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 alike
The early monetization experiments that led to their SaaS model
The value of progressive complexity in product design
How community building became a powerful growth lever
And much more…

References:

Abhijit Kane: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhijitkane/
Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/
Ankit Sobti: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankit-sobti/
Figma: https://www.figma.com/
Kong Inc.: https://konghq.com/
National University of Singapore: https://nus.edu.sg/
Postman: https://www.postman.com/
Ram Gupta: : https://www.linkedin.com/in/ram-gupta-39b9711/
Slack: https://slack.com/
Stripe: https://stripe.com/
Stewart Butterfield: https://www.linkedin.com/in/butterfield/
Yahoo: http://yahoo.com/

Where to find Abhinav:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhinavasthana/
Twitter/X: https://x.com/a85

Where to find Brett:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson

Where to find First Round Capital:

Website: https://firstround.com/
First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast

Timestamps:

(01:18) Why early computer access changed everything

(03:39) The first taste of the entrepreneurial bug

(09:58) Building BITS360 in college

(11:14) Curating entrepreneurial taste

(15:49) The ventures that didn’t make it

(20:53) The problems that preceded Postman

(29:56) How Postman’s team was formed

(34:01) Why clear roles prevent chaos

(34:50) Scrappy startup life in the early days

(36:26) Postman’s path to monetization

(39:59) Building a truly collaborative platform

(43:00) Navigating market and customer needs

(46:02) Cracking the go-to-market code

(49:39) Bridging the developer-enterprise divide

(54:43) The open-source dilemma

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