a critical platform for emergency communications, disrupting a notoriously tough market. This mission-driven journey just reached a major milestone: Prepared was acquired by Axon, the global public safety

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68:57

Saying yes to everything: How customer obsession...

In Depth ·

2025/09/11

Kiren Sekar is the CPO of Samsara, a company that brings real-time visibility, analytics, and AI to physical operations. Before Samsara, Kiren was an early leader at Meraki, which was acquired by Cisco for $1.2B.In this episode, he walks us through Samsara’s origin story: from hardware hacking in a basement to scaling a cross-industry IoT platform. He shares how early customer feedback loops led to the company’s first product, why starting with the mid-market was a deliberate choice, and how

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72:29

Starting an edtech giant in a “bad market” |...

In Depth ·

2025/09/03

Sam Chaudhary is the co-founder and CEO of ClassDojo, a multi-product education platform used in 95% of U.S. schools and over 180 countries globally to connect teachers, students, and families. In this episode, Sam shares the full arc of building ClassDojo, from early skepticism about edtech and a failed group-making tool, to creating a communication platform loved by millions. In this episode, we discuss: Why ClassDojo was built for consumers (teachers, students and parents) instead of

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66:20

From Chrome extension to $5B platform | Postman’s...

In Depth ·

2025/08/28

Abhinav Asthana is the co-founder and CEO of Postman, the world's leading API collaboration platform used by millions of developers and thousands of companies. What began as a personal itch, a simple Chrome extension Abhinav built to make his own API work easier, became a global phenomenon within weeks.In this episode, we discuss: Making the leap from India to Silicon Valley The moment Abhinav realized Postman could win His principles behind building for developers and non-developers

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64:26

How Canva leveraged unconventional growth levers to...

In Depth ·

2025/08/20

Cameron Adams is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Canva, the design platform valued at $42B as of August 2025, used by over 230 million people every month.Before starting Canva, Cameron was a designer and engineer at Google and co-founded Fluent, an email startup. In this episode, Cameron walks through Canva’s earliest days — from the remarkably fast courtship with co-founders Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, to the counterintuitive product decisions that helped Canva instantly

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65:35

Twitter's former CEO on rebuilding the web for AI |...

In Depth ·

2025/08/14

Parag Agrawal is the co-founder and CEO of Parallel, a startup building search infrastructure for the web’s second user: AIs. Before launching Parallel, Parag spent over a decade at Twitter, where he served as CTO and later CEO during a period of intense transformation, as well as public scrutiny.In this episode, Parag shares what he learned from his time at Twitter, why the web must evolve to serve AI at massive scale, how Parallel is tackling “deep research” challenges by prioritizing accuracy

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61:52

Ignoring Silicon Valley advice to build a $3B fintech...

In Depth ·

2025/08/06

Immad Akhund is the CEO and co-founder of Mercury, a digital banking platform that’s become the go-to financial infrastructure for startups. Before Mercury, Immad spent nearly two decades founding companies, learning the hard way what separates a good idea from a great business. In this episode, Immad shares the hard-earned lessons from launching Mercury as his third startup. He unpacks how he recognized this was the right idea to pursue, what strong product-market fit feels like, and why trying

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60:25

Inside the ex-YC partner’s $15B self driving car...

In Depth ·

2025/08/01

Qasar Younis is the co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition, a leading vehicle intelligence platform that helps companies develop and deploy autonomous systems at scale. In June 2025, the company raised $600M at a $15B valuation. Before Applied Intuition, Qasar was the COO and a group partner at Y Combinator, and earlier founded TalkBin, which was acquired by Google. He’s also held engineering roles at General Motors and Bosch. In today’s episode, we discuss: • The two founder traits Silicon Valley

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70:04

What Braintrust got right about product-market fit |...

In Depth ·

2025/07/24

Ankur Goyal is the founder and CEO of Braintrust, an end-to-end platform for building AI apps. Before that, he founded Impira, a data management platform that was acquired by Figma, where he went on to lead the AI team. Ankur kickstarted his career when he dropped out of college to join the founding team at SingleStore (formerly MemSQL), a formative experience that shaped his views on building for high-bar users.In today’s episode, we discuss: • Ankur’s early lessons on quality from MemSQL •

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55:01

How Gusto built a $9.5 billion company by identifying...

In Depth ·

2025/07/01

Tomer London is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Gusto, the payroll and people platform used by over 400,000 businesses. He grew up helping run his dad’s clothing store in Israel — an experience that sparked his mission to build better tools for small business owners. After moving to the US for a PhD at Stanford, he met his co-founders and started Gusto.In today’s episode, we discuss: Reinventing payroll without any prior experience Why you should hire for humility, not just

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101:24

How rejecting conventional wisdom grew Sentry to a $3...

In Depth ·

2025/06/19

David Cramer is the co-founder of Sentry, the leading open-source error monitoring tool used by over 90,000 companies. A self-taught engineer, he went from 9th grade high school dropout and Burger King manager to building one of the most widely adopted developer tools in the world — by working hard and rejecting conventional wisdom. As of 2022, Sentry is valued at over $3 billion. David now serves as Chief Product Officer, after previously holding roles as CEO and CTO.In this episode, we

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93:04

Inside Linear: Why craft and focus still win in...

In Depth ·

2025/06/05

Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, the project management tool built for high-performance software teams. Since its founding in 2019, Linear has achieved a valuation of $400 million and now counts companies like OpenAI, Ramp and Vercel as customers. Before founding Linear, Karri led design at Airbnb and Coinbase, and previously co-founded Kippt, a bookmarking tool acquired by Coinbase.In today’s episode, we discuss: Karri’s childhood love for computers that shaped his

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79:34

How Wes Kao coaches founders to influence, lead, and...

In Depth ·

2025/05/22

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

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74:59

From reluctant founder to $2B valuation: The story of...

In Depth ·

2025/05/08

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

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60:02

How a weekend hack became a multimillion-dollar AI...

In Depth ·

2025/04/29

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

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68:08

1Password’s growth story | How they went from...

In Depth ·

2025/04/24

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

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83:29

Scrappy tactics and a huge post-COVID pivot | Owner’s...

In Depth ·

2025/03/27

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

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164 results

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