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A Founder’s Framework for Understanding Performance vs. Brand Marketing for Your Startup
PR & Marketing

A Founder’s Framework for Understanding Performance vs. Brand Marketing for Your Startup

Startup marketing experts Sarah Emmott and Holly Chen share a multi-step process for how to craft a brand and performance marketing strategy, including how to set goals, allocate the right budget, and measure success.

Tips for Recruiting: How to Hire the Right Person
Management

Tips for Recruiting: How to Hire the Right Person

We've combed the Review archives for the best advice on how to hire the right person for your startup — including tips on writing the job description, asking better interview questions, and checking references.

9 Steps for Crafting a Good Decision Making Process
Management

9 Steps for Crafting a Good Decision Making Process

We’ve combed The Review archives to identify some of the more unique advice we’ve heard over the years, boiling it down into an easy-to-follow, 9-step decision-making process.

A Tactical Guide on How to Make Decisions Faster
Management

A Tactical Guide on How to Make Decisions Faster

We’ve put together a guide of tactical advice on how to speed up decision making at your startup — whether you’re trying to fix a decision making process that’s slowed as you’ve scaled, or you’re looking to build in speedy habits right from the start.

Elevate Your Performance Review Conversations with these 12 Expert Tips
People & Culture

Elevate Your Performance Review Conversations with these 12 Expert Tips

Stop dreading performance reviews. We assembled a list of 12 tips from expert leaders like Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham, Russ Laraway, Brie Wolfson, Julie Zhuo and more to make these conversations more impactful. There are frameworks and tactics for managers and reports alike to rethink their appro

Unlock the Power of Money Words: How Founders Can Write Copy That Converts
PR & Marketing

Unlock the Power of Money Words: How Founders Can Write Copy That Converts

Copyhackers’ Joanna Wiebe shares the science behind word choice to help take your copy from guesswork to goldmine.

Use These 5 Types of Interview Questions to Level Up Your Hiring Process
People & Culture

Use These 5 Types of Interview Questions to Level Up Your Hiring Process

Using different types of interview questions will help you make the right hires for your startup. See our favorite questions to ask across five categories.

How Talent Teams Can Better Weather Boom-and-Bust Cycles — Advice from Two Decades at Gem, Facebook, and Robinhood
Starting Up

How Talent Teams Can Better Weather Boom-and-Bust Cycles — Advice from Two Decades at Gem, Facebook, and Robinhood

Richard Cho has led talent acquisition teams at large tech firms for the better part of two decades. He’s collected the lessons he’s learned from operating in both hiring booms and busts, offering a thoughtful guide on how startup talent teams can do more — with less.

The Art of Self-Awareness: A Founder’s Guide to Assessing Strengths and Weaknesses
People & Culture

The Art of Self-Awareness: A Founder’s Guide to Assessing Strengths and Weaknesses

Psychologist and co-founder of Coa, Dr. Emily Anhalt, unpacks the five traits of high-impact founders — and how the very traits that make a founder successful can also hold them back.

How to Scale Yourself Down — Not Up — as a Leader
Management

How to Scale Yourself Down — Not Up — as a Leader

After a four-decade career of toggling back and forth between big and small, Lightspark SVP of Engineering James Everingham shares his playbook for scaling down your leadership as you go from an org of hundreds or thousands to a handful of direct reports.

21 Ways To Shore Up Your Customer Success Org
Sales

21 Ways To Shore Up Your Customer Success Org

When operating in a downturn, founders have to make the most out of what they have in order to grow, including their existing customer relationships. This often means shining a spotlight on customer success orgs. To help, we spoke to over a dozen customer success experts for their best advice, pract

The Most Common Go-to-Market Questions This Expert Gets from Early Founders
Sales

The Most Common Go-to-Market Questions This Expert Gets from Early Founders

Struggling to figure out your startup's early go-to-market? First Round's VP of GTM Emery Rosansky shares her expert advice and tactical templates for narrowing down your ICP, running a successful sales call, and accurate forecasting.

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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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