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This isn't your typical VC newsletter — it's about you, not us. Here's what to expect:
- In-the-weeds, actionable startup advice — straight from company builders themselves, not investors.
- Detailed, fascinating stories on startup leaders' careers and founders' different paths to product-market fit.
- Incredibly useful templates, question sets and low-lift tactics, crowdsourced from our community.
- A curated roundup of the most helpful resources on the internet this week.
Newsletter Archive
The most honest lessons about the path to product-market fit
Featuring founders from Gusto, Mercury, Meter and more
Notion put an engineer in sales to build better AI tools
Actually doing the work revealed the right problem to solve
The merger playbook: A founder’s firsthand story of the deal that beat the odds
And how it changed the trajectory of both companies
Listen: How this two-time billion-dollar founder wins in the enterprise
GTM lessons from Jyoti Bansal
The process I've used to name dozens of companies
A note from the essay's author
The other PMF: how personality-message fit helps founders communicate better
The 30-second prep habit, learning to read a room, and more
How a high school dropout built one of the world’s most-used developer tools
From bootstrapping to a $3B company
When founders should quit as head of product — and hire the first PM
4 heuristics for deciding when it’s time
The trap of weak product-market fit — lessons from Mercury’s founder
Inside the fintech unicorn’s path to product-market fit
The compensation rules to follow (and break), according to experts
Compensation leaders from Clay, Google and Instacart share the rules early-stage founders can break — and the few they should actually follow.
How to avoid a co-founder breakup before Series B
Rituals to strengthen the most important relationship in your startup
Inside Warp’s coding by prompt mandate (and how the CEO follows it too)
Every coding task starts with a prompt — even the CEO’s
Founders, you’re missing this key step on the path to product-market fit
A research toolkit for the discovery phase
How Brex is building an AI-first operations org
Changing roles, workflows and skills around AI
Why Sierra built a design partnership program on “hard mode”
Sierra’s first GTM hire, breaks down every step of their playbook.
Idea validation tactics they won’t teach you in business school
How founders from Linear, Mercury and other startups found conviction before the build
What your startup does (and doesn’t) need to come out of stealth
A launch plan from Figma’s first marketer
Scale smarter, not bigger: Inside Linktree’s internal AI adoption playbook
How Linktree kept headcount steady at 190 while boosting shipping velocity and AI adoption
How to use your industry outsider status to your advantage
Product-building lessons from a Twitter PM turned healthcare founder
Don’t ship your pitch deck to your website
How to translate investor talking points into a marketing story
Inside Owner’s zigzag path to a billion-dollar business
Dropping out of high school. A six-figure Minecraft server. A failing dog grooming business. A pandemic pivot.
Why Linear puts craft above all metrics
Inside the company’s slow and deliberate path to product-market fit
How Carta saves 3,500+ hours per month using AI agents
An 11-min task completed in seconds
A new publication from First Round: Applied Intelligence
Learn how companies are actually using AI, and the results they’re experiencing
Stop playing customer success hero. Here’s how to build your first team.
From hiring to metrics to first systems to set up
How to go from random wins to repeatable revenue
A formula for sales repeatability
Can you be a good micromanager?
How to toggle between details and delegation
Rent-an-exec: Should you hire a fractional leader?
A fractional COO explains
Inside Figma's human-centered approach to building AI
From determining success metrics to structuring qualitative feedback
How to hang on to conviction in an emerging market: Braze's long game to PMF
The origin story of the now publicly traded company
How to spot the wrong customer before they burn your roadmap
How Vanta, Clay, Retool & more startups found their ICP
Thinking about becoming a founder? Here’s how to emotionally prepare
A psychologist’s advice on preparing to take the founder leap
How to make craft your moat
How Stripe, Linear, Square & more top companies operationalize taste
How to build and grow the human side of your engineering org
Lessons from Apple, Palantir and Slack
From weekend project to Fortune 10 adoption
How this founder closed millions in ARR with no sales hires
Inside Superhuman’s onboarding strategy: from human-led to self-serve
An extremely detailed look at building and scaling onboarding
From two-person consultancy to $4.2B software business — dbt Labs’ Path to PMF
Co-founder Tristan Handy shares the startup’s unconventional backstory
A playbook for running “founder-led” growth
You're not ready for a Head of Growth — yet.
Square’s former CEO on the two crucial components of org design
Building a structure to enable scale.
A playbook for building deep tech startups
When traditional startup advice falls short
17,784 hours: Exactly how one startup founder spent 5 years building
Sam Corcos, co-founder & CEO of Levels, on tracking every 15-minute block
How Plaid, Clay, Lattice & other startups pivoted to find PMF
Why & when these founders knew it was time to switch
A complete guide to your startup’s first sales hire
Expert advice from first hires at Dropbox, Figma, Stripe & more
How Figma chooses, builds & launches new products
From spotting user hacks to the “screenshot test”
The rotation program that keeps this startup’s engineers learning (and not leaving)
How Checkr’s VP of Eng squashes attrition
Introducing our new 0 to $5M series — how to nail founder-led sales
We’re teaming up with First Round partner Meka Asonye for a new series all about getting to $5M ARR.
EvolutionIQ’s path to product-market fit — and a $730M acquisition
Lessons from a vertical AI success story
An engineering leader’s advice for pivoting from manager to IC
A 90-day plan to land the jump
10x, 10x, 6x — The exact GTM moves behind Clay’s explosive revenue growth
Lessons from a newly minted unicorn
The inside story of the idea & launch of Figma Slides
How PM Mihika Kapoor built momentum for her product idea
The 30 best pieces of advice we heard in 2024
The 12th edition of our annual roundup is here
Fight off organizational entropy with this guide from Rippling’s COO
Matt MacInnis on becoming a more impatient (and effective) exec
25 tough questions for founder self-reflection
Questions to size up your decision making, team, product & more
How Figma taps into product taste, simplicity and storytelling
An interview with Chief Product Officer Yuhki Yamashita
What this founder learned from losing product-market fit
Lessons in intellectual honesty from a 3X founder
Three unexpected anti-patterns for engineering leaders
Will Larson, CTO at Carta, shares unconventional leadership strategies he’s learned from scaling teams at Stripe, Uber and Calm.
20 lessons from 20 different paths to PMF
Our favorite lessons from founders who tackled the winding journey to product-market fit
A founder-friendly playbook for early customer discovery
This week, we’re sharing a step-by-step playbook for how to approach early customer discovery and user research the right way.
After a decade of entrepreneurial pursuits, a $4B unicorn emerges
This week, we’re back with the latest installment in our Paths to Product-Market Fit series.
Why you shouldn’t focus on building the best product — and what to do instead
This week, we're diving into the how, what, when, and why of going from single product focus to multi-product strategy, a common stumbling block for startups.
Dig deeper in reference calls with these 25 questions
Happy Valentine's Day! This week, we’ve pulled together a mega-guide for falling back in love with reference calls.
Why the key to extreme product-market fit is simplicity & velocity
This week, a step-by-step guide on how to turn your startup into a learning machine.
