Francis Larkin

🎙️ From Square to Mercury: How Rohini Pandhi became one of fintech’s top product leaders—and how velocity of learning at high slope companies shaped everything. Rohini dropped so many gems in our first episode of First Builders: 💎 Generalist → Specialist: In her early career, she was a generalist and tried everything. This led her to critical discoveries. She specialized in product and fintech when the “time was right” 💎 Follow the Engineers and Designers: Square was a high slope environment for Rohini, packed with talent density and learnings. She finds high slope environments by studying where smart engineers and designers are going. 💎 Fake News about PMs: PMs don’t just “move fast and break things.” Her team runs 30-50 customer interviews per quarter, providing rigor behind every decision. 💎 It’s Usually Too Early to Hire a PM: A top question she gets from founders is whether they should hire a PM. She usually says: “it’s too early.” 💎 Hiring a World Class Team is Like Tennis: When finding a tennis partner, you want someone a little better than you who can challenge you to improve your game. Give us a listen and leave a review on your favorite podcast location (see comments for links)! #FirstBuilders #StartupPodcast #ProductLeadership #TechCareers #Leadership

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Don’t automate a process you’ve never done. Your first product might just be a fancy services business. That’s fine. Everyone loves to reference Parker Conrad going heads down for 18 months to build Rippling. Or the founders who spend months in customer discovery mode without shipping. Or worse, founders with zero experience in an industry who are certain “AI will figure it out.” But here’s the truth: if you're not a domain expert, and you're not Parker, the best way to figure out what to build is to do the work yourself first. Services are underrated. Yes, agencies have bad margins. They don’t scale. They’re painful to operate. But they force you to deeply understand the workflows you’re trying to replace. You’ll learn which problems actually matter, which edge cases are noise, and where the product needs to stop. So many breakout startups started as agencies: Marketing, recruiting, customer support, legal, design. You name it. The best teams get so deep in the weeds that their product almost builds itself. When we launched Seona, we started by doing the work manually. We wrote the content. We emailed the customers. Then we just showed the results in a dashboard. It saved us thousands of wasted engineering hours and gave us way more confidence in what to build. If you want to automate something, try doing it by hand first. You might be surprised how few founders actually do.

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Founders: every rule (about fundraising and everything else) is artificial and meant to be broken. For example, consider the “rule” that the lead investor should invest at least X% of the entire round. It’s BS. For example, the amazing Kirsten Green led Bonobos’ $30m Series C round with $1m (and helped the founder raise the remaining $29m). Ignore the so-called rules. Do the right thing for your company. Be the exception.

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I often see marketing leaders respond with insufficient urgency to creative performance degradation. I view any meaningful drop in creative performance as an all-hands-on-deck emergency that needs to be addressed aggressively. A few years ago, in one of the most popular posts on Mobile Dev Memo, I proposed the idea of a "creative performance half-life": the point after which creative performance degrades precipitously because of saturation. That half-life is essentially a replacement timeline. If the creative production process requires two weeks from concept to deliverable into testing, then any significant decline in creative performance means that the creative production process either malfunctioned or became misaligned with market conditions *two weeks ago*. That's a catastrophe. The team should respond accordingly by dramatically increasing production output. This is why I advocate for working with a large number of agencies and freelancers, since their output can be flexibly scaled at a moment's notice. But the broader point is that a considerable drop in creative performance reveals a process problem in the past that will have accumulated over the half-life of the advertiser's creatives. Fixing it now requires a deliberate expansion of creative output and diversity.

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Yesterday Clay hit $100M ARR and I shared a post on the GTM bets that got us here. Today, I'm sitting down with our Head of Finance to dive deep on the business - metrics, our view on the AI market, and the path to $1B. Karan often gets this question from candidates: "Look, I have to dedicate my livelihood to Clay. All the upside of my equity is baked into one asset. How should I frame the real risk/reward?" It's a great question! So I wanted to use this video to go beyond the tactics and share how we think about the business holistically. The fundamentals, market dynamics and where we're really going. Some of what we cover: - The AI market and why GTM is actually the least crowded - Cohort data that shocked even us (enterprises never churn!) - How we've built an entire economy around Clay - The three things that create our customer flywheel - Why we're not burning cash while growing at an insane rate - The vectors to $1B: new geos, personas, use cases, channels, and verticals At the end, we get candid about the real risks and why World of Warcraft helps explain them. Watch here 👇

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The SMS interactions between brand & consumer contain incredibly rich context for 1:1 personalized commerce experiences. Postscript is the platform enabling such experiences. On this week's episode, Rishabh and I sat down with Adam Turner to explore how SMS evolved from an abandoned-cart afterthought to a 1:1 sales & marketing channel. We covered: - Category creation and the rise of the “SMS marketer” - Compliance and quality as product design principles - Moving from broadcast to conversational journeys - Building distribution in the Shopify ecosystem, then scaling a sales-led motion - Where AI has augmented vs reinvented both marketing products and teams Link in comments

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