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How to Sell Your Startup: The Complete Guide to Running an M&A Process as a Founder
Starting Up

How to Sell Your Startup: The Complete Guide to Running an M&A Process as a Founder

As a repeat founder, Daniel Debow has successfully sold three different startups. He reveals his no-nonsense playbook for other startup founders on how to run an M&A process from top to bottom.
Webflow’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons on Creating a Market with Rigorous Customer Empathy
Product

Webflow’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons on Creating a Market with Rigorous Customer Empathy

In this post in our “Paths to Product-Market Fit” series, Webflow’s Bryant Chou sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how he and his co-founders leaned into the power of customer empathy to create the leading visual development platform for building powerful websites.
The Secret to an In Sync Startup? Ditch Your Meetings and Try an Asynchronous Culture
People & Culture

The Secret to an In Sync Startup? Ditch Your Meetings and Try an Asynchronous Culture

As the co-founder and CEO of Subscript, Sidharth Kakkar ditched all the company’s meetings and decided to make the startup’s culture completely asynchronous. He shares his playbook for moving away from a meetings-heavy culture, with three pillars for other founders to lean on.
Binti’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons in Immersive User Research
Product

Binti’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons in Immersive User Research

In this post in our “Paths to Product-Market Fit” series, Binti’s co-founder and CEO Felicia Curcuru sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how her time spent shadowing family social workers in San Francisco empowered her to build a product.
“Sweat the Details” and Other Commandments for Mapping Out a Career in Product
Product

“Sweat the Details” and Other Commandments for Mapping Out a Career in Product

Veteran product leader Jiaona Zhang walks us through the biggest lessons from her entire career in product at Dropbox, Airbnb, WeWork and now Webflow, from breaking into the function as a first-time PM to tactical tips for navigating transitions into more senior roles.
The Startup’s Guide to Customer Advocacy: How to Get Closer to Your Champions
Sales

The Startup’s Guide to Customer Advocacy: How to Get Closer to Your Champions

Customer advocacy is more than just case studies. Kalina Bryant (formerly of Asana, Talkdesk and Marketo) shares tactical advice for turning customers into advocates, with tailored pointers for startups on a budget.
X1's Path to Product-Market Fit — How the Consumer Credit Card Company Pulled off a Pandemic Pivot
Product

X1's Path to Product-Market Fit — How the Consumer Credit Card Company Pulled off a Pandemic Pivot

In our "Paths to Product-Market Fit" series, X1 founder and CEO Deepak Rao sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to share the dramatic story of how his company pivoted during the pandemic and found product-market fit with a bold launch strategy.
The Startup Founder’s Guide to Hiring a Data Scientist
Engineering

The Startup Founder’s Guide to Hiring a Data Scientist

Are you ready to hire a data scientist? Mengying Li, Growth Data Science Lead at Notion, shares her framework for testing whether you should invest in this key hire and how to find the right data science skillset for your startup.
Pull, Don’t Push: How Catalysts Overcome Barriers and Drive Product Adoption
Product

Pull, Don’t Push: How Catalysts Overcome Barriers and Drive Product Adoption

Marketing expert Jonah Berger has spent years probing into the science behind changing people’s minds, and why becoming an effective change agent is about lowering barriers, not pushing harder. He distilled five of the most common barriers into a simple framework and walks us through it.
Retool’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons for Getting to 100 Happy Customers, Faster
Product

Retool’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons for Getting to 100 Happy Customers, Faster

In our "Paths to Product-Market Fit" series, Retool founder and CEO David Hsu sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to share how the internal tools company hypothesized, tested and iterated its way to 100 happy customers
Small Habits Co-Founders Can Hang On to as They Build the Plane While Flying It
Starting Up

Small Habits Co-Founders Can Hang On to as They Build the Plane While Flying It

Labelbox’s Manu Sharma and Brian Rieger have turned a decade-long friendship into a lasting business partnership, scaling the AI developer tool startup since co-founding it together in 2017.
Maven's Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons for Leveraging Community in the Early Days
Product

Maven's Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons for Leveraging Community in the Early Days

In the second post for our new series, "Paths to Product-Market Fit," Maven founder and CEO Kate Ryder sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to share the inside story of the first female-led telemedicine startup to achieve unicorn status.
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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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