All of our Starting Up articles

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.

A UX Research Crash Course for Founders — Customer Discovery Tips from Zoom, Zapier & Dropbox
Zoom’s Jane Davis answers all of your tricky customer development questions, creating a highly tactical guide for founders flying solo on UX research as they explore startup ideas, validate concepts, iterate on prototypes, and troubleshoot common product problems.