I see my role at the moment to produce very compelling products. If you just get that right, everything else falls in its place. It's such an exciting market, so much dynamism and the rate of progress seems to be accelerating. Our mission since the beginning has always been to build best-in-class products across the entire lifecycle of AI development. Brian is really great in thinking in terms of systems and processes and incentives. He has designed the entire organization that exists today. Sometimes he will work directly in special projects that are strategically important for a label box company to endure long term.
Our guests are Manu Sharma and Brian Rieger, co-founders of Labelbox.
In this interview, we take a microscope to their co-founder DNA, exploring the ins and outs of how they’ve made the relationship work over the years. We discuss:
- How Manu and Brian came together as co-founders and landed on the idea for Labelbox.
- How they intentionally aligned their skillsets, values and responsibilities before writing a line of code.
- Their rituals for spending valuable time together as the company grows, including thought-starter questions for deep discussions and sharing an executive coach.
- How they run the executive team at scale and sketch out decision rights.
Manu and Brian both have extremely valuable advice to other founders, either those in the early stages of looking for a co-founder, or folks who want to add a little magic to an existing co-founding relationship.
You can follow Manu at @manuaero and Brian at @RiegerB on Twitter.
You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson