Lessons from Etsy’s Chief Product Officer
Kruti leads Etsy’s product development efforts worldwide, helping to build the company into an S&P 500 darling. Kruti joined FirstMark’s Guilds to dive into how Etsy’s product prioritization strategy has evolved over her 10 years at the company.
No one knows the Etsy story better than its Chief Product Officer, Kruti Patel Goyal. She joined Etsy in 2011 when the entire company was about 150 people with ~$500M in gross merchandise value. Today, Etsy has over 1,500 employees, with 150 people in Kruti’s organization alone. Last year, the company sold over $10B worth of goods.
The journey to Etsy’s success…
Kimber is the CTO of One Medical, a $5B+ company making high-quality healthcare more accessible. Kimber joined FirstMark’s CTO Guild to share her perspective on building a team through a public financing, leading through a pandemic, and much more.
Implement Scalable 1:1s to Stay in Tune with a Growing Org
A great leader makes sure they understand how their organization is doing at every level. Leaders gather candid feedback, identify issues with process, systems, or culture, and collaboratively develop and implement solutions to help their team scale. And the single most important tool for a leader to accomplish this goal is the 1:1 meeting.
By: Amish Jani
We’re thrilled to welcome Parametrix Insurance to the FirstMark portfolio!
In an era when software is eating the world, every company is a technology company. And every company increasingly relies on third-party cloud software to power both their customer facing products and services, and their internal infrastructure. Therefore, it’s more important than ever for third party providers to provide reliable service.
Yet, companies currently have no ability to mitigate or insure against the risk of third-party service outages. Every week brings another high-profile story about the impact of outages, including some highly notable instances of global disruption…
A Conversation with Tatyana Mamut, SVP of New Products at Pendo
Tatyana brings over 20 years of product experience, leading Product at several world-class organizations including Amazon, Salesforce, and IDEO. Today, Tatyana is the SVP of New Products at Pendo.io. Prior to Pendo, she was Chief Product Officer of Nextdoor. She joined the FirstMark Guilds to dive into frameworks for navigating crises.
To put it lightly, a lot of sh*t hit the fan in 2020. Large-scale crises like these can throw your company into chaos. But even amidst all the turbulence of 2020, Tatyana led the Product org at Nextdoor to new heights. …
Understanding and Driving LTV:CAC
Jeremiah Zinn is the Chief Product Officer at Freshly, which was acquired by Nestlé for a reported $1.5B. Jeremiah manages the product management, design, customer messaging, and quality teams. Freshly is a DTC-prepared meals company that is expected to ship more than 50 million meals in 2021. Prior to Freshly, Jeremiah was the CPO at Bark and led Product, Data Science, & Engineering at Viacom.
The Most Important Metric for Subscription: the LTV:CAC Ratio
LTV:CAC is the lifeblood of any subscription business. The metric measures the lifetime value of a customer versus the cost of acquiring that customer. Yet, there are very few leaders who have successfully optimized LTV:CAC…
About FirstMark
FirstMark is looking for a talented IR & Operations Associate to join our team in New York City. With $2.5 billion of assets under management, FirstMark is a full-stack, technology venture firm investing in companies at every stage of their journey. We help accelerate the success of exceptional founders and are proud partners to some of the most iconic companies in the world, including Shopify, Pinterest, DraftKings, Airbnb, Discord, and many more. Our proprietary, industry-defining Platform generates network effects for our firm and portfolio companies that compound over time.
About The Role
As an IR & Operations Associate at FirstMark, you will have…
A Conversation with Connor Fee, Clubhouse CRO
Connor Fee is the CRO at Clubhouse.io helping build the Sales, Customer Success, Customer Support and Operations teams. Before Clubhouse, Connor served as the CRO of Clearbit, leading the GTM teams. He joined the FirstMark Guilds to dive into how he thinks about developing knowledge & skills in his front-line Sales and Customer Success teams. (Note: the Clubhouse discussed in this post is the project management Saas tool, not the social audio app.)
Training ≠ Coaching: What the Old Playbook Gets Wrong
The traditional playbook for training front-line teams (Sales & Customer Success) is pretty cut and dry: recommend a selection of classic books (Never Split the Difference, The…
A Conversation with Kathie Johnson, CMO of Talkdesk and former SVP of Marketing at Salesforce
Kathie Johnson is the CMO of Talkdesk, a breakout enterprise cloud contact center that’s raised $260M+ and is valued north of $3B+. Prior to Talkdesk, Kathie was SVP of Marketing at Salesforce. Kathie joined FirstMark’s Guilds to share her key learnings from running marketing at a large enterprise and how she’s translated those to a hyper-growth startup environment.
There’s an enormous chasm between how enterprise-focused companies can execute B2B marketing at an early stage and at scale. While the vast majority of the fundamental strategies and tactics are identical, startups are faced with one significant constraint: limited resources. …
A Conversation with Mark Wayland, CRO of Box
Mark Wayland is the Chief Revenue Officer of Box (NYSE: BOX), the cloud content management company that empowers enterprises to revolutionize how they work. Mark joined the FirstMark Guilds to discuss building robust sales organizations and successful sales leaders.
The Three Disciplines of Sales Leadership
Throughout his 20+ years in sales, from Tanium to Salesforce to Box, Mark has adopted a mental model for the three must-have buckets of skills for sales leaders:
- Selling skills: Selling is, of course, is the core function of the Sales org. To get promoted into sales leadership roles, you have to close deals. …
A Conversation with Severin Hacker, Duolingo’s CTO
Severin Hacker is the co-founder and CTO of Duolingo, the world’s most popular language-learning platform and most downloaded education app, with over 500 million users worldwide. Severin joined FirstMark’s Guilds to share how Duolingo has built a test-driven culture and how the company runs experiments at scale.
Why Duolingo Started Testing Everything
Duolingo’s culture is centered around one of the key operating principles of “test everything.” To validate this, the company launches 30 new experiments per week and is running 100s of experiments concurrently.
Early in its lifecycle, Duolingo used a third-party tool to launch and manage product experiments. Eventually, the expense became too great…
