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6 Counterintuitive Rules for Being a Better Manager — Advice from Lambda School, Quip & Facebook
Management

6 Counterintuitive Rules for Being a Better Manager — Advice from Lambda School, Quip & Facebook

Molly Graham shares her collection of rules for managers (which include references to robots and wilderness medicine), assembled from her experiences scaling Lambda School, Quip and Facebook

Your Marketing Org is Slow. Here’s a Framework to Move Faster.
PR & Marketing

Your Marketing Org is Slow. Here’s a Framework to Move Faster.

Former Gusto marketing leader Jaleh Rezaei shares a six-step framework for how marketers can "get out of the basement" and start thinking speed-first.

The 40 Best Questions to Ask in an Interview — How to Go Deeper Than “What’s the Culture Like?”
People & Culture

The 40 Best Questions to Ask in an Interview — How to Go Deeper Than “What’s the Culture Like?”

Top startup leaders shared their favorite thought-provoking questions for candidates to ask during an interview to stand out from the crowd and gain in-depth knowledge about the company, the team, and the role.

Drive Growth by Picking the Right Lane — A Customer Acquisition Playbook for Consumer Startups
Starting Up

Drive Growth by Picking the Right Lane — A Customer Acquisition Playbook for Consumer Startups

In Dan Hockenmaier's and Lenny Rachitsky's experience, founders are often surprised to learn that there are very few routes to scalable new customer acquisition. Here, this duo unpacks the three ways to drive consumer startup growth, offering a detailed framework and set of case studies for accelera

Use This Startup's Playbook for Running Impactful Virtual Offsites
People & Culture

Use This Startup's Playbook for Running Impactful Virtual Offsites

Many team retreats have the tendency to leave participants feeling exhausted, sick of slide deck presentations and itching to get back to the emails that have been piling up in their absence—and virtual offsites add marathon Zoom sessions and interruptions at home to the mix.

6 Small Steps for Handling the Emotional Ups and Downs at Work
People & Culture

6 Small Steps for Handling the Emotional Ups and Downs at Work

Tips you can use every day from seasoned startup veterans and psychology experts on how to manage your emotions at work — especially when you feel outside of your comfort zone.

This VP is Doing Things Differently in the Product Org — Here’s His Playbook
Product

This VP is Doing Things Differently in the Product Org — Here’s His Playbook

As the VP of Product at Divvy, Tyler Hogge shares his tips for truly empowering your product managers to deliver outcomes, including aligning with revenue teams and adding variable comp.

The Ultimate Guide to the Founding Designer Role
Design

The Ultimate Guide to the Founding Designer Role

We summarized the most tactical, honest pieces of advice from a group of design experts on what it really takes to be a startup's first design hire — from choosing the right startup to join to excelling in the role and growing your team.

A Founder's Guide to Writing Well
Management

A Founder's Guide to Writing Well

There's a long list of most frequently-cited skills for becoming a successful entrepreneur. One that rarely makes the list is effective writing. Upstart CEO Dave Girouard pens this thoughtful case for the importance of strong writing in the startup world — and his tips for leveling up.

How to Take Personal Development Off the Backburner — Tactical Frameworks for Leveling Up
People & Culture

How to Take Personal Development Off the Backburner — Tactical Frameworks for Leveling Up

Building better teams and companies starts with working on yourself. But for startup leaders, making time for personal development is usually last on the list. Here's a collection of tactical tips from the Review archives for getting started.

The Manager’s Guide to Inclusive Leadership — Small Habits That Make a Big Impact
Management

The Manager’s Guide to Inclusive Leadership — Small Habits That Make a Big Impact

Massella Dukuly, Tania Luna, Dr. Vaneeta Sandhu and Vanessa Tanicien (leadership trainers and facilitators at LifeLabs Learning) joined the First Round community for a tactical discussion on how leaders can become anti-racist and inclusive in their daily interactions, building the habits that can he

Hit the Emotional Gym — The Founder's Framework for Emotional Fitness
People & Culture

Hit the Emotional Gym — The Founder's Framework for Emotional Fitness

Psychologist and founder Dr. Emily Anhalt shares her seven traits of emotional fitness, why they're crucial for founders right now, plus concrete tactics for shaping up your emotional health.

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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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