How to Scale Yourself Down — Not Up — as a Leader
After a four-decade career of toggling back and forth between big and small, Lightspark SVP of Engineering James Everingham shares his playbook for scaling down your leadership as you go from an org of hundreds or thousands to a handful of direct reports.
Material Security’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Find Your Winning Idea by Selling Products That Don’t Exist Yet
Material Security co-founders Ryan Noon and Abhishek Agrawal sit down with First Round Partner Todd Jackson to explain how they whittled 25 startup ideas down to 4 and then used a pre-selling technique to find their winning idea.
21 Ways To Shore Up Your Customer Success Org
When operating in a downturn, founders have to make the most out of what they have in order to grow, including their existing customer relationships. This often means shining a spotlight on customer success orgs. To help, we spoke to over a dozen customer success experts for their best advice, pract
The Most Common Go-to-Market Questions This Expert Gets from Early Founders
Struggling to figure out your startup's early go-to-market? First Round's VP of GTM Emery Rosansky shares her expert advice and tactical templates for narrowing down your ICP, running a successful sales call, and accurate forecasting.
‘Give Away Your People’ — How Managers Can (and Should) Prep for High Performers to Leave
Seasoned startup operator Clarissa Shen offers a fresh perspective on Molly Graham’s ‘Give Away Your Legos’ framework by sharing her own tactics on how to proactively manage for high performers to leave.
Alma’s Path to Product-Market Fit — How to Pivot and Succeed as a Solo Non-Technical Founder
Alma founder and CEO Harry Ritter sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how he tackled a huge pandemic pivot that turned his initial startup idea on its head and found product-market fit twice.
Kubecost’s Path to Product-Market Fit — How the Co-Founders Validated Their Idea with 100 Customer Conversations
In this post in our “Paths to Product-Market Fit” series, Webb Brown sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how he and his co-founder validated the idea for Kubecost.
