About this channel
The decisions that shape a young company are at the centre of First Round Capital's channel. Engineering leadership, hiring, sales, product choices and executive coordination recur in the videos…
The decisions that shape a young company are at the centre of First Round Capital's channel. Engineering leadership, hiring, sales, product choices and executive coordination recur in the videos. Although growth is a frequent concern, the selection repeatedly asks what sits behind a result: why growth happens, what a new hire costs an organisation and which mistakes become expensive later.
Many videos isolate a single operating question. One considers what distinguishes strong engineering leaders, while another challenges the way companies outsource their technology. Jay Parikh appears in the latter discussion, bringing the subject into a conversation about a specific business decision. Other topics examine the purpose of a daily executive meeting and the case for allowing the strongest sellers to earn more than their colleagues.
The relationship between product and distribution is another thread. Gamma's choice to pursue consumers rather than a business audience offers a concrete example of market focus. A conversation featuring Lindsey Scrase connects sales experience with preparation for an operating leadership role. These subjects place career development and company design in the same frame: the experience a leader gains can affect the decisions they are equipped to make.
Founders, operators and people managing growing teams are likely to find the most relevant material. The videos offer points to examine in their own organisations, such as whether hiring is solving the right problem or whether a growth figure has an understood cause. The selection suits viewers seeking focused conversations about the work of building a company, with enough specificity to turn a general management concern into a question a team can discuss.
Latest episode
The most expensive mistake in outsourcing your tech stack | Jay Parikh (EVP CoreAI, Microsoft)
In the latest episode of Executive Function, Brett sits down with Jay Parikh, Executive Vice President of CoreAI at Microsoft. Before joining Microsoft, Jay spent over a decade as Facebook's global…
In the latest episode of Executive Function, Brett sits down with Jay Parikh, Executive Vice President of CoreAI at Microsoft. Before joining Microsoft, Jay spent over a decade as Facebook's global head of engineering, scaling the company from a few hundred engineers to billions of users, then ran the cybersecurity company Lacework as CEO through its acquisition by Fortinet. In this conversation, he breaks down the five ingredients of great engineering leadership, discusses why he'd rather run two competing bets in parallel than forecast a winner, and explains why company culture remains more important than ever for teams to get right.
In today's episode, we discuss:
• The five ingredients that separate excellent engineering leadership from the rest
• How to protect your team from large shifts in public perception
• The mindset shift organizations need to maintain speed at scale
• How every layer of the organization needs to stay connected to the customer
• Why Jay runs "brain trusts" of senior ICs with zero managers in the room
References
• Akamai: https://www.akamai.com/
• AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/
• George Conrades: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgeconrades/
• Mark Zuckerberg: https://x.com/finkd
• Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/
• Paul Sagan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-sagan-59654a1/
• Tom Leighton: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tleighton/
Where to find Jay
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayparikh/
• Twitter/X: https://x.com/jayparikh
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
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
00:36 How leadership changes through exponential growth
02:21 The five ingredients that define excellent engineering leadership
07:51 What actually drives culture at a company as it scales
12:05 The physics behind why everything slows down at scale
18:57 The fastest team of Jay's career, and why size mattered
22:44 Why every team should think like an FDE
26:20 Managing a team through wild swings in public perception
29:07 What's different about leading through the steepest S-curve moments
33:58 Why onboarding well means going slow to go fast
37:41 Is AI actually new, or is history just repeating?
41:35 What actually counts as a "big bet" worth taking
45:01 The concrete big bets that reshaped Facebook's entire technology stack
47:35 Why vertical integration keeps being the right call as companies scale
51:46 How being a startup CEO reshaped Jay as a leader
1:01:26 Why Jay overruled Zuckerberg's instinct to skip efficiency
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