All of our Starting Up articles

Deepak Rao on how X1 pivoted, launched, built a +600K-long waitlist and fundraised in tough times

Todd Jackson is back on the mic to guest host another product-market fit focused episode this week. He chats with Deepak Rao, co-founder and CEO of X1, a consumer fintech startup that’s building a credit card for a new generation. Just last week, X1 announced a $15 million funding round.

What startups can learn from enterprise corporate messaging — Sara Varni’s lessons from Salesforce & Twilio

Our guest is Sara Varni, CMO of Attentive, a conversational commerce platform. Before joining Attentive, Sara was Twilio’s CMO and spent 10 years as a senior marketing leader at Salesforce.

The art of starting a startup — Gagan Biyani’s advice for generating, validating, and executing on ideas

Today’s episode is with Gagan Biyani, co-founder and CEO of Maven, a company that empowers the world’s experts to offer cohort-based courses directly to their audience.

How to handle comp challenges at every startup stage — Kaitlyn Knopp’s advice from Pequity, Instacart, Cruise & Google

Today’s episode is with Kaitlyn Knopp, founder and CEO of Pequity, which automates HR workflows to make compensation more equitable and scalable.

Management

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.

Starting Up

23 Tactical Company Building Lessons, Learned From Scaling Stripe & Notion

From Stripe to Notion, Cristina Cordova has worked on some of the biggest products in tech. She shares tactical tidbits on what she’s learned about about scaling companies and shaping your career.

Starting Up

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.

After building hundreds of startup brands, Arielle Jackson shares 6 early marketing missteps to avoid

Today’s episode is with Arielle Jackson. For the past 7 years, she’s helped hundreds of companies build their positioning and brands from the ground up, both as our Marketing Expert in Residence here at First Round and in her own consulting work.

Starting Up

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.

How to hire the right marketer at the right time for your startup — Mux & Segment’s Maya Spivak

Today’s episode is with Maya Spivak, the Head of Marketing at Mux, which is an API for developers to build video experiences.

Starting Up

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.

Starting Up

Advice for the Pre-Product-Market Fit Days — This Founder’s Playbook for Pivoting with Purpose

CEO Tara Viswanathan shares her biggest lessons from the early years of building Rupa Health — including how to pivot your way into the right product and build the winning team.