All of our First-time founders articles

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.

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.

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.

Starting Up

You’re Not Ready for a Head of Growth: Run This Founder-Led Growth Playbook Instead

Founders are responsible for figuring out how their business is going to grow. Use these tactics — specifically designed for founders — to uncover your most impactful growth levers.

The 30 Best Pieces of Company Building Advice We Heard in 2024

For the 12th year in a row, we rounded up 30 timeless company-building insights we published from the year before.

Starting Up

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.

Must-reads

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.

Must-reads

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).

Product

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.

Must-reads

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.

Product

Vanta's Path to Product-Market Fit — Solve the Customer’s Problem, Then Write Code

Vanta founder and CEO Christina Cacioppo sits down with First Round Partner Todd Jackson for an inside look at all the unconventional moves in the company’s first few years — from creating a new category to signing the first 600 customers without a proper website.