
BUILD with Blake Bartlett
It takes 3 ingredients to build a software startup in today’s wild market: people, product and growth. Easier said than done. BUILD is here to help by featuring conversations between venture capitalist Blake Bartlett and the smartest folks in software. OpenView is a VC firm that invests in amazing companies like Datadog, Expensify and Calendly. Visit ov.vc for more details.
Latest episodes

Jan 29, 2020 • 25min
How Slack Balances the Needs of the User and Buyer in the End User Era
Fareed Mosavat, Director of Product at Slack, joins us for a second appearance on BUILD.
Learn how Slack’s product teams handle product prioritization at scale, what Fareed thinks about giving product teams a revenue quota, and what he means when he talks about ‘zone-era defense’.

Jan 13, 2020 • 26min
Marketing in a PLG Company: Insights from Plaid’s former Head of Marketing
While Season 7 has come to a close, we’re back with a special bonus episode! When businesses are building out their product-led strategy, when and how does marketing come into play? OV Partner, Devon McDonald, sat down with Helen Min, former Head of Marketing at Plaid, live at INBOUND to discuss this question and the importance of investing in marketing (particularly product marketing) early on in a business’ journey. Helen also touches upon marketing to developers (hint: invest in your community) and the best advice she’s received from mentors.

Dec 11, 2019 • 22min
How Calendly Serves 5,000,000 People on a Monthly Basis
The final episode of Season 7 features Tope Awotona, Founder & CEO of Calendly. He shares how they balance feedback with such an expansive user base, why he felt like he had an unfair advantage in the scheduling space and why they provide support even for free users.

Dec 4, 2019 • 40min
Webflow’s Mission to Empower as Many People as Possible
This episode features Vlad Magdalin, Co-founder & CEO of Webflow, a business that took four tries to get off the ground. Find out how they think about creating a product that's applicable to as many people as possible and why adding incremental value is more important than shipping a perfect product.

Nov 27, 2019 • 28min
The Road to 7,000,000+ Users with Postman
Abhinav Asthana is the Co-founder & CEO of Postman, a collaborative environment for API development that has scaled to more than 7 million users. Abhinav shares how they balance empathy and data, and how a product led growth approach leads to fundamentally better products.

Nov 20, 2019 • 24min
How Airtable Navigates Hypergrowth with the Customer First
Liat Bycel is the VP of Customer Engagement at Airtable. She shares how they made the decision to bring all customer-facing teams under one roof and how that decision has furthered their growth and made the customer experience more cohesive.

Nov 6, 2019 • 30min
Systems Engineering for Platforms & Organizations
This episode of BUILD features Alex Marinos, Founder & CEO of one of the newest members of the OV portfolio, balena. Find out how they pivoted to a product led growth strategy and the solution they built to minimize pain for employees as a distributed team.

Oct 30, 2019 • 29min
Pendo’s Culture & The Power of The Product Experience
Pendo was founded on three main principles: delivering an incredible product, putting customers first and creating a culture that attracts the best people possible. Todd Olson, Founder & CEO, shares exactly how they've executed on each principle and how the product empowers customers to deliver amazing experiences to their users.

Oct 23, 2019 • 40min
How Auth0 Scales with Simplicity
Eugenio Pace is the Co-founder & CEO of Auth0. Fundamentally, their product answers two questions: Are you who you say you are, and what can you do? Find out how they've managed to answer these questions in a way that gives users the flexibility to tailor the solution to their specific needs with the simplicity to scale.

Oct 16, 2019 • 30min
Inside GitLab's Values: Results, Iteration & Transparency
On this episode, Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder & CEO of GitLab, shares their top three values and how they came to be. Find out why they're so public about how the company operates and Sid's perspective on why values shouldn't be universally positive. You'll also get a sense of what they do to ship more features every month than some competitors do in a full year.