ABOUT THIS PODCAST 🔗
StepOne is a shortform podcast for tech founders who don't have time for hour-long interviews.
We interview the world's most successful founders, builders, and investors. Every episode is 10-15 minutes and covers one thing: the critical first move they made that actually moved the needle. Not their entire playbook — the foundational thing they did early (or wish they'd done) that unlocked everything else. Maybe it's how they found the right problem to solve, or the first cultural decision that set the tone, or the early board practice that built trust.
We interview the world's most successful founders, builders, and investors. Every episode is 10-15 minutes and covers one thing: the critical first move they made that actually moved the needle. Not their entire playbook — the foundational thing they did early (or wish they'd done) that unlocked everything else. Maybe it's how they found the right problem to solve, or the first cultural decision that set the tone, or the early board practice that built trust.
Hosts:
Update frequency:
biweekly
Average audio length:
20 minutes
Guest interviews
English
United States
11 episodes
since Jan. 28, 2026
episodic
LATEST EPISODE 🔗
Gia Scinto, ex-A16Z, YC Talent Leader and Partner at The Cole Group, flips the table to the candidate's side. In her second conversation with Ashish, she lays out how a senior leader should run their own search, from working the three channels that reveal the market and picking the right filters, t…
PREVIOUS EPISODES 🔗
Gia Scinto, ex-A16Z, YC Talent Leader and Partner at The Cole Group, has placed sales and marketing leaders at companies like OpenAI, Stripe, and Figma. In her first conversation with Ashish, she breaks down how founders should build an executive team from the very first hire, from how to pick a se…
AJ Tennant, Founder of Tenacity Capital and ex-CRO at Glean, spent three years scaling the company to $100M+ ARR. The hardest problems were rarely in the sales org. They lived in the CEO relationship, the board room, and the R&D roadmap.
He shares how he and CEO Arvind settled their AE to SE fi…
AJ Tennant, Founder of Tenacity Capital and ex-CRO at Glean, pioneered enterprise AI selling as the leader who scaled the company to $100M+ ARR. Selling an AI transformation is closer to selling business consulting than shipping a feature list. The reps who win can walk into a CIO's office, run dis…
AJ Tennant, Founder of Tenacity Capital and ex-CRO at Glean, scaled the company to $100M+ ARR. The engine was a repeatable hiring system. Pair an experienced AE with an up and comer, add one aggressively vetted SE, then give frontline leaders hiring quotas with no relief until seats fill.
He explai…
Mohit Aron has spent nearly 20 years watching technology shifts play out, and his read on AI moats is blunt: the fundamentals of competitive advantage haven't changed, the tools just have. Most founders are asking the wrong question entirely.
With AI agents increasingly acting as the primary interf…
Most CTOs talk about AI productivity gains in the abstract. Mohit Aron, Founder of Cohesity and Nutanix, has a concrete system — one he built by taking his pre-AI coding methodology and mapping AI directly onto every phase of it. He still writes unit tests, runs two coding agents in parallel for di…
Mohit Aron has built two companies past $10B+ valuations and is now on his third. In this episode, he walks through the exact go-to-market playbook he has run each time, starting with why the founder has to be the primary seller early on, a practical necessity before messaging has been proven in th…
Most founders delay culture work until later. Marcus Ryu made it foundational at Guidewire when they had no customers—because no one would talk to them about a non-existent product. That decision became their survival mechanism through a product failure, an existential lawsuit, and multiple breakin…
Most founders approach board meetings like performance reviews: exhausting themselves trying to look good while board members gradually encroach into operational decisions. Marcus Ryu reveals this is a failure mode. In this episode, he reframes the board relationship from governance to advisory, ex…
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Front Lines, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
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