In Depth

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 Auto...

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 mo...

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 toda...

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 M...

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 a...

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 th...

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 R...

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....

Kellan Elliott-McCrea is a Head of Engineering at Adobe, overseeing Frame.io, a newly acquired video review and collaboration platform. He is known for his experience and expertise as an engineering leader. He was previously a VPE at Dropbox, and CTO at Etsy where he built and led a team of 300 people, from tech and platform reboot through to IPO. Kellan also built and scaled teams at Flickr, and...

Alex Kracov is the CEO and Co-Founder at Dock, and the former VP of Marketing at Lattice. Alex joined Lattice as the first marketer and third employee, and he helped to grow the business from seed to 1850+ customers. Prior to Lattice, Alex was a consultant at Blue State Digital — the team that elected President Obama and orchestrated projects at Google. Since leaving Lattice in 2021, Alex co-found...

Anique Drumright is the COO at Loom, a video communication tool for streamlining workflows. Loom has raised over $200M, and was last valued at $1.5B. Anique has a proven track record across product development, executive leadership, and building high-performing organizations. Before joining Loom, Anique was the VP of Product at TripActions, where she scaled the team over 8x globally, and she has a...

Noah Desai Weiss is the Chief Product Officer of Slack, and has an accomplished track record inside and outside of the company. He started Slack’s Search, Learning, and Intelligence division, led the Self-Service (SMB) Business, and led the Expansion and Virtual HQ product areas (responsible for Huddles, Clips, and more). Before joining Slack, Noah was the SVP of Product Management at Foursquare (...

Jack Altman is the co-founder and CEO of Lattice, a people success platform for building engaged, high-performing teams. Lattice has raised over $330M, and was last valued at $3B. He is an expert in building company culture, and wrote a book on the topic, titled: “People Strategy”. In today's episode, we discuss: The importance of self-awareness and how to develop it The value of difficult convers...

Tara Seshan is the Head of Product at Watershed, a climate platform that companies use to measure, report, and reduce their carbon emissions. Before joining Watershed, Tara was Head of Product at Stripe throughout the launch of Stripe Billing and Stripe Treasury. As a Thiel Fellow and experienced multi-product builder, Tara brings a wealth of experience with 0-1 SaaS products. In today's episode,...

Our guest today is Melissa Tan, GM of Self-Service and Head of Growth at Webflow and formerly Head of Growth and Monetization for Dropbox Business. In today’s conversation, she unpacks the nuances between the two PLG businesses and how growth strategy changes for a more complex product like Webflow, including:  Designing and structuring a growth org The right way to tackle goal-setting How Webflow...

Our guest today is Marcel Weekes, VP of Product Engineering at Figma and former VP of Engineering at Slack. In today’s conversation, he unpacks why most startups get it wrong when they uplevel someone from IC engineer to eng manager and unfurls what stellar engineering management looks like at high-growth companies, including: Setting appropriate expectations and goals  Turbocharging the team’s ef...

Todd Jackson is back on the mic to guest host another product-focused episode. This time, he chats with Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran, co-founder and CEO of Luminai, a B2B software tool that helps automate any manual process down to just one click.  Dinakaran’s personal and professional story is one that you do not want to miss. A former Rubik’s Cube champion and back-to-back Hackathon winner, Dinakaran...

Our guest today is Douglas Hanna, Chief Operating Officer at Grafana Labs.  Grafana Labs is an observability stack built around Grafana, a leading open-source technology for dashboards and visualization. Douglas is a seasoned revenue leader, previously leading operations and GTM strategy at Zendesk. At Grafana Labs, Douglas has been instrumental in scaling GTM at the open-source company — building...

Today’s conversation is with Jessica McKellar, co-founder and CTO of Pilot, which is the largest accounting firm for startups. She’s been working on Pilot for the last 6 years with her two co-founders, Waseem Daher and Jeff Arnold. But what makes this founding trio super unique is that they’ve stuck together in not just one, but three different startups.  As repeat founders, the Pilot team has lea...

Our guest today is Artem Kroupenev, VP of Strategy at Augury.  Augury is a leader in a category they helped to define known as “machine health.” The company sells products that combine hardware, AI, and SaaS within industrial manufacturing.  Artem joined the team at the very beginning of its journey and helped shape strategies for how the team measured product-market fit, go-to-market, and eventua...

Our guest today is Jeanette Mellinger, Head of UX Research at BetterUp and our User Research Expert in Residence at First Round. In today’s conversation, Jeanette unspools her tested playbook for high-quality customer interviews, with particular advice for founders in the very early days of validating an idea, including:  The three-step framework for a thorough user-research process The biggest mi...

Our guest today is Claire Hughes Johnson, former COO of Stripe and author of the new book, “Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building.”  Claire joined Stripe as its COO back in 2014 and, over the course of her nearly seven years in the company’s executive suite, she oversaw rapid growth as Stripe scaled from under 200 employees to over 7,000. Prior to Stripe, she spent 10 years a...

Our guest today is Rachel Hepworth, Head of Marketing at Notion.  Rachel currently runs growth marketing at Notion, and sees her job as bringing process and control to all of Notion’s different marketing channels. Before joining Notion, Rachel launched the first growth marketing team at Slack, laying down the tracks for a well-oiled go-to-market strategy that could be measured easily.  Much like S...

Our guest today is Nadia Singer, Chief People Officer at Figma.  Nadia joined Figma in 2020 and has seen explosive growth in her own career alongside the collaborative design platform’s. Before Figma, Singer was a talent expert who has hired hundreds of talented folks at places like Quora, Facebook and Google.  In our conversation today, we dive deep into what makes someone a terrific talent evalu...

Todd Jackson is back on the mic to guest host another product-focused episode this week with Christina Cacioppo, the co-founder and CEO of Vanta.  Vanta is the leading automated security and compliance platform, with thousands of businesses relying on the product to get compliant (and to stay that way).   After toying with some initial ideas, like a voice assistant for biologists, Christina starte...