A new podcast from First Round: How the top 0.001% of scaleup execs operate

Introducing our new podcast, Executive Function, where we sit down with the best scaleup execs operating today: The ones up-and-coming tech leaders wish they could have as a mentor, and founders wish they could hire.

Our first episode with Vercel COO Jeanne DeWitt Grosser just dropped — and stay tuned for future interviews with execs from Rippling, Harvey, Cognition & more.

Listen now: YouTube | Apple | Spotify

There's a lot of knowledge floating around the Valley about what makes a great founder, engineer or PM. Some names and faces, or heuristics and frameworks probably come to mind.

But we’ve found there's remarkably few resources available for folks stepping into the C-suite, specifically at hypergrowth companies — these people are forced to keep pace with a company that changes 5-10x in a year.

Our new podcast, Executive Function, aims to fill this gap. Think of these conversations like office hours with the execs driving the growth of today’s best companies, like Rippling, Harvey and Cognition.

Our first guest, Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, exemplifies operational excellence. She spent nearly a decade at Stripe, leading growth and product before stepping into the role of Chief Business Officer. She’s now the Chief Operating Officer at Vercel.

First Round Partner Brett Berson sat down with Jeanne to unpack why most execs fail, how she interviews exec hires and why context is the biggest rate limiter of impact. Some highlights from their conversation:

Why the hardest leap in leadership is going from frontline manager to manager of managers: “Often where people get stuck is they try to scale via what has made them successful so far, and become a super IC, rather than empower the other people around them to be excellent ICs as well.”

Why the best execs work themselves out of a job every couple months: “The minute you feel you have deeply mastered something is probably the point at which you should be figuring out how somebody else does that.”

The brutal truth John Collison shared during a performance review that still rings in her head today: “He told me, 'When you don't think somebody's good at their job, they're dead to you.’ You can’t un-hear that.”

We’ve got a lot more interviews lined up in the coming weeks. Here are some of the incredible execs you’ll be able to learn from:

David Singleton, former CTO at Stripe

Ryan Lucas, VP of Design at Rippling

Stevie Case, CRO at Vanta

Katie Burke, COO at Harvey

Sheila Joglekar Vashee, CMO at Figma

Whether you’re a senior IC who wants to know what it takes to get to the top, or a founder building out your C-suite, we hope you’ll walk away from these conversations with a new model for what executive excellence looks like.