This week we sit down with Jonni Lundy, Co-founder and COO of Resend. You'll hear about navigating the shift from Seed to Series A funding, why they track ARR per head instead of burn rate, how inverting retention graphs revealed hidden product insights, and the mental shift from individual contributor to founder that no one talks about.
About Jonni Lundy:
Jonni Lundy is the Co-founder and COO of Resend, the developer-first email infrastructure platform that's revolutionizing how companies handle transactional emails. After helping scale Resend from inception to an $18M Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, Jonni has become a thoughtful voice on sustainable growth, remote team management, and the psychological transitions founders face as they scale. Under his operational leadership, Resend has built a disciplined, metrics-driven culture that prioritizes long-term sustainability over hypergrowth.
About Resend:
Resend is a modern email API built for developers who care about deliverability, developer experience, and scalability. Founded to solve the frustrations developers face with legacy email providers, Resend offers a simple, powerful API with React email components, real-time analytics, and enterprise-grade reliability. The company has quickly become the go-to choice for engineering teams at fast-growing startups and enterprises alike.
Show Notes:
00:00 Introduction to Resend's mission to revolutionize developer email infrastructure
02:41 How Resend is disrupting the legacy email provider space with developer-first thinking
05:44 The unexpected psychological shift from IC to founder: "Success means other people winning"
10:50 Inside their Series A: Why they stayed conservative even after raising $18M from a16z
14:55 The retention graph hack that changed everything: inverting data to reveal product truth
21:24 Building celebration culture in a remote team: why small wins matter
27:40 Remote productivity insights: managing 24/7 flexibility without burning out
30:29 Creating genuine connection in distributed teams: beyond Zoom happy hours
33:45 Why making space for quieter team voices drives better decisions
35:06 "Thoughtful discipline": Resend's approach to sustainable growth
41:14 Finding balance as a new parent and founder: the parallel journeys
43:48 The one metric that matters post-Series A: ARR per head over everything