All of our First-time founders articles

How to lower barriers to change when building and selling products — Jonah Berger’s advice for founders

Our guest today is Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the bestselling author of “Contagious” and “Invisible Influence.” Today we’re chatting about his follow-up book, “The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind.”

How to scale your co-founder relationship alongside your startup — Manu Sharma & Brian Rieger of Labelbox

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.

A crash course on founder-led customer success — Sydney Strader’s lessons from Catalyst & InVision

Today’s episode is with Sydney Strader, VP of Customer Success at Catalyst. Prior to joining Catalyst, Sydney was the VP of Customer Success at InVision.In our conversation we focus on founder-led customer success, an area of early company building that’s often overlooked.

The founder’s guide to making your first few hires — Steven Bartel on recruiting at Gem & Dropbox

Today’s episode is with Steven Bartel, co-founder and CEO of Gem.Before building the talent acquisition platform, Steven was an early engineer at Dropbox, where he spent 5 years working on analytics, Dropbox Paper, and hiring as the company grew from 25 to 1500 people.

Management

A Tactical Guide to Working with EAs: How to Make Delegation Your Superpower

Sam Corcos, co-founder & CEO of Levels, admits he's obsessive about optimizing his time. He shares the ins and outs of how he delegates 400 tasks a month with this ultra-specific guide to working with executive assistants.

Engineering

How to Chart Your Engineering Career Path: IC, Manager or Technical Founder?

From early employee to technical founder: Amber Feng shares essential lessons for engineers up and down the org chart, drawing from her 8-year career at Stripe and becoming a technical founder of Cocoon.

A crash course on comms for founders — Nairi Hourdajian’s early-stage advice from Figma & Uber

Today’s episode is with Nairi Hourdajian, the VP of Communications, Content and Community Marketing at Figma.Prior to joining Figma, Nairi was the Chief Marketing Officer at Canaan, an early-stage venture capital firm.

Starting Up

23 Tactical Company Building Lessons, Learned From Scaling Stripe & Notion

From Stripe to Notion, Cristina Cordova has worked on some of the biggest products in tech. She shares tactical tidbits on what she’s learned about about scaling companies and shaping your career.

People & Culture

Run This Diagnostic to Thoughtfully Build (and Evaluate) Your Startup’s Culture

There are tons of reads on why company culture matters, but few on how to actually architect it. And it’s rarely examined at the co-founding duo, 5-person team, or 30-person startup level. Laura Del Beccaro aims to change that by sharing this 3-step framework she’s leaned on while building Sora.

Never done sales before? Meka Asonye shares GTM playbooks from Stripe, Mixpanel, and backing founders at First Round

Today’s episode is with Meka Asonye, a Partner at First Round Capital. This week marks the one year anniversary since he joined, making the transition from seasoned GTM leader to full-time early-stage investor.

The startup playbook for expanding internationally — Advice from Faire CEO Max Rhodes

Today’s episode is with Max Rhodes, the co-founder and CEO of Faire, an online wholesale marketplace that connects independent retailers and brands.

Starting Up

The Company-Building Cornerstones Every Founder Needs to Focus On — Advice From HubSpot’s Dharmesh Shah

Dharmesh Shah has spent the last 15 years as co-founder & CTO of HubSpot. He pinpoints the inflection points and key decisions that other founders face in the early days, from choosing a co-founder to crafting the culture, and shares unconventional advice.