Abhinav Asthana is the co-founder and CEO of Postman, the world's leading API collaboration platform used by millions of developers and thousands of companies. What began as a personal itch, a simple Chrome extension Abhinav built to make his own API work easier, became a global phenomenon within weeks.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Making the leap from India to Silicon Valley


• The moment Abhinav realized Postman could win


• His principles behind building for developers and non-developers alike


• The early monetization experiments that led to their SaaS model


• The value of progressive complexity in product design


• How community building became a powerful growth lever


• And much more…

References:

• Abhijit Kane: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhijitkane/


• Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/


• Ankit Sobti: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankit-sobti/


• Figma: https://www.figma.com/


• Kong Inc.: https://konghq.com/


• National University of Singapore: https://nus.edu.sg/


• Postman: https://www.postman.com/


• Ram Gupta: : https://www.linkedin.com/in/ram-gupta-39b9711/


• Slack: https://slack.com/


• Stripe: https://stripe.com/


• Stewart Butterfield: https://www.linkedin.com/in/butterfield/


• Yahoo: http://yahoo.com/

Where to find Abhinav:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhinavasthana/


• Twitter/X: https://x.com/a85

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:

(01:18 ) Why early computer access changed everything

(03:39 ) The first taste of the entrepreneurial bug

(09:58 ) Building BITS360 in college

(11:14 ) Curating entrepreneurial taste

(15:49 ) The ventures that didn’t make it

(20:53 ) The problems that preceded Postman

(29:56 ) How Postman’s team was formed

(34:01 ) Why clear roles prevent chaos

(34:50 ) Scrappy startup life in the early days

(36:26 ) Postman’s path to monetization

(39:59 ) Building a truly collaborative platform

(43:00 ) Navigating market and customer needs

(46:02 ) Cracking the go-to-market code

(49:39 ) Bridging the developer-enterprise divide

(54:43 ) The open-source dilemma