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In Depth

In Depth

Auteur(s): First Round
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À propos de cet audio

 Welcome to In Depth, a new podcast from First Round Review that’s dedicated to surfacing the tactical advice founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies and themselves. Hosted by Brett Berson, a partner at First Round, In Depth will cover a lot of ground and a wide range of topics, from hiring executives and becoming a better manager, to the importance of storytelling inside of your organization. But every interview will hit the level of tactical depth where the very best advice is found. We hope you’ll join us. Subscribe to “In Depth” now and learn more at firstround.com Développement commercial et entrepreneuriat Entrepreneurship Gestion et leadership Économie
Épisodes
  • How to build a company you’ll run forever | Zack Kanter (Founder and CEO of Stedi)

    How to build a company you’ll run forever | Zack Kanter (Founder and CEO of Stedi)
    Nov 6 2025
    Zack Kanter is the founder and CEO of Stedi, an API-first healthcare clearinghouse. After bootstrapping a wildly profitable auto-parts business, he sold it to tackle "the most complicated problem" he'd ever encountered: business-to-business transaction exchange. He spent years building EDI infrastructure, threw away the entire codebase eight times, and found extraordinary traction in healthcare. Stedi recently raised a $70M Series B co-led by Stripe and Addition. In this conversation, Brett and Zack discuss why venture capital means "going pro," why execution is never actually a moat, and how "eating glass" became Stedi's competitive advantage. In today’s episode, we discuss: How 16-year-old Zack turned $2,500 into a wholesale empire Why bootstrapping means being "constrained by capital" and how VC removes that ceiling Why Zack rebuilt their EDI product eight times before launch The snake swallowing a deer: what extreme product-market fit really looks like What software companies can learn from discount retail and Toyota Why Stedi’s new hires are told "everything’s your fault now" And much more Where to find Zack: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zkanter Twitter/X: https://x.com/zackkanter 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 References: Aetna: https://www.aetna.com/ Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/ AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/ Blue Cross Blue Shield: https://www.bcbs.com/ Change Healthcare: https://www.changehealthcare.com/ Cigna: https://www.cigna.com/ Clay: https://www.clay.com/ Costco: https://www.costco.com/ Ford Motor Company: https://www.ford.com/ GM: https://www.gm.com/ HIPAA overview (HHS): https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/index.html Jeff Bezos: https://x.com/JeffBezos Kanban / TPS (Toyota): https://global.toyota/en/company/vision-and-philosophy/production-system Microsoft Teams: https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-teams NetSuite: https://www.netsuite.com/ O’Reilly Auto Parts: https://www.oreillyauto.com/ Peter Thiel: https://x.com/peterthiel Porter’s five forces: https://www.isc.hbs.edu/strategy/pages/the-five-forces.aspx "Reality has a surprising amount of detail": https://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail Slack: https://slack.com/ Stedi: https://www.stedi.com/ Summit Racing: https://www.summitracing.com/ Target: https://www.target.com/ Walmart: https://www.walmart.com/ Zapier: https://zapier.com/ Timestamps: (01:24) Zack’s first business (08:54) Why the first customer is tricky (10:12) The downside of bootstrapping (11:42) Why venture capital is like “going pro” (14:20) The confusion between ownership vs. control (16:08) Building a company you don’t want to leave (20:46) Do things better than other people (24:49) Stedi’s early years (31:43) Physical vs. digital product-market fit (34:41) How Stedi scaled decision-making (40:08) Stedi’s journey to product-market fit (45:22) Finding founder-approach fit (50:42) “All software is a cascade of miracles” (52:52) The surprising lessons from discount retail (57:50) How the Toyota production system influences software (1:01:31) What it means to be a high-agency person (1:03:09) The core trait Zack looks for when hiring (1:02:57) Maintaining conviction in unconventional practice (1:14:19) When should you start to hire managers? (1:17:42) “Reality has a surprising amount of detail”
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    1 h et 24 min
  • Go hard early: How lessons from Verkada shaped Serval's AI agents for IT teams | Jake Stauch (Founder and CEO)

    Go hard early: How lessons from Verkada shaped Serval's AI agents for IT teams | Jake Stauch (Founder and CEO)
    Oct 23 2025
    Jake is the founder and CEO of Serval, an AI-driven IT automation and service management platform that just raised $47M in Series A funding this week. Before founding Serval, Jake spent over five years at Verkada, where he led multiple products from 0-1 and helped scale the company across hardware and software. His years at Verkada taught him that winning in enterprise means delivering consumer-quality experiences to business buyers — a lesson that shapes how Serval turns complex IT automation into something that feels magical. In this episode, Jake and Brett dive into the lessons from Verkada that inspired Serval's founding, what it takes to disrupt entrenched enterprise categories, and practical tips for getting deeply embedded with customers and hiring high-quality candidates. In today’s episode, we discuss: Why building “in existing categories” can be more powerful than creating new ones The lessons from Verkada that shaped Serval's platform strategy The customer interview question that unlocked the IT buyer’s hidden pain points How Serval's automation builder uses AI to generate code-based workflows Redefining engineering and PM roles with forward-deployed engineers Keeping the hiring bar high in an AI-native startup Why there’s a “land grab” moment right now in enterprise AI And much more... Where to find Jake: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakestauch/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/jakeserval 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 References: Alex McLeod: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexmcleodio/ Clay: https://www.clay.com Cloudflare: https://www.cloudflare.com Cursor: https://cursor.sh Filip Kaliszan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaliszan/ Hans Robertson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hansrobertson Linear: https://linear.app Okta: https://www.okta.com Rippling: https://www.rippling.com Serval: https://www.serval.com/ ServiceNow: https://www.servicenow.com Verkada: https://www.verkada.com Workday: https://www.workday.com Timestamps: (02:25) Lessons from holding different product roles (07:29) Turning “hard mode” into a moat (10:49) The early days of Serval (12:59) Scratching the founder itch (14:57) Unconventional interview techniques (17:47) Solving core interview challenges (21:10) Planning the early product roadmap (23:03) The surprising power of patience (26:12) Serval’s impressive technical advantage (27:35) Disrupting legacy incumbents (31:13) Building for mid-market and enterprise (33:35) Serval’s enduring roadmap (36:08) How to sell to an existing market (39:16) The evolving role software plays (43:55) Building for AI that didn’t exist yet (49:49) Serval’s forward-deployed engineers (58:31) The hybrid PM-GM (1:00:27) “You can over-prioritize” (1:02:48) The unexpected value of panic buttons (1:04:50) What Serval looks for in new talent (1:07:01) The ultimate hiring litmus test (1:13:59) Building out Serval’s go-to-market function (1:16:31) The evolving IT market in 2025
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    1 h et 23 min
  • The pivot that paid off: How fal found explosive growth in generative media | Gorkem Yurtseven (Co-founder and CTO)

    The pivot that paid off: How fal found explosive growth in generative media | Gorkem Yurtseven (Co-founder and CTO)
    Oct 22 2025
    Gorkem Yurtseven is the co-founder and CTO of fal, the generative media platform powering the next wave of image, video, and audio applications. In less than two years, fal has scaled from $2M to over $100M in ARR, serving over 2 million developers and more than 300 enterprises, including Adobe, Canva, and Shopify. In this conversation, Gorkem shares the inside story of fal's pivot into explosive growth, the technical and cultural philosophies driving its success, and his predictions for the future of AI-generated media. In today's episode, we discuss: How fal pivoted from data infrastructure to generative inference fal’s explosive year and how they scaled Why "generative media" is a greenfield new market fal's unique hiring philosophy and lean <50-person team Building a brand that resonates with developers What the world looks like in 2027 when AI-generated video becomes mainstream And much more… Where to find Gorkem: LinkedIn X / Twitter Where to find Todd: LinkedIn X / Twitter 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 References: Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/ Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/ Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/ Base10: https://base10.vc/ Black Forest Labs: https://blackforestlabs.ai/ Burkay Gur: https://www.linkedin.com/in/burkaygur/ Canva: https://www.canva.com/ Clay: https://www.clay.com/ Coinbase: https://www.coinbase.com/ Cursor: https://www.cursor.com/ DALL-E: https://openai.com/dall-e-2 Databricks: https://www.databricks.com/ Dylan Patel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanpatelsa/ fal: https://fal.ai/ Google DeepMind: https://deepmind.google/ LLaMA: https://ai.meta.com/llama/ OpenAI: https://openai.com/ Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/ Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/ Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/ Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/ Sora: https://openai.com/sora Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL): https://stability.ai/stable-diffusion Stability AI: https://stability.ai/ Together AI: https://www.together.ai/ All images and videos generated using models run on fal.ai Timestamps: (01:43) The generative media industry (02:29) From $2M to $100M ARR: fal's explosive year (04:06) How Gorkem met co-founder Burkay Gur (05:38) The hardest decision that saved the company (09:52) Spotting the opportunity in generative media (13:28) Turning Todd into George Clooney (15:29) The early adopters of the first fal product (17:54) The transition from toy to tool (19:27) Why 2025 is the year of AI-generated video (21:44) Staying nimble as a 45-person company (24:42) Predicting AI-generated film in 2027 (27:24) Why generative media is a greenfield market (30:33) fal’s greatest optimization wins (34:42) Why fal has 500 Slack channels (36:02) Competing in a fast-moving, fragmented market (42:06) How to build a world-class team (47:24) Learning sales as a technical founder (50:55) How fal built a brand without a marketer (53:21) The story behind "GPU Rich / GPU Poor" (54:22) Inside fal’s rule-breaking playbook (56:09) The hardest part of scaling fal
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    59 min
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