Starting Up

How to Know if Your Idea’s the Right One — A Founder’s Guide for Successful Early-Stage Customer Discovery

Jeanette Mellinger, BetterUp's Head of UXR and former Head of UXR for Uber Eats, unpacks her approachable three-step playbook for early-stage customer discovery so founders can build something users really want.

Product

GOAT’s Path to Product-Market Fit — How a Fake Sneaker Sparked a $4B Idea

GOAT co-founder and CEO Eddy Lu sits down with First Round Partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how a decade of middling entrepreneurial ideas finally culminated in the $4B idea for a sneaker marketplace.

Product

From Flagship Back to Fledgling: Lessons on Going Multi-Product From an Early Stripe PM

In this exclusive interview, Tara Seshan shares nine lessons from her playbooks for going multi-product, drawing on examples from both Stripe and Watershed.

Management

Add More Rigor to Your Reference Calls With These 25 Questions

When approached with craft and care, reference calls can be a massively influential piece of the hiring decision.

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.

PR & Marketing

How to Build an Iconic Brand Without Breaking the Bank — This Founder's Formula for Early Marketing

Studs co-founder Lisa Bubbers shares how they melded a strong brand with operational rigor to build a thriving business with minimal marketing expenses.

Starting Up

The Secret to Running Effective Growth Sprints — Follow This Process to Learn Faster

"With every growth experiment, you're not just trying to optimize your return on ad spend, lower your CPA, or bag a few new logos ahead of the next fundraise. You're fundamentally learning and making progress toward a simple question: How are we going to grow this business?"

Product

Pilot’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Three-Peat Founders on Picking the Right Team and the Right Market

The founders of Pilot have started three times over, starting with Ksplice (sold to Oracle in 2011) and then Zulip (acquired by Dropbox in 2014).

Must-reads

The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2023

It’s the first week of the new year, and here on The Review we’re ushering it in with a beloved annual ritual (that we find to be much more delightful than other yearly exercises like annual planning or performance reviews).

Must-reads

Look Back to Leap Ahead: 7 Questions for Your End of Year Reflection

As the year draws to a close, you may find yourself in a reflective mood. There’s plenty to take stock of as you look back on how 2023 went.

Product

How to Take Bigger, Bolder Product Bets — Lessons from Slack’s Chief Product Officer

Seasoned product leader and Slack’s CPO Noah Desai Weiss shares the three-step framework he leans on to make quality product decisions with just the right amount of risk.

Engineering

New Engineering Managers Have a High Failure Rate — This Figma Leader is on a Mission to Fix It

Are leaders setting up new engineering managers to fail? Marcel Weekes (VP of Engineering at Figma) sure thinks so. He unpacks his playbook for supporting the tricky transition from senior engineer to people manager and tested tactics for avoiding the common traps.