Today’s episode is with Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Twilio. He’s spent the last 13 years building and running the company, including leading through a successful IPO in 2016.    In today’s conversation, Jeff looks back on some of the peaks and valleys in Twilio’s journey, and his own evolution as the CEO. He dives into some of the initial wins, like going against conventional wisdom to launch a second product in the early days of Twilio. He’s equally game to unpack some of the mistakes along Twilio’s path — like when one of their biggest customers, Uber, significantly scaled back their investment in Twilio’s products.    Jeff also opens up the pages from the playbook he pulled from his time at Amazon, chiefly Twilio’s “write it down” company value, and makes his case for why PowerPoint is a terrible decision-making tool. He takes us inside Twilio’s C-suite, including why they do post-mortems when things go right — not just when they go wrong. He also sketches out his “aha” moment that his executive team needed to argue more.    Today’s conversation is a must-listen for company-builders across all industries and growth stages, as well as folks that have hopes to someday occupy these same seats.    Jeff’s new book is titled “Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century.” https://www.amazon.com/Ask-Your-Developer-Software-Developers/dp/0063018292   To learn more about how Twilio approaches company values, check out this article on First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/draw-the-owl-and-other-company-values-you-didnt-know-you-should-have   You can follow Jeff on Twitter at @jeffiel.   You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @twitter.com/firstround and @twitter.com/brettberson 

Today’s episode is with Leah Sutton, SVP of Global HR at Elastic. Leah’s been in the HR space for over 20 years, and now leads everything from HR operations to recruiting and employee engagement for Elastic’s fully-distributed employee base, which includes over 2,000 spread across 40 countries and 48 states.  In today’s conversation, we look closely under the hood of what Leah calls Elastic’s “distributed by design” company DNA. She walks us through her learnings tackling challenges companies now are paying close attention to — including how to interview for leaders that can manage well remotely — and even dives into the nitty-gritty details about payroll and compensation across regions. She also outlines a few of the tactics Elastic has leaned on to smooth over some of the language and cultural barriers that often trip up global leadership teams. Leah zooms out even further to discuss Elastic’s source code, which she describes as not so much a traditional list of values but more the things that make Elastic, Elastic. Finally, she sketches out her pitch for why companies should talk about operational debt as much as they do technical debt. Today’s conversation is a must-listen for HR leaders and founders — and for folks on the hunt for a more systematic approach to the new challenges of distributed work.   Learn more about Elastic’s source code here: https://www.elastic.co/about/our-source-code   You can follow Leah on Twitter at @leahesutton   You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @twitter.com/firstround and @twitter.com/brettberson 

Kevin Fishner, Chief of Staff at HashiCorp, discusses how they run meetings, set and track goals, and make decisions through writing. He shares tactical advice for annual planning, including business simulations and scorecard systems. The episode provides valuable insights for managers and leaders on making teams more effective.

Today’s episode is with David Lieb, the Director of Google Photos. Previously, he was the founder/CEO of Bump, an app that allowed users to swap contact information by physically bumping phones. Bump was acquired by Google in 2013, and formed the basis for the design of Google Photos, which launched in 2015 and passed the 1 billion users mark in 2019. In today’s conversation, David takes us through that journey of building a consumer product from scratch and scaling it to over a billion users in just four years. He shares the mistakes they made while building Bump, what he learned from navigating big company politics at Google, and how they pinpointed the problem in the photo-sharing space. From the precise questions they asked in user interviews, to how they stack ranked for the canonical users, there’s tons of wisdom in here for early product builders. There’s also lessons from operating at Google’s scale as well, including how his approach to planning and org design have evolved. Learn more about the Spotify “squads’ model that David mentioned in the org design section here: https://medium.com/pm101/spotify-squad-framework-part-i-8f74bcfcd761    You can follow David on Twitter at @dflieb, and you can learn more about his approach to building products on First Round Review: https://firstround.com/review/cognitive-overhead-is-your-products-overlord-topple-it-with-these-tips/    You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @twitter.com/firstround and @twitter.com/brettberson 

Bill Carr and Colin Bryar, former Amazon executives, share insights on Amazon's culture of innovation, including the origin stories of the Kindle, AWS, and Prime businesses. They discuss the importance of full-time focus on innovation, customer obsession, diving deep, and developing controllable input metrics. They also explore the significance of balancing customer interests, transparent policies, and Amazon's structured interviewing process.

Today’s episode is with Anne Raimondi, Chief Customer Officer at Guru, and independent board member at Asana, Gusto and Patreon. Previously, she was part of the founding team at Blue Nile, spent five years in product marketing at eBay, and led marketing as an early employee at SurveyMonkey, before pivoting to operations as an SVP at Zendesk.  In today’s conversation, Anne pulls on threads from across her impressive career as a founder, operator, executive and board member to deliver spot-on advice for folks with an eye for the C-suite. From what enables the best executives to scale up, to how she’s approached her own 30, 60, 90-day plans as a brand-new hire — she doles out plenty of prescriptions for getting this critical transition right and avoiding common traps. She also opens up her playbook for approaching executive recruiting, interviewing and hiring, and when to mine executive talent internally rather than defaulting to external hires. Finally, she opens up about her board work, sharing the essential ingredients for productive, impactful boards across every growth stage.  Today’s conversation is a must-listen for executives, founders and board members looking to level up their leadership frameworks — and for folks who someday hope to step into these same shoes. You can follow Anne on Twitter at @anneraimondi and you can learn more about her approach to diagnosing and repairing team trust on First Round Review: https://firstround.com/review/use-this-equation-to-determine-diagnose-and-repair-trust/ You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @twitter.com/firstround and @twitter.com/brettberson 

Jean-Denis Grèze, Head of Engineering at Plaid and former Director of Engineering at Dropbox, shares insights on leadership, pragmatism over perfection, team motivation, KPI tracking, and fostering ownership mentality in engineering. He emphasizes prioritizing technical debt, aligning team performance with business goals, and hiring strategies for engineering roles. A must-listen for technical leaders looking for actionable advice.

Dave Girouard, CEO and co-founder of Upstart and former President of Google Enterprise, shares insights on starting and growing Upstart, the challenges of fundraising, the successful pivot, and his management philosophies. He emphasizes the importance of believing in the product, shares helpful frameworks for startup leaders, and discusses managing the executive team.

Today’s episode is with Jay Simons, who’s currently a partner at Bond and serves on the boards of Hubspot and Zapier. But before that, he had a long run as the President of Atlassian, which develops software collaboration tools like Jira, Confluence and Trello. In today’s conversation, Jay dives into Atlassian’s growth story, from what’s misunderstood or not talked about enough, to the strategic choices that went against the grain. He shares an inside look at how Atlassian built a product that can sell itself and deferred short-term openings for more durable long-term opportunity. In addition to unpacking what he calls their “three-legged stool” of self-service, a global network of channel partners, and eventual enterprise upselling, Jay gives us a deep dive into their pricing strategy and how they thought about exploring adjacent product areas. From spinning the flywheels of a remarkable product and a high-velocity self-service funnel, to building a culture that focuses on first principles, there’s tons of great advice in here — not only for go-to-market and revenue leaders, but for anyone who works at a startup. This blog post from Intercom has the flywheel graphic that Jay mentioned in the episode. https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/scale-how-atlassian-built-a-20-billion-dollar-company-with-no-sales-team/  You can follow Jay on Twitter at @jaysimons. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @twitter.com/firstround and @twitter.com/brettberson 

Today’s episode is with Cristina Cordova, Notion’s Head of Platform & Partnerships. Previously, she was the 28th employee and the first partnerships hire at Stripe, where she cultivated partnerships with companies like Shopify, Squarespace and Apple, built out the BD org, and led their new Corporate Card effort.  After a decade in partnerships, Cristina has bagged big deals, honed her negotiation skills, built out teams — and made plenty of mistakes she hopes others can learn from. In today’s conversation, Cristina pulls from across her career to share the inside scoop on deals that had an unexpected outsized impact — as well as the ones that went sideways.  She also shares her playbook for being a startup’s first partnership hire, including the three critical areas to focus on first, and the common traps to avoid. It’s also full of actionable tactics on everything from dealing with partners trying to push you around, to how to hire for partnerships roles and structure the org chart. Today’s conversation is a must-listen of course for folks currently in or hoping to break into partnerships, platform or BD roles, but Cristina also shares great tactics for getting better at negotiating, as well as some fascinating stories of how Stripe and Notion scaled — meaning there’s tons to learn here for everyone. You can follow Cristina on Twitter at @cjc. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson