• Articles
  • Curated Reads
  • Paths to PMF
  • Newsletter
  • Podcast
  • Sign In
  • Articles
  • Curated Reads
  • Paths to PMF
  • Newsletter
  • Podcast
  • Sign In
All Product Fundraising Starting Up Management Engineering PR & Marketing Must-reads People & Culture Design Sales
Zūm’s Path to Product-Market Fit — How The Student Transportation Company Found Product-Market Fit Twice
Product

Zūm’s Path to Product-Market Fit — How The Student Transportation Company Found Product-Market Fit Twice

Zūm co-founder Ritu Narayan sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how her transportation company found product-market fit in both B2C and B2B.
Labelbox's Path to PMF: Founders Need to be Contrarian and Right — Here's How
Product

Labelbox's Path to PMF: Founders Need to be Contrarian and Right — Here's How

Labelbox co-founder and CEO Manu Sharma sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how he prioritized idea validation and customer discovery before building Labelbox.
Kubecost’s Path to Product-Market Fit — How the Co-Founders Validated Their Idea with 100 Customer Conversations
Product

Kubecost’s Path to Product-Market Fit — How the Co-Founders Validated Their Idea with 100 Customer Conversations

In this post in our “Paths to Product-Market Fit” series, Webb Brown sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how he and his co-founder validated the idea for Kubecost.
Binti’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons in Immersive User Research
Product

Binti’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons in Immersive User Research

In this post in our “Paths to Product-Market Fit” series, Binti’s co-founder and CEO Felicia Curcuru sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how her time spent shadowing family social workers in San Francisco empowered her to build a product.
GOAT’s Path to Product-Market Fit — How a Fake Sneaker Sparked a $4B Idea
Product

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

Eddy Lu, co-founder of GOAT, shares the winding road that led to his current success.
X1's Path to Product-Market Fit — How the Consumer Credit Card Company Pulled off a Pandemic Pivot
Product

X1's Path to Product-Market Fit — How the Consumer Credit Card Company Pulled off a Pandemic Pivot

In our "Paths to Product-Market Fit" series, X1 founder and CEO Deepak Rao sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to share the dramatic story of how his company pivoted during the pandemic and found product-market fit with a bold launch strategy.
Live Tinted’s Path to Product Market Fit: How to Build a Loyal and Passionate Community Before You Even Have a Brand
Product

Live Tinted’s Path to Product Market Fit: How to Build a Loyal and Passionate Community Before You Even Have a Brand

Live Tinted co-founder and CEO Deepica Mutyala sits down with First Round Partner Todd Jackson for a behind-the-scenes look at how she built a loyal and powerful customer base long before she ever had a product to sell.
The 100 Best Bits of Advice from 10 Years of First Round Review
Career advice

The 100 Best Bits of Advice from 10 Years of First Round Review

We combed The Review archives for a special compilation of the 100 very best advice published on our digital pages over the last 10 years from folks like Stewart Butterfield, Claire Hughes Johnson and Alexis Ohanian.)
From Flagship Back to Fledgling: Lessons on Going Multi-Product From an Early Stripe PM

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.
Add More Rigor to Your Reference Calls With These 25 Questions

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

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

Anna Harmon and Lisa Bubbers, the founders of Studs, share how they melded a strong brand with operational rigor to build a thriving business with minimal marketing expenses.
The Secret to Running Effective Growth Sprints — Follow This Process to Learn Faster
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?"
  • About
  • Articles
  • Curated Reads
  • Paths to PMF
  • Newsletter
  • Podcast
  • Sign in
  • Sign In
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
Shuffle

Published by