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Building a Deep Tech Company? Most Startup Advice Doesn’t Apply — Read This Instead
Starting Up

Building a Deep Tech Company? Most Startup Advice Doesn’t Apply — Read This Instead

Learn from Loyal founder Celine Halioua’s rigorous approach to milestone-based planning, fundraising and multi-product strategy for deep tech companies.
The Pivot to Product-Market Fit: How Plaid, Clay, Lattice & Other Startups Broke Out
Product

The Pivot to Product-Market Fit: How Plaid, Clay, Lattice & Other Startups Broke Out

For many startups, the secret to finding product-market fit lies in the pivot. Here’s how these founders knew it was time to change directions.
How I Spent 17,784 Hours in 5 Years as a Startup Founder
Starting Up

How I Spent 17,784 Hours in 5 Years as a Startup Founder

Sam Corcos, co-founder & CEO of Levels, shares a detailed look into exactly how he spent 5 years building the company, with reflections on what changed in the transition from very early-stage to scale up.
Replit’s Path to Product-Market Fit — The $1 Billion Side Project

Replit’s Path to Product-Market Fit — The $1 Billion Side Project

In the startup world, we often hear stories of founders who’ve dreamt of starting a company—any company—since childhood, with big business ambitions stemming from their days of running a lemonade stand. This is not one of those stories. Amjad Masad’s founder journey began instead with a
Gong’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Why This $7B Company Still Works With Design Partners

Gong’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Why This $7B Company Still Works With Design Partners

There are tons of stories about how now-successful startups took meandering paths and hard-left pivots to find what clicked. Twitter started out as a podcasting platform, Slack was first a live chat for a video game — in our series chronicling founders’ paths to product-market fit, we’ve covered many such
EvolutionIQ Just Got Acquired for $730M — Here's Their Playbook For Building an Enduring AI Business

EvolutionIQ Just Got Acquired for $730M — Here's Their Playbook For Building an Enduring AI Business

We sat down with the founding team for the inside story of one of the first major vertical AI exits.
Vercel’s Path to Product-Market Fit — From Open-Source Project to Billion-Dollar Business
Product

Vercel’s Path to Product-Market Fit — From Open-Source Project to Billion-Dollar Business

Guillermo Rauch, raised in Buenos Aires and fascinated by computers since age 7, taught himself to code and moved to San Francisco at 18. His company, Vercel — the frontend cloud service behind open-source development framework Next.js — was recently valued at $2.5 billion.
0-$5M: When, Who, and How to Make Your First Sales Hire
Sales

0-$5M: When, Who, and How to Make Your First Sales Hire

Expert advice from Dropbox, Figma and Stripe on timing your first sales hire, finding the right candidate profile and creating effective onboarding to successfully transition from founder-led sales to a scalable revenue team.
Clay’s Path to Product-Market Fit — A 7-Year 'Overnight Success'

Clay’s Path to Product-Market Fit — A 7-Year 'Overnight Success'

In the earliest days of building, the founder is the company. Their fingerprints are pressed across every nook and cranny of the business — each decision, hire and product feature. Most early-stage investors will tell you (us included) that the strength of the founding team is the single most important factor
Vanta's Path to Product-Market Fit — Solve the Customer’s Problem, Then Write Code
Product

Vanta's Path to Product-Market Fit — Solve the Customer’s Problem, Then Write Code

Vanta founder and CEO Christina Cacioppo sits down with First Round Partner Todd Jackson for an inside look at all the unconventional moves in the company’s first few years — from creating a new category to signing the first 600 customers without a proper website.
The Inside Story of How This Startup Turned a 216-Word Pitch Email into a $2.6 Billion Acquisition

The Inside Story of How This Startup Turned a 216-Word Pitch Email into a $2.6 Billion Acquisition

Looker went from a single customer to more than 1700, from a small, scrappy team in Santa Cruz to a 700-person company spanning eight offices around the globe. Now on the heels of its acquisition by Google, co-founders Lloyd Tabb and Ben Porterfield, CEO Frank Bien, and first investor Bill Trenchard
Retool’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons for Getting to 100 Happy Customers, Faster
Product

Retool’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons for Getting to 100 Happy Customers, Faster

In our "Paths to Product-Market Fit" series, Retool founder and CEO David Hsu sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to share how the internal tools company hypothesized, tested and iterated its way to 100 happy customers
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For the founder's notepad:
"If you personally want to grow as fast as your company, you have to give away your job every couple months." – Molly Graham
“Asking ‘Why can't this be done sooner?’ methodically, reliably and habitually can have a profound impact on the speed of your organization.” – Dave Girouard
“End every meeting or conversation with the feeling and optimism you’d like to have at the start of your next conversation with the person.” – Chris Fralic
“Focus is doing things with a clear intention. It doesn’t mean you charge single-minded toward a goal. It means you pay rapt and incremental attention to how you need to turn the rudder on a project.” – Fidji Simo
“It’s essential to grow with the company — rather than having the company grow around you.” – Cristina Cordova 
“You have to be impatient with shipping, but patient with your career.” – James Everingham
“‘I trust you, make the call’ might be the six most powerful words you can hear from a manager.” – Sean Twersky
“Your job as a CEO is to build fire departments, not put out fires.” – Sam Corcos 
“Can you say with confidence that each report would want to be on your team again? If you aren’t sure that the answer is yes, it’s probably no — much like how if you have to ask, ‘Am I in love?’ you’re probably not.” – Julie Zhuo 
“People can get addicted to yak shaving. An effective engineering generalist knows when to move on. Pay attention to whether they used their time wisely, not just the results.” – Mike Krieger 
“It sounds so simple to say that bosses need to tell employees when they're screwing up. But it very rarely happens.” – Kim Scott
“You’ll know you understand the customer problem enough when you can predict 75% of what a customer tells you. Keep having these conversations until three-quarters of it is stuff you already know.” – Christina Cacioppo
“I have a rule: no company swag until the business has at least $250K of revenue or 250k users. Until then, you don’t get to “feel” the benefits of having started a company.” – Gagan Biyani
“The business model ends up becoming the business. It’s equally important as the market you’re going after and the product that you build.” – Jay Simons 
“If speed is the yin, the yang is prioritization. You can’t be fast if you don’t know what’s important.” – Jaleh Rezaei
“If you treat your connections as a kind of personal ATM you use for frequent withdrawals, you’ll quickly be disappointed (and overdrawn).” – Karen Wickre 
“Delighting the customer always yields better returns than countering or copying a competitor. It’s just a lot harder to do.” – Andy Rachleff 
“When you’re a founder, every moment you’re not writing code or getting users, you need to be making a conscious choice: Is whatever you’re doing worth your time?” – Alexis Ohanian
“‘Why would a customer not want this?’ is often a far more interesting question than why they would.” – Rick Song
“When you leave the planning process wondering if you put too many resources behind a single bet, that’s the bet that ends up succeeding. Bold ideas need bold resourcing.” – Lenny Rachitsky and Nels Gilbreth
“Treat customer development as a one-on-one with a direct report — you just want to ask the hard questions.” – Ryan Glasgow
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