Steve Blank, an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University, is widely regarded as the father of modern entrepreneurship. Prior to academia, Steve’s career spanned eight different startups. Credited with launching the Lean Startup movement with his May 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story, Steve has changed how startups are built, and how entrepreneurship is taught. Steve is also the renowned author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany and The Startup Owner’s Manual.

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In today’s episode, we discuss:

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Referenced:

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Where to find Steve:

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Where to find Brett:

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Where to find First Round Capital:

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(02:20) Why there aren’t more successful startups

(06:07) Outlier founders have similar childhoods

(10:34) How to be a successful founder CEO

(12:00) Why entrepreneurship should be taught in schools

(16:39) The importance of curiosity

(19:57) The role of instincts in entrepreneurship

(22:31) Having profound beliefs in a vision

(24:17) Building in existing versus new markets

(29:09) What second-time founders can get wrong

(33:49) Why founders need to be irrational

(39:28) Common traits shared by outlier founders

(45:05) Evaluating what makes a startup successful

(49:44) Steve’s assessment of Satya Nadella at Microsoft

(52:26) What it takes to build an incredible company

(60:45) The Four Steps to the Epiphany in 2023

(64:36) The origins of The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Neha Narkhede is a co-founder at Confluent, a data streaming software that raised at a $9.1b valuation in 2021. Neha later co-founded Oscilar, a no-code platform that helps companies detect and manage fraud. Before building these two companies, Neha was a Principal Software Engineer at LinkedIn where she co-created Apache Kafka. Neha is ranked #50 on Forbes’ list of “America’s Richest Self-Made Women 2023” with an estimated net worth of $520m.

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In today’s episode we discuss:

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Referenced:

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Where to find Neha:

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Where to find Brett:

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Where to find First Round Capital:

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(02:14)The origin story of Kafka

(05:24) Co-creating Kafka at LinkedIn

(07:31) Why open sourcing Kafka was a masterstroke

(11:04) The unique nature of Confluent's Zero to One phase

(16:35) Building for a specific customer early on

(18:42) Inside Confluent’s successful launch

(20:12) Establishing Confluent as an enterprise company

(22:00) The role of developer evangelism in Confluent’s success

(23:49) Using developer evangelism in category creation

(26:41) Navigating early co-founder dynamics

(30:06) Leveraging complementary founder skills

(31:56) Advice for future founders

(32:45) Building Confluent with monetization in mind

(34:38) Monetizing open source products

(36:05) GTM for subscription Saas versus consumption SaaS

(39:48) The importance of founder-led GTM sales

(40:58) Neha’s order of operations for GTM sales

(42:33) When to build out outbound sales

(45:28) Adding SaaS to a software business

(49:48) Choosing what to license and what to open source

(53:32) How Confluent’s co-founders decided on SaaS offering

(57:58) Neha’s journey as a second-time founder

(59:48) Building Oscilar differently to Confluent

(64:15) Going from speculation to product realization

(70:00) Solving problems people are willing to pay for

(72:07) Neha’s “proactive research sprint” tactic

(73:48) How Neha has applied this tactic

Jack Krawczyk is a Senior Director of Product at Google, building Bard. Bard is Google’s collaborative, conversational, and experimental AI tool that’s bridging the gap between humans and bots, while addressing ethical considerations around AI. After joining the project in 2020, Jack helped ship Bard in less than four years. Bard sources information directly from the web, and now enables users to inquire about and summarize YouTube videos.

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In today’s episode, we discuss:

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Referenced:

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Where to find Jack Krawczyk:

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Where to find Brett Berson:

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Where to find First Round Capital:

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(02:17) Bard’s origin story

(03:54) Deciding on the application of Bard

(05:59) The ethical considerations around building Bard

(10:19) Why Bard launched to the public so early

(13:30) Risk-taking at big companies versus smaller ones

(16:20) Bard’s early user research

(21:21) Bard versus ChatGPT

(25:01) The cultural and product principles behind Bard

(30:56) Insight into Bard’s impressive development speed

(35:17) Deciding when to ship Bard

(41:41) Why Bard is different from other products Jack has built

(46:30) Evaluating Bard’s original spec

(48:02) Insight into Bard's product roadmap

(56:00) The toughest challenges Bard has faced

(57:50) What’s special about team-building at Bard

(62:54) Addressing Bard’s negative press

(67:49) Advice for aspiring LLM companies

(69:15) Advice for non-LLM companies

(71:05) The biggest barriers to advancing AI

(75:45) How product people can use or build with AI

(77:24) How AI is changing product leadership

(79:20) People who had an outsized impact on Jack

Will Larson is the CTO at Carta, an ownership and equity management platform that raised at a $7.4b valuation in 2021. Prior to joining Carta, Will was CTO at Calm, founded Stripe's Foundation Engineering org, and led Uber’s Platform Engineering people and strategy. Will also writes extensively about engineering leadership, and has authored two books in this area: Staff Engineer, and An Elegant Puzzle.

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In today’s episode we discuss:

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Referenced:

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Where to find Brett Berson:

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Where to find Will Larson:

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Where to find First Round Capital:

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:03) The nuances of taking lessons from old companies

(14:28) The value of writing down engineering principles

(17:03) How to structure a strategy document

(18:48) The 2 parts of any engineering strategy

(21:08) Advice for turning strategy into action

(23:44) Carta's unique "navigator" model

(24:50) The Hidden Variable Problem

(29:59) Explaining, measuring, and optimizing velocity

(35:28) Useful metrics for engineering orgs

(39:08) The balance between micromanagement and understanding details

(43:03) Management anti-patterns

(45:49) How to execute policies whilst managing their exceptions

(47:56) What an excellent engineering executive looks like

(53:53) How Will has evolved as an engineering executive

(56:56) How to communicate with executives

(63:18) Things that derail meetings

(66:10) How to approach presentation feedback

(67:30) A bad sign when working with direct reports

(69:13) Advice for growing as an early-career engineer

(71:11) Will's model for developing engineering teams

(74:33) Sources of inspiration for Will's views on engineering management

Anastasis Germanidis is the Co-Founder & CTO at Runway, an applied AI research company shaping the next era of art, entertainment, and human creativity. Runway has raised $237m and was one of Time Magazine’s “100 most influential companies” in 2023. Runway has been a persistent viral sensation in recent years, and is behind many of the most famous AI demos online.

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In today’s episode we discuss:

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Referenced:

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Where to find Anastasis Germanidis:

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Where to find Todd Jackson:

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Where to find First Round Capital:

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:23) The unique story of how Runway's co-founders met

(08:27) The origins of Runway

(09:28) Forming the initial product

(13:55) Turning Runway into a company

(14:41)Approach to initial market segments

(18:53) Early-adopters

(21:20) The limitations of being “customer-driven”

(25:54) Forming a vocal community

(27:08) Fostering community

(29:05) The progression of Runway's tech and use-cases

(33:08) How they picked users for early release

(34:00) Expanding past the first 100 users of Gen-2

(35:33) Runway’s approach to safety and content moderation

(36:44) Balancing product development and research development

(43:51) Runway's org structure

(45:08) Goal-setting amidst constant change in AI

(46:50) Why Runway doesn't plan very far ahead

(50:26) Advice to early-stage AI founders

(53:11) Will AI replace video editors?

(55:04) When Runway had the most momentum

(56:49) Anastasis' #1 piece of advice

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 Automattic (the company behind WordPress), and in 2015 he founded Vercel.

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In today’s episode we discuss:

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Referenced:

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Where to find Guillermo:

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Where to find Todd Jackson:

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Where to find First Round Capital:

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Timestamps:

(02:35) Becoming an “internet celebrity” at age 11

(08:30) Guillermo's first company: Cloudup

(11:09) Biggest learnings from Cloudup and WordPress

(15:06) The insights behind starting Vercel

(17:11) Sources of validation for Vercel

(20:29) How Vercel formed its V1 product

(23:25) Navigating the early reactions from competitors and users

(25:58) The paradox of developers and how it impacted Next.js

(31:20) Advice on finding product market fit

(34:48) The forces behind a trend towards "Front-end Cloud”

(38:35) Why people now pay so much attention to the front-end

(40:06) How to make an open source business successful

(44:54) Insights on product positioning and category creation

(48:52) Vercel's journey through becoming multi-product

(51:44) Guillermo's take on the future of AI

(53:43) Heuristics for building better product experiences

(55:49) AI insights from Vercel’s customers

(57:37) How AI might change engineering in the next 10-20 years

(62:43) Guillermo's favorite advice

(65:45) Guillermo's advice to himself of 10 years ago

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.

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In today’s episode we discuss:

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Where to find Brett Berson:

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Where to find Ashley Kramer:

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Where to find First Round Capital:

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Referenced:

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro

(02:34) Marketing in closed vs open source companies

(07:40) The role of marketing at GitLab

(09:23) The tensions of being a commercial, open source company

(12:36) Advice for nurturing community and dealing with disagreements

(15:02) GitLab's main marketing metrics

(20:26) The thinking behind GitLab’s org structure, in and around marketing

(28:19) Selling to enterprise as an open core company

(29:53) The difference between open core and open source

(30:39) Serving many different customer segments

(35:10) GitLab's planning process

(39:22) An example of GitLab’s marketing in practice

(42:12) How marketing collaborates with product

(45:55) Marketing lessons from working in an open core company

(49:46) Examples of GitLab's focus on transparency

(52:22) Why GitLab is transparent about their marketing

(54:59) 2 examples of GitLab's uniquely transparent culture

(58:35) The downsides of being a transparent company

(60:13) GitLab's meeting structure and cadence

(62:04) Benefits of having an engineering and product background as CMO

(71:09) People who made an outsized impact on Ashley's career

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.

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In today’s episode we discuss:

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Referenced:

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Where to find Brett Berson:

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Where to find Colin Zima:

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Where to find First Round Capital:

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction

(02:30) Colin's unique entry into Looker

(04:35) How Colin talks to users

(08:20) How Colin's scope at Looker expanded

(10:53) Why and how to provide white-glove customer support

(20:25) Which companies should invest heavily in customer support?

(22:49) Hiring for and hiring from customer support

(27:40) The #1 thing for making customer support effective at scale

(29:32) The culture of customer support at Omni

(32:57) Insights on product strategy

(41:33) The role of intuition vs data in product decisions

(44:25) The merits and downsides of an intuition-driven approach to product

(48:36) Insights from hitting every goal for 24 quarters straight

(55:07) The founding story of Omni

(58:10) How Colin maintains intellectual honesty as a founder

(60:02) How Colin thinks about what to copy vs not copy from Looker

(63:25) How to pick which startup to join

(66:07) The most underrated trait in early stage startup employees

(68:11) Colin's take on founder-market-fit

(69:42] Unpopular opinion on how to hire good PMs

(72:28) The people who made an outsized impact on Colin's career

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 Marketing Manager at Veterans United - a role that had a significant influence on Zapier’s eventual success.

In today’s episode, we discuss:

Referenced:

Where to find Brett Berson

Where to find Wade Foster

Where to find First Round Capital:

Timestamps

(05:46) The fascinating story of Veterans United

(06:55) Lessons from Veterans United

(08:35) The most important things Zapier got right

(10:13) How Zapier built their powerful distribution engine

(16:56) Why Zapier didn't move to focusing on enterprise

(19:06) How Wade thinks about product market fit

(24:26) The role of skill vs luck in Zapier's success

(26:23) What was hard about building Zapier

(30:03) Key lessons on people management

(32:35) Rule of thumb: "don't hire ‘til it hurts”

(36:42) Zapier's #1 hiring mistake

(42:50) How to test for scrappiness in the hiring process

(44:31) Do hiring playbooks transfer between companies?

(50:01) The 12 year evolution of Zapier's product

(53:20) How Zapier makes product decisions

(55:40) How Zapier thought about competition

(60:11) How to foster intellectual honesty in yourself and your org

(65:35) The people who most impacted Wade's worldviews

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 and startup culture. 

In today’s episode we discuss:

Referenced:

Where to find Todd Jackson:

Where to find Laura Behrens Wu:

Where to find First Round Capital:

Timestamps

(02:36) The Shippo origin story

(06:57) Why they pivoted into Shippo

(11:01) How they got their first customers

(13:27) The role of timing in Shippo's early success

(14:40) The value of being an outsider

(17:49) When founder-market-fit is and isn't necessary

(19:07) The path to product-market-fit

(22:06) What kept the Shippo team persisting

(24:41) Advice on talking to users

(29:28) Shippo's fundraising journey

(34:26) Finding product-market-fit again and again

(37:54) The 3 Horizons Framework

(45:04) Shippo's culture and early team

(49:17) Hiring people you can learn from

(50:40) Laura's most impactful hires

(52:12) Frank Slootman's "Sunday Email”

(55:43) Laura's #1 piece of advice for founders

(57:34) The most memorable influences on Laura's career