# Zeno Rocha, founder of Resend: $18M Series A by obsessing over every detail | Evil Martians podcast

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/dev-propulsion-labs-6704290/zeno-rocha-founder-of-resend-18m-series-a-by-obsessing-over-every-detail-evil-martians-podcast
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/dev-propulsion-labs-6704290/zeno-rocha-founder-of-resend-18m-series-a-by-obsessing-over-every-detail-evil-martians-podcast.md
Podcast: [Dev Propulsion Labs](https://stenobird.com/podcast/dev-propulsion-labs-6704290)
Published: 2025-10-23T16:34:12+00:00
Episode link: https://rss.com/podcasts/dpl/2285289
Audio file: https://content.rss.com/episodes/239660/2285289/dpl/2025_10_22_18_23_06_e121ba7b-931b-4d55-88e4-da2c2c1c6dec.mp3
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Duration seconds: 3322

## Resource

Zeno Rocha, founder and CEO of Resend, sits down with Victoria Melnikova to talk about how he built an $18M Series A email API company by ruthlessly cutting scope to ship perfect products fast. He shares why seeking rejection accelerates growth, how building work so good your heroes want to copy it became Resend's north star, and why a 20,000-person waitlist before launch came from years of building a founder brand. Zeno also breaks down investing $3M in email security, why the hybrid work model is the worst of both worlds, and how open source became Resend's launchpad — not its business model. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and reliable. https://www.trychroma.com

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