The 12th installment of our annual retrospective is here — read on for a preview of the most impactful insights we published over the last year.
The 30 Best Pieces of Company Building Advice We Heard in 2024
Happy 2025!
Every January, we greet the new year with a longstanding tradition: sifting through the trove of company building wisdom we collected over the past 365 days and pulling out 30 of our favorite pieces of advice.
Our founding mission of The First Round Review hasn’t wavered since 2013: to help founders build better companies — by learning directly from fellow builders. Last year, as every year, that guiding principle led our curiosity toward a broad range of topics and tactics, from early customer discovery to non-obvious signs of traction to brand-building on a budget.
But in the process of assembling this roundup at the start of each year, themes start to crystalize in hindsight. In 2024, AI made it easier to build quickly and the search for product-market fit was the top question on many founders’ minds.
That clear demand for a more tactical breakdown of the subject inspired one of our largest editorial projects to date: an essay unpacking the four levels of PMF as we see them, from nascent to extreme — the result of hundreds of hours of research and two decades spent partnering closely with pre-PMF founders. It’s full of detailed benchmarks, common pitfalls, and hard-won advice from founders who've built billion-dollar companies.
But finding (and keeping) product-market fit is only the first of many towering hurdles to jump, and we published heaps more advice for the later chapters of company-building, like fighting against entropy as you scale to the case for intentionally lopsided org charts.
Here’s a peek at some of the snappy yet actionable advice you’ll find on this list:
- Find your 200% adjustment to unlock extreme product-market fit. “More often than not, if you're working on something that is not getting great traction, you’re probably not a 10% adjustment away — you’re probably a 200% adjustment away,” says Lattice founder Jack Altman, who got unstuck at nascent PMF with a sharp product pivot from OKR planning to performance management.
- Stay on top of your annual plan (even when it gets upended). As you set your annual plan into motion this January, prepare to check in (and course correct) as your plan collides with reality. To gird your check-ins with some structure, borrow Linktree CPO Jiaona Zhang’s template. “We have a scorecard template for each quarter. It has 3-5 of our key cross-functional goals. Every single week we have a scorecard meeting, which is a lightweight check-in where you grade your goal and tell everyone if you're on track, at risk, or off track,” says Zhang. (You can find Zhang’s detailed template in the full article).
- Seek out conflict to get context faster. Carta CTO Will Larson has a nudge for engineering execs that rings true for leaders across the org chart: Something that worked at your last company isn’t a guaranteed success at your new one. “Successful leaders come in and ask, ‘How can I change myself to fit?’ not ‘How can I force my entire organization to fit to work with me?’” he says. To get more context on how your new company operates, he recommends deliberately seeking out opposing viewpoints and inviting pushback on ideas for new approaches.
- Make sure your early hires pass the button-clicker test. “One of the biggest mistakes people make with early marketing hires is they have someone who can talk the talk, but when it comes to actually doing things, they have to go hire people to click the buttons,” says Alex Kracov (Dock founder and first marketing hire at Lattice).
Our hope is that this yearly roundup surfaces a resonant reminder or fresh approach to take with you into the year ahead.