All of our First-time founders articles

Starting Up

Is Your Startup Idea Any Good? Borrow These Validation Tactics from the Founders of Linear, Mercury and More

Founders share the unconventional ways they found conviction in their startup ideas.

Starting Up

To Learn a New Market, Start by Building Your Product — Tactics From a Twitter PM Turned Healthcare Founder

Color co-founder and CEO Othman Laraki built a billion-dollar company in an industry he had zero professional experience in. Here, he shares four product-building tactics that helped him learn the healthcare industry.

Product

The Story Behind Owner’s Pivots to a Billion-Dollar Business

Owner co-founder and CEO Adam Guild shares his unique entrepreneurial journey, featuring a six-figure Minecraft server, his mom's failing dog grooming business and a 180-degree pandemic pivot.

Podcast

How rejecting conventional wisdom grew Sentry to a $3 billion company | David Cramer (Co-founder and CPO)

David Cramer is a self-taught engineer who dropped out of high school in 9th grade and managed a Burger King. He worked hard and rejected conventional wisdom to co-found Sentry, the leading open-source error monitoring tool used by over 90,000 companies.

Inside Linear: Why craft and focus still win in product building | Karri Saarinen (Co-founder and CEO)

Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, the project management tool built for high-performance software teams. Since its founding in 2019, Linear has achieved a valuation of $1.25B and now counts companies like OpenAI, Ramp and Vercel as customers.

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.

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.

From reluctant founder to $2B valuation: The story of Persona | Rick Song (Co-founder and CEO)

Rick Song is the co-founder and CEO of Persona, the identity verification platform used by some of the world’s largest companies. Before starting Persona, Rick worked on identity fraud and risk products at Square, which laid the groundwork for what would become Persona’s highly technical, horizontal platform. Since

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.

How a weekend hack became a multimillion-dollar AI startup | Adit Abraham (Co-founder & CEO at Reducto)

Adit Abraham is the co-founder and CEO of Reducto, which helps leading AI teams extract and structure data from complex documents and spreadsheets in their pipeline. Within 6 months of launching, Reducto went from 0→7 figures in ARR. Reducto has grown to process tens of millions of pages monthly

1Password’s growth story | How they went from bootstrapped to $6B company | Jeff Shiner (CEO)

Jeff Shiner is the CEO of 1Password, the access management company used by over 100,000 businesses and millions of individuals worldwide. He joined 1Password as CEO in 2012, when the team was just under 20 people. Under Jeff’s leadership, 1Password expanded into B2B, launched a SaaS platform, and

Product

How dbt Labs Built a $4.2B Software Business out of a Two-Person Consultancy

Tristan Handy, CEO and co-founder of dbt Labs, shares the unorthodox moves he made to transform a Philly-based consultancy into a billion-dollar SaaS powerhouse.