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Linear’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Quality and Craft > Speed and Scale
Product

Linear’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Quality and Craft > Speed and Scale

Linear CEO and co-founder Karri Saarinen unpacks the $1.25B company's slow and deliberate path to product-market fit.
The Founder’s Guide to Building a V1 of Customer Success
Starting Up

The Founder’s Guide to Building a V1 of Customer Success

A CS leader who has built the function from the ground up shares where founders should start — from how to hire to the most important metrics to track.
0-$5M: How to Go From Random Wins to Repeatable Revenue
Sales

0-$5M: How to Go From Random Wins to Repeatable Revenue

When every deal closes differently, how do you build repeatability? First Round Partner Meka Asonye shares proven tactics from founders and revenue leaders who've solved this exact puzzle.
Is All Micromanagement Bad? Here's How the Best Startup Leaders Balance Details and Delegation
Management

Is All Micromanagement Bad? Here's How the Best Startup Leaders Balance Details and Delegation

Founders and execs from Apple, Rippling, Carta and more share their strategies for altitude shifting as a manager.
Should You “Rent” an Exec for Your Startup? A Fractional COO Weighs In
People & Culture

Should You “Rent” an Exec for Your Startup? A Fractional COO Weighs In

A veteran strategy and ops leader turned fractional COO walks us through why, when and how early-stage founders can tap fractional execs to learn and grow faster.
The Art of Evals: How Figma Put People at the Center of Its AI Product
Product

The Art of Evals: How Figma Put People at the Center of Its AI Product

Building, testing and validating with human craft and creativity.
How to Build for a Market That Doesn’t Exist Yet — Braze’s Path to Product-Market Fit
Product

How to Build for a Market That Doesn’t Exist Yet — Braze’s Path to Product-Market Fit

The Braze founding team shares all the early moves they made to lay the path to IPO.
0-$5M: How to Identify Your ICP — Lessons from Vanta, Clay, Retool
Sales

0-$5M: How to Identify Your ICP — Lessons from Vanta, Clay, Retool

How do you spot the wrong customer before they burn your roadmap? First Round Partner Meka Asonye digs into how now-massively successful startups cracked the code.
Thinking About Taking the Founder Leap? Here’s How to Prep for the Emotional Gauntlet
Starting Up

Thinking About Taking the Founder Leap? Here’s How to Prep for the Emotional Gauntlet

How to start building your emotional toolkit for the founder journey ahead, with advice from psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt.
The Unsung Ingredient in Stripe, Square and Linear’s Success: Taste
Product

The Unsung Ingredient in Stripe, Square and Linear’s Success: Taste

Tactical advice for weaving craft into your product and operationalizing taste.
Mastering the Human Side of Engineering: Lessons from Apple, Palantir and Slack
Engineering

Mastering the Human Side of Engineering: Lessons from Apple, Palantir and Slack

Apple engineering leader Michael Lopp gives tactical advice for managers on how to empower individual engineers — and become better leaders themselves.
From Weekend Project to Fortune 10 Adoption — Reducto's Path to Product-Market Fit
Product

From Weekend Project to Fortune 10 Adoption — Reducto's Path to Product-Market Fit

Adit Abraham, co-founder and CEO of Reducto, shares how he closed millions in ARR and a Fortune 10 customer with no sales hires.
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For the founder's notepad:
"If you personally want to grow as fast as your company, you have to give away your job every couple months." – Molly Graham
“Asking ‘Why can't this be done sooner?’ methodically, reliably and habitually can have a profound impact on the speed of your organization.” – Dave Girouard
“End every meeting or conversation with the feeling and optimism you’d like to have at the start of your next conversation with the person.” – Chris Fralic
“Focus is doing things with a clear intention. It doesn’t mean you charge single-minded toward a goal. It means you pay rapt and incremental attention to how you need to turn the rudder on a project.” – Fidji Simo
“It’s essential to grow with the company — rather than having the company grow around you.” – Cristina Cordova 
“You have to be impatient with shipping, but patient with your career.” – James Everingham
“‘I trust you, make the call’ might be the six most powerful words you can hear from a manager.” – Sean Twersky
“Your job as a CEO is to build fire departments, not put out fires.” – Sam Corcos 
“Can you say with confidence that each report would want to be on your team again? If you aren’t sure that the answer is yes, it’s probably no — much like how if you have to ask, ‘Am I in love?’ you’re probably not.” – Julie Zhuo 
“People can get addicted to yak shaving. An effective engineering generalist knows when to move on. Pay attention to whether they used their time wisely, not just the results.” – Mike Krieger 
“It sounds so simple to say that bosses need to tell employees when they're screwing up. But it very rarely happens.” – Kim Scott
“You’ll know you understand the customer problem enough when you can predict 75% of what a customer tells you. Keep having these conversations until three-quarters of it is stuff you already know.” – Christina Cacioppo
“I have a rule: no company swag until the business has at least $250K of revenue or 250k users. Until then, you don’t get to “feel” the benefits of having started a company.” – Gagan Biyani
“The business model ends up becoming the business. It’s equally important as the market you’re going after and the product that you build.” – Jay Simons 
“If speed is the yin, the yang is prioritization. You can’t be fast if you don’t know what’s important.” – Jaleh Rezaei
“If you treat your connections as a kind of personal ATM you use for frequent withdrawals, you’ll quickly be disappointed (and overdrawn).” – Karen Wickre 
“Delighting the customer always yields better returns than countering or copying a competitor. It’s just a lot harder to do.” – Andy Rachleff 
“When you’re a founder, every moment you’re not writing code or getting users, you need to be making a conscious choice: Is whatever you’re doing worth your time?” – Alexis Ohanian
“‘Why would a customer not want this?’ is often a far more interesting question than why they would.” – Rick Song
“When you leave the planning process wondering if you put too many resources behind a single bet, that’s the bet that ends up succeeding. Bold ideas need bold resourcing.” – Lenny Rachitsky and Nels Gilbreth
“Treat customer development as a one-on-one with a direct report — you just want to ask the hard questions.” – Ryan Glasgow
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