In Depth Podcast
After publishing 500+ profiles and attracting millions of readers on the First Round Review since 2013, we've learned a lot about what makes for compelling conversations and standout company-building advice. Whether it's an interview with a big-name CEO or a VP you likely haven’t heard of, there's been a common thread across our most popular stories — a willingness to go deeper and an eagerness to share not just what to do, but how to do it. Our podcast, In Depth, takes the very same signature style we've cultivated over the years and gives you a chance to listen in on these deeper conversations firsthand. We cover a lot of ground and a wide range of topics — from hiring executives and becoming a better manager, to finding your first customers, to function-specific playbooks — but every interview will hit the level of tactical depth that dives far below the surface.
All Episodes

How to build a company you’ll run forever | Zack Kanter (Founder and CEO of Stedi)
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.

Go hard early: How lessons from Verkada shaped Serval's AI agents for IT teams | Jake Stauch (Founder and CEO)
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.

The pivot that paid off: How fal found explosive growth in generative media | Gorkem Yurtseven (Co-founder and CEO)
Gorkem Yurtseven is the co-founder and CEO 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.

From dorm room to life-saving AI | Prepared’s story | Michael Chime (Co-founder & CEO of Prepared)
Michael is the co-founder and CEO of Prepared, the AI assistant for 911 calls that helps dispatchers capture information faster, translate emergency calls in real time, and deliver lifesaving context to first responders. Founded out of Yale in 2019, Prepared grew from a school safety app into a critical platform for emergency communications, disrupting a notoriously tough market. This mission-driven journey just reached a major milestone: Prepared was acquired by Axon, the global public safety technology company. In this conversation, Michael joins Meka to share the inside story of building in a tough market, the counterintuitive strategies used to crack government procurement, and why their mission is a competitive moat.

Saying yes to everything: How customer obsession built Samsara | Kiren Sekar (CPO)
Kiren Sekar is the CPO of Samsara, a company that brings real-time visibility, analytics, and AI to physical operations. Before Samsara, Kiren was an early leader at Meraki, which was acquired by Cisco for $1.2B. In this episode, he walks us through Samsara’s origin story: from hardware hacking in a basement to scaling a cross-industry IoT platform. He shares how early customer feedback loops led to the company’s first product, why starting with the mid-market was a deliberate choice, and how Samsara kept a startup mindset even as it scaled.

Starting an education giant in a “bad market” | ClassDojo’s story | Sam Chaudhary (Co-founder and CEO)
Sam Chaudhary is the co-founder and CEO of ClassDojo, a multi-product education platform used in 95% of U.S. schools and over 180 countries globally to connect teachers, students, and families. In this episode, Sam shares the full arc of building ClassDojo, from early skepticism about education and a failed group-making tool, to creating a communication platform loved by millions.

From Chrome extension to $5B platform | Postman’s journey | Abhinav Asthana (Co-founder & CEO)
Abhinav Asthana is the co-founder and CEO of Postman, the world's leading API collaboration platform used by millions of developers and thousands of companies. What began as a personal itch, a simple Chrome extension Abhinav built to make his own API work easier, became a global phenomenon within weeks.

How Canva leveraged unconventional growth levers to grow to $42B | Cameron Adams (Co-founder & CPO)
Cameron Adams is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Canva, the design platform valued at $42B as of August 2025, used by over 230 million people every month. Before starting Canva, Cameron was a designer and engineer at Google and co-founded Fluent, an email startup. In this episode, Cameron walks through Canva’s earliest days — from the remarkably fast courtship with co-founders Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, to the counterintuitive product decisions that helped Canva instantly resonate with users who thought they would never design anything.