In Depth

Michael Cieri, CPO at Gusto and former Head of Product at Square, shares key product strategies, building for SMBs, pros and cons of vertical SaaS, moving faster in product teams, developing intuition, and impactful individuals at Square.

Stephanie Berner, Customer Success Executive at LinkedIn, discusses common customer success mistakes, building a world-class customer success org, tactics for hiring exceptional talent, and where customer success fits into the wider org. She shares successful strategies from Box, Medallia, and LinkedIn. Topics also include early-stage customer success metrics, addressing churn problems, building trust with customers, connecting customer success with product development, and determining the size of a customer success team.

Michael Lopp, experienced engineering leader at Apple, Palantir, and Slack, talks about his 'utopia' where engineers have time to create, what makes an excellent engineering leader, navigating internal dynamics between design, engineering, and product, and key lessons from over 30 years in the industry.

Kareem Amin, co-founder of Clay and former VP of Product at The Wall Street Journal, talks about building power users, finding product-market fit, understanding founder psychology, and using data to improve outbound messaging.

Kyle Parrish, Figma's first sales hire, discusses the right time to build a sales function, hiring and scaling a successful sales org, building a unique sales culture, and career advice for ambitious salespeople. They also explore Figma's early sales motion, integrating the first sales hire, and navigating the founder/Head of Sales relationship.

Oliver Jay, former CRO at Asana, discusses common mistakes PLG companies make, how to avoid the 'PLG trap', transitioning to enterprise, building an enterprise sales team, and breaking $10 billion market cap. He also explores the challenges of transitioning from individual to enterprise usage in PLG companies and the growth of Atlassian's product ecosystem.

Steve Blank, the father of modern entrepreneurship, discusses topics such as improving entrepreneurship in the USA, misunderstood aspects of the Lean Startup methodology, traits shared by outlier founders, irrationality of successful entrepreneurs, transitioning from founder to CEO, why some second-time founders fail, building in existing versus new markets, and the future of The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

Neha Narkhede, co-founder at Confluent and Oscilar, discusses the origins of Confluent, Kafka, and Oscilar, how to become a successful second-time founder, advice for monetizing open source products, Neha's unique GTM strategies, and how Confluent ran two businesses within one company.

Jack Krawczyk, Senior Director of Product at Google, discusses key lessons from Bard's development process, ethics in AI, how Bard shipped fast, what separates Bard from competitors, the future of LLM, Generative AI, and AGI, and advice for aspiring AI developers.

Will Larson, CTO at Carta and former CTO at Calm, discusses engineering strategy, common management mistakes, optimizing engineering velocity, organizational policies, and the value of micromanagement in certain situations. They also explore the challenges of resource allocation, diving into the details, measuring engineering velocity, handling feedback, and building fundamentals in engineering.