All of our Starting Up articles
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.
How to Know if Your Idea’s the Right One — A Founder’s Guide for Successful Early-Stage Customer Discovery
Jeanette Mellinger, BetterUp's Head of UXR and former Head of UXR for Uber Eats, unpacks her approachable three-step playbook for early-stage customer discovery so founders can build something users really want.
The Secret to Running Effective Growth Sprints — Follow This Process to Learn Faster
"With every growth experiment, you're not just trying to optimize your return on ad spend, lower your CPA, or bag a few new logos ahead of the next fundraise. You're fundamentally learning and making progress toward a simple question: How are we going to grow this business?"
How Talent Teams Can Better Weather Boom-and-Bust Cycles — Advice from Two Decades at Gem, Facebook, and Robinhood
Richard Cho has led talent acquisition teams at large tech firms for the better part of two decades. He’s collected the lessons he’s learned from operating in both hiring booms and busts, offering a thoughtful guide on how startup talent teams can do more — with less.
The Tactical Guide to Making Better Decisions When Starting and Scaling Companies
The First Round team has been lucky to work with retired poker player and decision-making expert Annie Duke in a special capacity these past few years. Here, we open-source some of the advice she gives to help founders face down uncertainty and make better decisions.
The Company-Building Cornerstones Every Founder Needs to Focus On — Advice From HubSpot’s Dharmesh Shah
Dharmesh Shah has spent the last 15 years as co-founder & CTO of HubSpot. He pinpoints the inflection points and key decisions that other founders face in the early days, from choosing a co-founder to crafting the culture, and shares unconventional advice.
Finding Language-Market Fit: How to Make Customers Feel Like You’ve Read Their Minds
After more than a decade of running B2B growth teams at PayPal and investing at 500 Startups, Matt Lerner now spends his days helping early-stage startups with growth. He's seen firsthand how changes in a handful of words can yield jaw-dropping differences in conversion.
The Minimum Viable Testing Process for Evaluating Startup Ideas
The traditional approach is to do some customer research, throw an MVP out there as fast as possible, and hope it hits. After being early at three startups that achieved over $1M in run-rate in their first six months of going live, Gagan Biyani has landed on an approach that’s quite different.