In Depth
Welcome to In Depth, a podcast from The 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 lear...
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Building Zipline: From launch disaster to drone-delivery giant | Keller Cliffton (Co-founder, CEO)
<p>Keller Cliffton is the co-founder and CEO of Zipline, the world's largest commercial autonomous delivery system, which today serves 5,000 hospitals across multiple countries and saves an estimated 17,000 lives per year. In this episode, Keller breaks down his extreme hiring philosophy that has powered Zipline for over a decade. He also walks through Zipline’s full origin story: from a near-dead home robot startup to a scrappy bet on drone blood delivery in Rwanda, to 135 million autonomous miles flown.</p> <p>In today's episode, we discuss:</p> Why Zipline hires teenagers over PhDs Why the best startup employees are "heat-seeking mi...
Snowflake’s first sales hire on scaling from $0 to $3.5B | Chris Degnan (Former CRO, Snowflake)
<p>Chris Degnan was the first sales hire at Snowflake and spent 11 years scaling the company from zero to $3.5 billion in revenue as its CRO, working alongside four different CEOs and learning from each one. In this episode, Chris breaks down what it actually takes to scale an enterprise sales organization, why MEDDIC is the methodology every founder should know, and what working under Frank Slootman taught him about firing fast, taking feedback and finding the fakers in your team.</p> <p>In today's episode, we discuss:</p> What the CRO job looks like at $10M vs. $1B+ Why sales...
Why 90% of CROs will fall behind in the next 2 years | Stevie Case (CRO, Vanta)
<p>Stevie Case is the CRO of Vanta, the trust management platform serving everyone from founders to Fortune 100 CISOs. A former pro-video gamer who stumbled into sales through a mentor's bet, Stevie has built one of the most unconventional paths to the C-suite in tech. In this episode, she unpacks why early revenue hires fail, what separates a true CRO from a VP of Sales, and why she believes fewer than 10% of current CROs will thrive by 2028.</p> <p>In today's episode, we discuss:</p> Why early revenue hires fail What a top 1% CRO actually does The scaling mistake Stevie...
Figma is not the source of truth | Ryan Lucas (VP of Design, Rippling)
<p>In the second Executive Function episode, Brett sits down with Ryan Lucas, VP of Design at Rippling. Before Rippling, Ryan led design at Retool and co-founded multiple startups, bringing a rare founder's perspective to design leadership. A trained industrial designer, Ryan traces the roots of modern software design back 2,000 years to make the case that products must be useful, usable, and desirable - and above all, used.</p> <p>In today's episode, we discuss:</p> Why design leaders who stop designing stop leading The four pillars every design manager must master How to delegate when you're a perfectionist Why...
Executive Function: Building systems that can make decisions without you | Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (COO, Vercel)
<p>In the first Executive Function episode, Brett sits down with Jeanne De Witt Grosser, Chief Operating Officer at Vercel. Before Vercel, Jeanne spent nearly a decade at Stripe, where she built and scaled global revenue teams and led product partnerships. In this conversation, she unpacks what separates good executives from extraordinary ones, shares her rigorous executive hiring process, and reveals the brutally honest performance review feedback she'll never forget.</p> <p>In today's episode, we discuss:</p> What it takes to operate at 30,000 feet and ground level simultaneously The leap from frontline manager to manager of managers Inside Jeanne's...
Building Meter for decades, not an exit | Anil Varanasi (Co-founder and CEO)
<p>Anil Varanasi is the co-founder and CEO of Meter, which provides full-stack networking infrastructure as a service for businesses. Since founding Meter with his brother Sunil in 2015, Anil has been playing a distinctly long game in one of the most entrenched markets in technology, betting on vertical integration, business model innovation, and a multi-decade time horizon. In this conversation, he unpacks Meter’s origin story, from four-plus years of heads-down R&D, and shares how his unconventional approach to planning, management, and pace keeps him excited to run the company for decades.</p> <p>In today’s episode, we disc...
How Harness runs 16 “startups within a startup” at scale | Jyoti Bansal (Co-founder and CEO)
<p>Jyoti Bansal is the co-founder and CEO of Harness, the software delivery platform used by thousands of engineering teams, and previously founded AppDynamics, which he led from inception to a multibillion-dollar acquisition by Cisco. In this episode, Jyoti unpacks what it really takes to move from mid-market to enterprise, why he thinks in terms of “product-market-sales fit,” and how he structures Harness as a collection of “startups within a startup” to launch multiple “best-of-breed” products.</p> <p>In today’s episode, we discuss:</p> Why companies get stuck in the mid-market and struggle to move up into enterprise Why Jyoti delibera...
How to build a company you’ll run forever | Zack Kanter (Founder and CEO of Stedi)
<p>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 discuss why venture capital means "going pro," why execution is never actually a moat, and how "eating glass" became Stedi's competitive advantage.</p> <p><br></p> <p>...
Go hard early: How lessons from Verkada shaped Serval's AI agents for IT teams | Jake Stauch (Founder and CEO)
<p>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 something that feels magical.</p> <p>In this episode, Jake and Brett dive into the lessons from Verkada that in...
The pivot that paid off: How fal found explosive growth in generative media | Gorkem Yurtseven (Co-founder and CTO)
<p>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 of AI-generated media.</p> <p>In today's episode, we discuss:</p> How fal pivoted from data infrastructure to generative inference ...
