How I Spent 17,784 Hours in 5 Years as a Startup Founder

EvolutionIQ Just Got Acquired for $730M — Here's Their Playbook For Building an Enduring AI Business

We sat down with the founding team for the inside story of one of the first major vertical AI exits.

This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineering Leaders Back into Frontline Developers

The GTM Inflection Points That Powered Clay to a $1B+ Valuation

Get free and unlimited access to The Review

Join now to unlock every article, access exclusive content and get our weekly(ish) newsletter in your inbox.

View all 10 articles in collection

New to The Review? Start here.

Our most-widely read articles since The Review first started in 2013

View all 10 articles in collection

New to The Review? Start here.

Our most-widely read articles since The Review first started in 2013

The 25 Micro-Habits of High-Impact Managers

Sharp folks from across the First Round community share the small habits that great managers do, including delivering feedback with care, opening up about failure, and sending praise up the chain.

40 Favorite Interview Questions from Some of the Sharpest Folks We Know

Given the high-stakes nature of every hire, interviewing chops are always in need of sharpening. We’ve spent the past few months reaching out to some of the most thoughtful company builders in our network to pose a simple question: What’s your favorite interview question to ask and why? Here are the

How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit

Superhuman founder and CEO Rahul Vohra walks us through the framework his startup used to make product/market fit more actionable, detailing the survey and four-step process that were key to measuring and optimizing it.

How to Become Insanely Well-Connected

Chris Fralic is a world-class super-connector. Here's how the long-time First Round Partner has methodically built bonds spanning years and careers.

Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss

Kim Scott cut her teeth as a manager at Apple and Google, and now helps create great leaders as an author and coach for companies like Twitter. Here's the secret that's made all the difference for her.

‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups

Molly Graham helped forge a work culture at Facebook that's withstood huge amounts of growth. Today, she's something of a rapid scaling expert. Here's the key to doing it right, she says.

This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineers into Remarkable Managers

Twitter's former Director of Engineering shares the plan he uses to transform engineers into successful and happy managers.

Speed as a Habit

All things being equal, speed will determine whether your company succeeds or not. Here's how to make it core to your culture.

From 0 to $1B - Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy

“HELL YEAH WE'RE USING @SlackHQ AT WORK I. LOVE. SLACK.”

How Design Thinking Transformed Airbnb from a Failing Startup to a Billion Dollar Business

Airbnb Co-founder Joe Gebbia talks about the true meaning of being scrappy and being willing to do things that don't scale.

Passing the Button-Clicker Test, and Other 0 to 1 Lessons from Lattice’s First Marketing Hire

The behind-the-scenes story of how Lattice built its marketing strategy from the ground up, as told by its third employee and first marketing hire, Alex Kracov.

Gong’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Why This $7B Company Still Works With Design Partners

Gong co-founder and CPO Eilon Reshef sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to unpack how he turned an early bet on AI into a multi-billion dollar category leader in revenue intelligence.

How Notion Does Marketing: A Deep-Dive Into its Community, Influencers & Growth Playbooks

We peel back the layers of Notion’s multifaceted marketing strategy, diving deep into three distinct channels that have helped power its meteoric rise: community, influencer marketing, and growth and analytics.

Build Your Culture Like a Product — Lessons from Asana’s Head of People

Anna Binder, Asana's Head of People and the company's first HR hire, shares her step-by-step approach to intentionally building the company culture.

Navigating the Legal Maze: A Founder’s Guide to Hiring Lawyers at Every Stage of Your Startup

Veteran legal executive Irene Liu provides a comprehensive guide on the startup legal roadmap and how to engage lawyers as you scale. She offers insider advice on hiring outside and in-house counsel and building strong founder-lawyer partnerships.

Navigating New Waters: 10 Tips for First-Time Founder Success

Tactical advice from seasoned founders like Thumbtack’s Marco Zappacosta and Dropbox’s Drew Houston about the biggest mistakes to avoid as a first-time startup founder.

View all 5 articles in collection

If you're thinking about starting a company:

Advice for pressure-testing ideas, finding a co-founder, and all you need to know before taking the founder's leap.

View all 5 articles in collection

If you're thinking about starting a company:

Advice for pressure-testing ideas, finding a co-founder, and all you need to know before taking the founder's leap.

This Founder Built Startups in 2008, 2016 and 2018. Here’s What He’s Learned About Resiliency

Bob Moore's first brush with life as a founder started in 2008—three days before Lehman Brothers collapsed. Since he cut his teeth as a first-time founder in turbulent times, he's gone on to build two other companies. Here, Moore shares the lessons he's learned along the way.

The Founder Dating Playbook – Here’s the Process I Used to Find My Co-Founder

Gloria Lin opens up about her pre-founder journey, from how to find a co-founder and early conversations, to the set of 50 questions she prototyped to team up on a startup idea.

Navigating the Leap from Big Tech to Startups — Advice from a Former Google and Flipkart Exec

Punit Soni cut his teeth as a product leader at large companies such Google, Motorola and Flipkart before venturing out on his own to found Suki, a healthcare startup. Here, he shares his observations on the differences between the two experiences, noting what surprised him, what he felt unprepared

Future Founders, Here’s How to Spot and Build in Nonobvious Markets

Nonobvious markets can lead to hypergrowth, but they’re hard to spot in the moment. Leaning on his experience as a seasoned investor and operator, Elad Gil shares four principles to help uncover the three types of opportunities that others are overlooking.

90% of Feedback is Crap: How to Find the Next Big Startup Idea

Flatiron Health Co-founder Nat Turner on the process he uses to distill, pitch and iterate on new ideas.

How to Know if Your Idea’s the Right One — A Founder’s Guide for Successful Early-Stage Customer Discovery

Jeanette Mellinger, BetterUp's Head of UXR and former Head of UXR for Uber Eats, unpacks her approachable three-step playbook for early-stage customer discovery so founders can build something users really want.

Get the best advice in tech delivered right to your inbox

From Flagship Back to Fledgling: Lessons on Going Multi-Product From an Early Stripe PM

In this exclusive interview, Tara Seshan shares nine lessons from her playbooks for going multi-product, drawing on examples from both Stripe and Watershed.

Add More Rigor to Your Reference Calls With These 25 Questions

When approached with craft and care, reference calls can be a massively influential piece of the hiring decision.

The Secret to Running Effective Growth Sprints — Follow This Process to Learn Faster

"With every growth experiment, you're not just trying to optimize your return on ad spend, lower your CPA, or bag a few new logos ahead of the next fundraise. You're fundamentally learning and making progress toward a simple question: How are we going to grow this business?"

Pilot’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Three-Peat Founders on Picking the Right Team and the Right Market

The founders of Pilot have started three times over, starting with Ksplice (sold to Oracle in 2011) and then Zulip (acquired by Dropbox in 2014).

The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2023

It’s the first week of the new year, and here on The Review we’re ushering it in with a beloved annual ritual (that we find to be much more delightful than other yearly exercises like annual planning or performance reviews).

Look Back to Leap Ahead: 7 Questions for Your End of Year Reflection

As the year draws to a close, you may find yourself in a reflective mood. There’s plenty to take stock of as you look back on how 2023 went.

Get free and unlimited access to The Review

Join now to unlock every article, access exclusive content and get our weekly(ish) newsletter in your inbox.

How to Take Bigger, Bolder Product Bets — Lessons from Slack’s Chief Product Officer

Seasoned product leader and Slack’s CPO Noah Desai Weiss shares the three-step framework he leans on to make quality product decisions with just the right amount of risk.

New Engineering Managers Have a High Failure Rate — This Figma Leader is on a Mission to Fix It

Are leaders setting up new engineering managers to fail? Marcel Weekes (VP of Engineering at Figma) sure thinks so. He unpacks his playbook for supporting the tricky transition from senior engineer to people manager and tested tactics for avoiding the common traps.

Shippo’s Path to Product-Market Fit — The Upside of Being Industry Outsiders

Shippo co-founder and CEO Laura Behrens Wu sits down with First Round Partner Todd Jackson for a behind-the-scenes look at how she leveraged industry outsider and first-time founder status to build a billion-dollar shipping company.

The 100 Best Bits of Advice from 10 Years of First Round Review

We combed The Review archives for a special compilation of the 100 very best advice published on our digital pages over the last 10 years from folks like Stewart Butterfield, Claire Hughes Johnson and Alexis Ohanian.

Storytelling as a Craft: Advice from 5 Experts on How to Tell a Compelling Business Story

Every startup leader should practice flexing their storytelling muscles. To help warm these muscles up, we’ve rounded up some of our best advice about storytelling in business that’s been featured in the Review.

How I Spent 17,784 Hours in 5 Years as a Startup Founder

EvolutionIQ Just Got Acquired for $730M — Here's Their Playbook For Building an Enduring AI Business

This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineering Leaders Back into Frontline Developers

The GTM Inflection Points That Powered Clay to a $1B+ Valuation

Trending What folks are currently reading