#9: Amber Feng on customer obsession and optimizing for the steepest learning curve

On today's episode, Dana Stalder shares lessons on company building from his time as an early executive at Netscape, Ebay & Paypal. Dana is also a General Partner at Matrix Partners and shares the fintech investment themes he is most excited about. 

Today's guest is Amber Feng. Amber joined Stripe when it was around ten people and held a number of product and engineering leadership roles. In this episode, we talk about Stripe's early culture of customer obsession and optimizing for personal and professional growth at an early-stage startup. You can find Amber on Twitter @amfeng.

Today's guest is Paige Todd, VP of People Operations at Flock Safety. We talk about the early days of Flock Safety and cover all things early stage hiring & team empowerment. Paige shares her thoughts for sourcing, evaluating & setting up candidates for success.

Lane Shackleton is the Head of Product & Design at Coda. He was previously a product manager at Google and also had a chapter as the founder of a wine company. On today's episode we dive into Lane's thoughts on productivity, how to structure teams for maximum collaboration and how product leaders can best work with founders on the journey to product market fit. You can find Lane on Twitter @lshackleton

Today's guest is Cristina Cordova. She has spent most of her career building out the partnerships team at iconic startups like Stripe and Notion. In this episode, we dive into why partnerships are a core part of company strategy, how startups can leverage partnerships for distribution and product development and what to avoid when negotiating a partnership. You can find Cristina on Twitter https://twitter.com/cjc

McKenna Quint is an expert on people and talent. She built and run the people function at Cruise from 20 to over 2000 and at Plaid from over 100 to 800 people. In today's conversation, we dive into how to hire, retain and empower your team to achieve their best.

Ayo Omojola is currently the SVP of Product at Carbon Health. Previously, he was a product lead at Cash App and cofounded a consumer social startup. In this episode, we dive into techniques for problem selection, the importance of going unreasonably deep in a domain, and Ayo's thoughts on building products in a regulated space. You can find Ayo on Twitter @ay_o.

Julia Dewahl has tackled some of the most complex operations problems faced by early-stage startups. As the operations lead at Opendoor she built out their operations function and helped scale the company from a single market to several markets across the US. In today's episode, we talk about what it means to build a world-class operations function within a startup, how to assess early-stage company risk, and tactics for finding product-market fit. You can find Julia on Twitter @juliadewahl

Erik Bernhardsson is well known for his views on data. As one of the first 30 hires at Spotify, he built out Spotify's analytics function and authored the popular open-source project, Luigi.  Most recently, Erik was the CTO at Better.com where he built up the engineering org from 1 to 300. In today's episode we dive into how to build an effective engineering team, tactics for hiring in a competitive market, why engineering project estimates are a bad idea, and what questions to ask of your data. You can find Erik on Twitter @bernhardsson.

In today's episode we talk to Patrick Malatack, former VP of Product at Twilio and General Partner at Matrix Partners. Patrick started his career at Microsoft. He then joined Twilio as the second product hire and rose through the ranks to VP of Product. We discuss lessons from big tech that apply to startups and those that don't. We also talk about the importance of customer segmentation in the early days, why you sometimes have to say no to customers and why usage is more important than revenue for early-stage startups. Patrick shares lessons from his time at Twilio on product-led growth and some surprising tactics for creating a culture of customer obsession. You can find Patrick on Twitter @patrickmalatack.