First Round Review - Articles
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The most actionable, tactical company building advice around for founders and startup leaders.
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The Art of Evals: How Figma Put People at the Center of Its AI Product
Building, testing and validating with human craft and creativity.
How to Build for a Market That Doesn’t Exist Yet — Braze’s Path to Product-Market Fit
The Braze founding team shares all the early moves they made to lay the path to IPO.
0-$5M: How to Identify Your ICP — Lessons from Vanta, Clay, Retool
How do you spot the wrong customer before they burn your roadmap? First Round Partner Meka Asonye digs into how now-massively successful startups cracked the code.
Thinking About Taking the Founder Leap? Here’s How to Prep for the Emotional Gauntlet
How to start building your emotional toolkit for the founder journey ahead, with advice from psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt.
The Unsung Ingredient in Stripe, Square and Linear’s Success: Taste
Tactical advice for weaving craft into your product and operationalizing taste.
Mastering the Human Side of Engineering: Lessons from Apple, Palantir and Slack
Apple engineering leader Michael Lopp gives tactical advice for managers on how to empower individual engineers — and become better leaders themselves.
From Weekend Project to Fortune 10 Adoption — Reducto's Path to Product-Market Fit
Adit Abraham, co-founder and CEO of Reducto, shares how he closed millions in ARR and a Fortune 10 customer with no sales hires.
Obsessing Over Onboarding for 10+ Years — The Architect of Superhuman's Onboarding Shares His Playbook
Superhuman became known for its unique approach to onboarding: a highly-personalized, white-glove, human-led experience. Superhuman's Gaurav Vohra, startup advisor and growth leader, gives us a detailed look at how he...
How dbt Labs Built a $4.2B Software Business out of a Two-Person Consultancy
Tristan Handy, CEO and co-founder of dbt Labs, shares the unorthodox moves he made to transform a Philly-based consultancy into a billion-dollar SaaS powerhouse.
You’re Not Ready for a Head of Growth: Run This Founder-Led Growth Playbook Instead
Founders are responsible for figuring out how their business is going to grow. Use these tactics — specifically designed for founders — to uncover your most impactful growth levers.
How to Intentionally Design Your Org, From Square’s Former CEO
Former Square CEO, AWS's first GM and 12-year Microsoft veteran, Alyssa Henry, walks us through the two crucial considerations for organizational design — your business and your people — and...
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.
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.
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...
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...
Lessons in Product Scaling and Storytelling from Figma’s CPO
Figma CPO Yuhki Yamashita offers up his playbook for the gnarly phase of product building that arrives after a startup clinches product-market fit — and sets its sights on the...
The Rotation Program That Keeps This Startup’s Engineers Learning — and Not Leaving
Checkr VP of Engineering Krista Moroder opens up about the rotation program that’s helped keep her org’s non-regrettable attrition at near-zero.
0-$5M: How to Nail Founder-Led Sales
First Round partner Meka Asonye sits down with founders and first sales hires to unpack 6 specific tactics for learning to embrace founder-led sales instead of avoiding it.
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.
This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineering Leaders Back into Frontline Developers
David Loftesness has deftly cycled between management and IC roles throughout his career. Here, he lays out a plan to help engineering leaders make a smooth transition back into the...