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