First Round Capital

Celebrating 5 Years of First Round’s Angel Track with a New Cohort (and a New Look)

Emily Stanford — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 16:00:20 +0000

Back in 2018, we set out on a little experiment. We wanted to bring together talented startup builders who were keen on diving deeper into angel investing — those who hoped to both sharpen their skills and escape the “going it alone” feeling by joining an intimate cohort of like-minded peers. With just a small group of 16 — including standout folks like Ayo Omojola (CPO at Carbon Health) and Vivek Patel (Former COO at Postmates) — meeting weekly in our San Francisco office, we weren’t sure how this fledgling program would pan out.

Fast forward to this summer, as we wrapped up the 12th cohort of what became Angel Track and laid the groundwork for this fall’s new batch, which just kicked off last week. Our Spring 2023 cohort was a seriously impressive group of 36 individuals, from founders like Instacart’s Max Mullen to incredible leaders from a broad range of standout companies, including Stripe, Figma, Shopify, Rippling, Plaid, Retool, and Cruise.

But it’s not just the megawatt talent that stands out here — welcoming these new angel investors into the ranks of Angel Track alumni marks a significant milestone. As we celebrate 5 years of running this program, we can also share that we’ve now crossed the 400-member mark in our community of exceptional angel investors.

To mark the occasion, we’ve been working on a little project — so if you haven’t visited angeltrack.firstround.com in a while, we highly recommend checking out the newly redesigned site. It’s not just a fresh coat of paint. From a sneak peek of the curriculum to a sampling of the incredible members in our tight-knit community, we’re sharing more details than ever about what it’s like to be a part of Angel Track.

As startup leaders dabble in angel investing, progress and learning can feel slow, and the solo journey can be lonely. We’ve designed Angel Track to be the antidote, carefully crafting a program where you can sharpen your craft, leverage tactical frameworks from First Round’s nearly two decades of Day 0 investing expertise, and lean on a community of exceptional angels for the best early-stage deal flow (and support group) in tech.

What stands out most is the sheer array of talent we’re proudly able to showcase on our new site. There’s a wide range of impressive career paths in this community we’ve built over the years, including experienced startup leaders like Nick Caldwell (recently named Chief Product Officer at Peloton) Madhu Muthukumar (Chief Product Officer at Chime and Notion), and Nadia Singer (Chief People Officer at Figma); full-time investors like Variant’s Li Jin, Lightspeed’s Justin Overdorff, a16z’s David Haber and Sriram Krishnan, and First Round’s own Meka Asonye; and community builders and creators like Lenny Rachitsky, Mario Gabriele’s The Generalist, and Emily Kramer’s MKT1.

You can find and connect with all of those standout alumni and hundreds of other angel investors in Angel Directory, which has a fresh new look as well. As we continue to experiment with new ways to connect angels and founders, we’ll keep building on this extensive resource for browsing hundreds of angel and founder profiles, so watch this space.

With that, we’re excited to introduce the latest graduates to join their ranks — meet our most recent cohort of angel investors from Spring 2023, ready to take your pitches:

Aabhas Sharma, CTO at Found
Alexander Du, Head of Payments & Finance at Column
Andrew Arruda, CEO & Co-Founder at Flexpa
Andrew Edelman, Vice President, Partnerships & Business Development at Miro
Arup Chakrabarti, Former Senior Director of Engineering at PagerDuty
Carolyn Starrett, CEO at Flatiron Health
Conor Walsh, CEO at Monzo US
Dhruv Vasishtha, SVP Product at firsthand
Emily Boschwitz, VP of Growth at Vanta
Francesca Krihely, Head of Marketing at Oso
Hila Qu, Executive in Residence, Growth Advisor at Reforge
Hoda Eydgahi, Director of Data Science at Shopify
James Dyett, Head of Strategic Accounts at OpenAI
Jamie Cuffe, Self-serve & new products lead at Retool
Jenn Wei, Vice President, GTM & Monetization & Alliances at Rubrik
Jenny Wen, Product Design Manager at Figma
Joanna Lord, Chief Marketing Officer at Spring Health
Jordan Zamir, CoFounder at Turnstile
Matt O’Leary, VP Partnerships & BD at 1Password
Max Mullen, Co-founder at Instacart
Nate Abbott, General Partner at Mischief and Former Head of Product at Front
Nico Ferreyra, CEO & Co-Founder at Default
Nikunj Kothari, Product Lead at Meter
Nitzan Shapira, Co-Founder & CEO at Epsagon (Acquired by Cisco)
Oisin Hanrahan, Former CEO & Co-Founder at Handy
Pratyus Patnaik, Senior Director of Engineering at Okta
Raphael Lee, Co-Founder US Digital Response
Robert Lopez, SVP & CRO at Justworks
Ryan Engel, former Global Business Development at Peloton
Sahar Afrakhan, Former Superhuman product leader
Sara Du, CEO & Co-Founder at Alloy Automation
Sarah Adams, GTM Leader at Plaid
Stephanie Hannon, Advisor & Investor
Thomas Osborne, Head of Strategy & Partnerships at Verily
Tim Schwartz, Product Lead at Rippling
Tony Dong, VP of Engineering at Rippling
Tristan Zier, Sr. Director, Special Projects for COO at Cruise
Varun Anand, Head of Operations at Clay

Hoping to join the Angel Track ranks and further your own career as an angel investor? Fill out this form if you’re interested in being a part of next year’s group.

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Meet First Round’s Newest Partner: Liz Wessel, a Founder, Experienced Angel & Former YC Visiting Partner

Jessi Craige — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 16:48:06 +0000

Why we’re excited to add this former founder, GTM powerhouse, and investor in Ramp, Ro and ScaleAI, to our team.

Today, we’re thrilled to share that Liz Wessel has joined us as First Round’s newest Partner.

On the rare occasions that we add to our small, tight-knit partnership, there’s a long list of qualities on our wish list. At First Round, our singular focus is on helping founders go from idea to product-market fit, so we look for someone who’s both experienced in and fired up about helping companies get from 0 to 1.

The partner needs to be someone early-stage founders will turn to for advice, someone who can share incredibly tactical guidance from their own company-building experiences and the patterns they’ve seen from supporting startups of all stripes. Their work ethic and drive to win needs to be rivaled only by their kindness.

To put it plainly, we’ve got a high bar. But Liz clears it by a wide margin. We were immediately taken with her go-to-market chops, her deep well of empathy and unwavering support for fellow founders, and her impressive angel investing track record — and we’re convinced that she’s an incredible partner for founders who are just getting started.

Her own “getting started” story demonstrates why. Similar to many great founders and investors, Liz had an entrepreneurial streak from her earliest days. In elementary school, she’d take the $2 bills her dad gave her for candy money and trade this “rare” currency with her classmates for $5. Later while studying at Penn, she launched various businesses and side projects. After graduation, Liz joined the storied APMM program at Google, where she marketed products that reached billions and moved to India for a year to build the company’s brand and product awareness in areas that were just gaining access to technology.

But Liz still felt the entrepreneurial itch to start a company, and so at 23 years old, she left Google and teamed up with her college friend to start WayUp. She spent the next seven years as co-founder and CEO, fully enveloped in the company-building grind as WayUp became a leading early career recruitment platform. The B2B2C product has been used by seven million candidates and thousands of employers. Liz raised over $40M from firms like General Catalyst and Index Ventures, scaled a team, and merged the business with Yello in 2021.

But as is the case with all company-building journeys, if you dig deeper, there are all the blips beneath the headlines: The challenges of learning founder-led sales and moving from SMB to enterprise. The difficulties of troubleshooting churn and building out customer success. The rush of scaling quickly, followed by the big decision to exit the business after years of effort.

In our view, it was these experiences that made Liz such a successful angel investor, equipping her to pick apart all the challenges a company could run into and lend the targeted support founders truly need. While hard at work on her own business, she began building a remarkable portfolio. To date, she’s backed over 40 companies, including Ramp, ScaleAI, Ro, Artera (fka Well), Snackpass and FreeWill — all in the earliest days. In our experience, there aren’t too many founder-turned-angel investors with those early wins under their belts.

After WayUp’s exit, Liz joined Y Combinator as a Visiting Partner. In addition to interviewing and picking companies for the batches, she dove headfirst into founder support, earning a reputation as something of a “GTM whisperer.” She spent her days in back-to-back office hours sessions reviewing sales pitches, refining positioning, helping with pricing, and counseling YC founders on all things enterprise sales, B2B marketing, storytelling and fundraising.

Between her personal investments and her time at YC, she’s advised more than 180 companies. She’s built a standout track record in the enterprise space, establishing herself as a GTM maven, and solidifying a special talent and strong passion for helping with those messy early days.

After getting to know her better and speaking with those who’ve worked with her closely, we’re certain that Liz is the investor who will make the biggest difference on founders’ cap tables — particularly for those domain experts and technical or product-oriented builders looking to more effectively sell to customers and get to their first million in revenue faster.

Here’s why:

Founder DNA: Liz is a founder who’s been in your shoes very recently, so she knows your challenges backwards and forwards. There aren’t all that many folks who’ve both spent the better part of a decade building their own business and are now focusing purely on early-stage investing. If you’re looking to stick it out through the ups and downs from inception to exit, there’s no one better to have in your corner. Whether you’re looking to avoid the hiring traps first-time founders often fall into, or seeking guidance on how to rally your team in tumultuous times, Liz has still-fresh experiences to tap into.
Unmatched work ethic: Over the years, we’ve found that the best additions to the First Round team have had a competitive streak — and an intense work ethic to back it up. Liz has that in spades. If you backchannel her references (as we spent a considerable amount of time doing this year) you’ll hear one consistent theme: She will outwork any investor on your cap table. More specifically, we heard things like, “She was in the top 1% of founders in terms of what she put into the company,” “Liz is the hardest working person I’ve ever met,” and “She’s an insanely motivated person. That is her defining quality.” Whether it’s building her own company or backing startups from Day 0, Liz has never seen her role as something to clock in and out of — which makes her a perfect match for founders who have that same drive. If you’re looking for someone to spend the weekend helping you overhaul your Series A deck or take that late-night call to game plan after an exec unexpectedly leaves, Liz is the one you want on speed dial.
GTM powerhouse: Liz is a secret weapon for founders who’ve never sold a day in their lives. She’ll coach you through everything from lining up those first few sales calls to getting creative with your marketing to making your first GTM hire. She also has a special knack for storytelling, for pulling out the voice of the customer and polishing up your positioning so that it’s compelling — no matter the sector.
Hands-on help with the 30,000-foot strategy and the 3-inch-level work: We were particularly drawn to Liz’s ability to toggle between supporting founders on both strategy and tactics. Her experience as a founder and investor make her the perfect sounding board for those “one-way door” decisions, including navigating M&A options, pivoting the product, managing thorny board dynamics, and choosing the right follow-on investors. And instead of the “let me know how I can help” tropes, Liz can dive right into the weeds — whether it’s watching Gong calls and giving you feedback on your pitch, reviewing conversion rates in your sales funnel, interviewing early sales reps for you, or brainstorming viral marketing campaigns. Count on her to share incredibly tactical advice, whether you’re a technical founder who’s never sold before or you’re scaling sales to the next level.
Focus on unlocking advantages for others: Reading the descriptions in the bullets above certainly paints a picture of intensity. And as XN’s Gaurav Kapadia eloquently put it, some think of kindness and rigor as being at odds. But like other First Rounders, Liz proves that to be a false tradeoff. Across the board, we consistently heard from her references that “She’s a top-tier human” who’s “open and kind.” Her commitment to collaboration and dedication to building wider doorways and longer tables makes her a perfect addition to our culture.

We are confident that she’ll be an amazing partner and we could not be more excited to welcome her to First Round’s investment team, and to our San Francisco office.

If you’re building a company and think Liz could help, please get in touch with her here: liz dot wessel at firstround dot com.

Photography by Bonnie Rae Mills.

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Apply to First Round’s AI/ML Unconference to Learn From Fellow Builders

Emily Stanford — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 17:50:34 +0000

The buzziness around AI and ML has prompted a FOMO-fueled mad dash for companies to quickly integrate these technologies into their products. But if you dive into the details, those on the ground floor of this new wave are wrestling with tactical challenges of everyday building, from cleaning and labeling datasets to fine-tuning models and monitoring them in production — all while racing to stay on top of the breakneck pace of new developments that seem to be advancing by the day, if not the hour.

From long-standing partnerships with companies like Labelbox and Verkada, to backing newer startups like Rewind and Together, to seeing how companies like Notion and Superhuman are integrating this technology into their products, we’ve long been inspired by how founders in the First Round community are innovating in this space and tackling these challenges.

Now, we’re expanding access to some of their critical lessons in our first-ever AI and ML Unconference.

In the past few years, we’ve experimented with a unique set of experiences called Unconferences, where we’ve brought together an intimate, curated group for peer-to-peer sessions on specific topics. This format empowers attendees to both share and learn by feeding off of each other in dynamic breakout discussions that are focused on extremely tactical content. This allows for multi-dimensional conversations among people with different perspectives, rather than an audience of many receiving one point of view from a stage.

We’re excited to bring the Unconference formula to AI and ML. By providing a forum for folks to swap tactics and share learnings, we hope to build the strongest community of technical startup leaders. Our aim is to provide a space for technically-minded individuals (think: product, eng, and design) to come together to discuss how they are implementing AI and keeping up with the rapid developments in the industry.

The First Round AI Unconference is on Monday, August 28, from 5-8 pm in San Francisco. If this sounds like a conversation you need to be a part of, apply here to grab your spot.

So what can you expect as an attendee? Your time will be spent in small breakout discussions, focused on the most burning questions for AI and ML leaders right now. You’ll also get a chance to engage with some of the best and brightest early-stage companies in this space. With this unique exposure to founders currently building on the frontiers of AI/ML, you’ll be able to learn about their strategies and potential opportunities to work at companies like Together, Wai’i, and Fadeaway.

As with our previous Unconferences, we’re tailoring the content so we cover exactly what’s top-of-mind by crowdsourcing topics from AI & ML leaders across the org chart in sessions like:

Selecting between Foundation Model providers
Building a moat and other defenses for generative AI applications
Open-source vs closed-source models and devtools
Domains and industries being unlocked by AI applications
AI agents and artificial general intelligence

We are now accepting applications! If you are a leader or operator in the AI or ML space, apply by Friday, August 25 to join us in person on Monday, August 28 from 5-8pm PT.

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Opening Up Applications to Fast Track 15 — Join Us as a Mentor or Mentee

Emily Stanford — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 15:50:57 +0000

With June in the rearview mirror, it’s time for a mid-year check-in. How’s your outlook for the rest of 2023? Whether you’re brimming with optimism for the latter half of the year or are feeling a bit stuck, mentorship and community can inject a dose of structure and inspiration to supercharge your motivation in the coming months.

That’s why we’re thrilled to open up applications to Fast Track, our fan-favorite mentorship community that pairs rising stars in the startup space with trusted mentors who have heaps of knowledge to share.

Since launching the program back in 2016, we now have 14 cohorts under our belt and have made over 4,000 mentor-mentee pairs. Along the way, we’ve learned a ton about what makes mentorship truly impactful.

To start, we hand-match every single mentorship pair based on interests and areas of expertise (more later on what we’re looking for from prospective mentors and mentees). And to pave the way for success, we provide the structure for an experience that’s meaningful by design, with playbooks, resources and best practices on how to make the most out of the mentorship experience. Within that structure, each one of these thousands of mentorship pairings is able to blossom into a relationship that’s incredibly unique and best suited to serve the mentee’s needs and the mentor’s expertise.

But the experience goes far beyond just these impactful 1:1 pairings. When you join Fast Track, you also become part of a community surrounded by thousands of talented operators like yourself across the startup ecosystem who will inspire you.

How the program works:

Fast Track is a 90-day mentorship program running from around Labor Day to Thanksgiving. After being paired up, mentees meet bi-weekly with their mentors to discuss their professional goals, the challenges of startup life, tactics to cultivate their leadership skills, and frameworks for how to grow their impact. You’ll also have ample opportunities to build your network and connect with other talented folks who are similarly growth-minded as you move forward together.

In addition to those impactful 1:1 sessions, mentors and mentees also receive invitations to events within the larger Fast Track community — past events have included angel investing 101, public speaking workshops, Q&A events with First Round’s partners, and more. Most events will be virtual, but we’ll also be bringing some in-person programming to a few select cities for folks to connect IRL. All participants also have the opportunity to network with other mentors and mentees via virtual coffee chats and an exclusive online community.

The time commitment for mentors and mentees:

From September 4th to November 24th, mentors and mentees will meet every other week for one hour, a total of six 1:1 sessions.
There is mandatory training for both mentors and mentees the week of August 28th.
There is optional programming for everyone in the Fast Track cohort — but you’ll get the most out of the program if you make time to attend a few of these extra sessions and events.

It may seem like a big commitment — and that’s by design. One of the biggest challenges with mentorship is the lack of structure, with mentees who fear coming across as needy to busy mentors, and mentors that don’t want to risk overstepping in their advisory role. That’s why we’re clear about the specific bi-weekly time commitments — so that everyone’s on the same page at the start.

APPLY HERE TO JOIN FAST TRACK. APPLICATIONS CLOSE ON AUGUST 4TH.

You might be a good fit for mentee spot if:

You’re a startup operator looking for ways to supercharge your impact, either as an individual contributor or a team leader. Mentees can come from any functional background, whether it’s engineering, product, design, marketing, sales, people ops, and more. Operators across the startup ecosystem are encouraged to apply to be a Fast Track mentee, even if you’re not already a part of the First Round community.

Some mentees enter Fast Track with goals to level up from individual contributor to manager. Others made a cross-functional leap, looking for mentorship guidance as they flexed new skills. Plenty of our mentees are seasoned leaders themselves, with ambitious goals to level up from great to excellent. And some mentees lean on their mentors as they join a startup for the first time, and tackle all the nuances that come from going from big to small.

No matter your individual targets, you’ll get further, faster with the power of a community behind you. By joining Fast Track, you’ll unlock the energy and knowledge share of the entire cohort of talented mentees and mentors who will motivate you, hold you accountable, encourage as you make necessary pivots, and cheer you on to think even bigger.

As former mentee Josh Archer put it, “I’m grateful to have had a mentor who has done what I’m doing a few times over. They were incredibly helpful in sharing tools and resources that they have used to structure their team and processes. They weren’t afraid to point out where I was going wrong so that I could correct course for the betterment of the company.”

And mentee Emma Steele adds, “Fast Track is so unbelievably helpful. I continuously learn things from my mentor that I am able to implement into my workflow immediately following our meeting. It’s valuable to have an outsider’s perspective on your company and the dynamics you’re facing.”

APPLY HERE BY AUGUST 4TH TO BE A MENTEE.

You might be a good fit for a mentor spot if:

You’re a VP, mid-career superstar or director at a breakout tech company with over six years of experience under your belt. While startup experience is highly encouraged, we’ve also had plenty of impactful FAANG mentors. The common thread is that you have a strong desire and ability to help folks achieve their bold goals, navigate career paths, level up in specific functional areas, recognize blind spots, and manage and lead teams. You use your own learnings and candor to elevate the knowledge of others, helping mentees discover and amplify their talents by sharing the good, the bad and the ugly. You’re also excited to join an all-star community of tech leaders, where you’ll form impactful new connections and learn from other amazing folks.

The feedback we hear time and time again is that mentors get a ton of value out of the program, too (in fact, many have returned to mentor for multiple Fast Track cohorts). While mentors sign up for the program with the goal to share knowledge, they end up learning right alongside their mentee.

As repeat mentor Prabhath Nanisetty put it, “I love meeting and getting to know my mentees. Many times I discover things about myself and my career that were not clear until I began helping my mentee. It’s a fantastic experience!”

And another multi-time mentor, Kintan Brahmbhatt, adds: “Fast Track has been a terrific program from the start and it continues to exceed expectations with every new cohort. The community of mentors and mentees alike is peculiar in its inclusiveness and a very high signal-to-noise ratio. I have learned as much from my mentees as I hope to have contributed.”

Whether it’s sharpening their coaching and leadership skills in 1:1 sessions with their mentee, sitting in on a workshop exclusive for Fast Track Executives, or connecting with other ultra-talented folks and building deep relationships across the First Round community, there are tons of tangible benefits to signing up as a mentor (including the opportunity to lift up other folks as you climb).

APPLY HERE BY AUGUST 4TH TO BE A MENTOR.

Know anyone who might be a good fit as a mentor or mentee? Please forward this post and encourage them to apply.

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Adding to First Round’s Investment Team

Brett Berson — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 18:01:43 +0000

Meet Our New Investor in Infrastructure & AI/ML

Ever since our founding in 2004, we’ve been laser-focused on investing in pre-product-market fit companies very early in their lifespan. We’ve since had the privilege of partnering with generational companies in vastly different spaces — like Looker transforming data, Uber shaping modern transportation, Roblox expanding the gaming universe, Notion bringing a fresh take to productivity and collaboration, and Mirror tackling virtual fitness (just to name a few).

But while we’ve tended to apply a generalist lens to early-stage investing, when you take a step back, you don’t have to squint to see that our investments tend to cluster around a few key areas, such as application layer SaaS, healthcare, consumer and marketplaces, fintech and technical infrastructure (data tools, developer tools and AI/ML).

Ultimately, we’ve approached the age-old question of whether to be specialists and generalists as a balancing act. In our experience working with over 400 companies, so many of the challenges are the same regardless of the space you’re building in — whether it’s the struggle to make those first few hires, the difficulty of developing your initial product positioning, or the obstacles to closing your first several customers and getting to product-market fit.

But there’s no denying the value in specialized knowledge. For example, in the case of founders building new infrastructure or developer tools, it’s immensely helpful to lean on investors who can assist with everything from distributing early prototypes to their network of engineering leaders for feedback and providing guidance on growing a developer community, to sharing context around shifting trends in open-source software, and making introductions to those elusive MLE or DevOps candidates.

As we’ve tried to balance advice on the nuts and bolts of company building with bespoke, sector-specific support to deliver the most for the founders we back, we’ve naturally moved a few ticks closer to a more specialized approach over the last five years — especially as we’ve grown as a firm and added to our partnership.

As an example, take how we’ve built up a large and thriving healthcare community with investments like Flatiron Health, Rupa Health, PatientPing, Forward, Nomad Health, Alma, Thirty Madison and over twenty other companies, with Josh Kopelman and Hayley Barna leading the charge. Or how Bill Trenchard and Todd Jackson have built up our focus on supporting founders building the latest data and dev tools, leading investments in Looker, Labelbox, Omni Analytics, Kubecost, and others.

As an extension of that more specialized work, we’re excited to publicly share that we’ve added our first dedicated Infrastructure & AI/ML investor in the last year to support our sector-specific expertise.

James Wu’s vast experience includes a stint in academia, conducting AI and data security research with grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense. During this time he also dipped his toe into investing, working as a VC fellow supporting early-stage portfolio companies. This gave him a taste for entrepreneurship, so he co-founded AdaptiLab, aimed to help companies scale their ML and data science teams. The company counted Fortune1000s and unicorns in its customer base and was later acquired.

James then joined Amperity, where he led the company’s new machine learning projects and tapped back into his academic background, contributing to patents and research papers. James earned his Computer Science and Statistics degrees from Duke. Now at First Round, James works closely with our partners as they uncover new opportunities in the AI/ML, data infrastructure, devtools and security spaces.

We’re thrilled to have James as a trusted voice on our investing team as we continue to deepen our industry expertise and support the very best founders as they build from 0 to 1 — and beyond.

Photography by Bonnie Rae Mills.

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Celebrating Whitnie Narcisse’s Promotion to Operating Partner

Brett Berson — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 17:00:05 +0000

To build a lasting company, founders (and the folks who join them on the startup journey), need to learn how to do a tremendous range of things: build a fantastic product, raise money, hire great people, figure out pricing and packaging, manage well, develop new employees, run a board meeting, evaluate performance, run all-hands meetings and offsites, assemble a top-notch exec team — the list truly goes on and on. At its core, entrepreneurship is a journey of problem-solving.

At First Round, we’re as much builders as we are investors — our customers are the special founders who partner with us, and we build tailored programs, tools, communities and playbooks for them to lean on as they tackle all of these company-building firsts. We’ve assembled an incredible operating team to support these founders on everything from finding your first customers to your first marketer and everything in between.

And over the years, Whitnie Narcisse has had an outsized impact on how we build for this incredible group of founders. Put simply, Whitnie’s tireless commitment to our community of founders and our team members has made First Round a better institution. We’re thrilled to announce her promotion to Operating Partner.

With this milestone, we wanted to take the opportunity to look back on some of the incredible work that Whitnie has achieved in her time here — and how she’s lived out our values along the way. There is no better person to pull into a brainstorm or a whiteboarding session — to dream up innovative projects that we could try out, and then get into the nitty-gritty tactical details to make those ideas a reality.

Even the very first project Whitnie tackled when she joined First Round has staying power. Whitnie spent her first two years building out First Round’s Expert Network, which now includes over 700 experts with everyone from growth marketing gurus to pricing pros and tax specialists. If founders have an unanswered question, there is an incredible group of advisors with the First Round seal of approval to meet those needs — rather than founders trying to puzzle it out on their own.

Whitnie treats the little things like the big things — sweating the small details and maintaining a high bar for excellence. Seeds that Whitnie planted and cultivated at First Round include our fan-favorite Fast Track mentorship program — which matches seasoned startup leaders with early-stage operators for 1:1 guided mentorship. Whitnie piloted the program back in 2016, with just 20 mentor/mentee pairs. We now have 12 Fast Track cohorts under our belt, with a whopping 3,000 mentorship pairs that have gone through the program (and counting). In true “give away your legos” fashion, Whitnie encourages other folks at First Round to grow their own careers and take on these programs to make them their own — like mentoring our Senior Community Manager Julia Govberg, who started as a First Round intern and now runs our Fast Track program.

Whitnie also helped create programs tailored to the needs of specific startup roles, including Founding Designer Track and Product Program to bring small groups of folks in these early startup roles together for community and curriculum. A recent addition to the lineup includes Recruiter Track, a beginner program specifically geared towards folks looking to make a career change into startup recruiting. Here at First Round, we make speed a habit — and Whitnie is always the first to raise her hand and transform a kernel of an idea into a fully-fledged program and a cornerstone offering.

And as First Round Founding Partner Josh Kopelman is fond of saying, “we owe founders our unvarnished advice and unwavering support.” Over her seven years at First Round, Whitnie has become a trusted advisor for leaders across our community, not just serving as a sounding board for the most significant milestones, but for every up and down in between. She prides herself on being the first call or text when a founder needs a dose of advice for a new hire that isn’t quite working out, or when runway is getting tight. She’s a cheerleader when founder doubt creeps in, and an empathetic ear when burnout lurks around the corner.

In addition to sharing her trusted counsel in one-on-one touchpoints with First Round founders, Whitnie also facilitates opportunities for founders to form deep bonds and connect with one another. She leads our Founder Forums and Founder Retreats, intimate events that bring folks together to share some of their thorniest problems with others who understand the burdens on an entrepreneur’s shoulders. As Alexa Grabell, founder of Pocus, shared about a recent Founder Retreat: “This is 100% the most meaningful and insightful thing any investor could ever do. I learn more in these short three days than in weeks of founder life.”

Now as an Operating Partner, the nuts and bolts of Whitnie’s role won’t change all that much. Internally, she will continue to lead many of our First Round operating teams, including People Ops, DEI, and Recruiting, as well as all of our founder services, including our Talent team (which sources critical early hires for our portfolio companies), Community & Technology (including First Round Network, our private online platform for First Round companies), and Go-To-Market (sharing actionable expertise for building a revenue engine). And she will continue to be a trusted resource for entrepreneurs as they build from 0–1 and beyond.

It’s hard to imagine where First Round (and our incredible founders) would be if Whitnie hadn’t sent a cold email to jobs@firstround.com many years ago. And we’re thrilled for all that’s still to come as she continues to leave her mark on the First Round community.

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Welcoming Annie Duke to First Round

flickerbox — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 16:58:43 +0000

How this renowned retired poker player & decision-making expert is helping us refine our process and support founders in our community.

The longer I’ve been an investor, the more I realize how humbling this job is. These past 18 years of backing incredible founders have shown me and my partners at First Round that there’s always room for surprises — sometimes on the upside, sometimes on the downside. At its core, building mental models and frameworks to evaluate outlier potential is outrageously hard.

A few years ago now, I tuned into a podcast episode where that capacity to be surprised was brought into sharp focus. Hearing renowned retired poker player and decision-making expert Annie Duke talk about concepts like resulting and why luck and skill are so easily confused struck a chord. I immediately picked up a copy of her book “Thinking in Bets,” and quickly tore through it.

For me, Annie’s lessons from the world of high-stakes poker had strong parallels to venture. Take this paragraph from the book’s introduction:

“Those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future. The implications of treating decisions as bets made it possible for me to find learning opportunities in uncertain environments.”

As investors, it’s easy to fall into the traps — rather than lean into the learning opportunities — of our uncertain environment. With a sometimes decades-long feedback loop, we can get caught up in the week-to-week pace of making discrete investment decisions, instead of refining rubrics and systems to better guide a decision-making process. Even the very habit of reflecting back and trying to assess prior calls is challenging, as dynamics like confirmation and hindsight bias cloud your assessment of your own decision quality.

To paraphrase Daniel Kahneman’s new book, “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment,” (another incredible read in this field), improving our “decision hygiene” is critical to reducing the “noise” around the decisions we consistently make.

At First Round, we’ve always been obsessed with constant reflection and improvement. Our pre- and post-pitch discussion and decision-making processes have evolved over the years as we’ve tried new techniques and brought different perspectives into the partnership. What’s remained constant from the early days of First Round is that we’ve treated our investment decisions and overall process as a product.

But after familiarizing ourselves with Annie’s work, it became clear that we could refine our “product” even further and introduce more rigor. For the last three years, Annie has been a key part of our team — and during that time she has had a transformational impact on our decision-making process.

She’s helped us create decision-making rubrics, build systems to reduce bias from our decision-making, and improved our data collection so we can conduct retrospective reviews post-decision. And after years of doing this work in the background, I’m excited to publicly announce Annie’s role as First Round’s Special Partner, focused on Decision Science.

In this unique capacity, Annie is helping us refine the way in which we make investment decisions, drawing on her incredible set of experiences as a student of cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania, a professional poker player who made millions in tournament games, and now as a bestselling author and decision strategy consultant.

Annie has also been a wonderful addition to our community, sharing her toolkit with emerging angel investors by teaching classes in our Angel Track program for example. In addition to her incredible decision science support for the First Round team, I’m perhaps even more excited about how Annie’s role will expand to support our founders as well.

Building an enduring company is ridiculously hard. From all the small decisions that define great products, to the “bet the company” strategic gambles, there are countless tough calls that fall on a founder’s shoulders.

Just as we have partners who’ve developed deep experience in product strategy and go-to-market motions, Annie will share her expertise and coach First Round-backed founders through frameworks to help them make the very best possible decisions as they build incredible companies. (For a preview of the decision-making advice she shares with founders in the First Round community, be sure to check out this article featuring Annie in The First Round Review today.)

In our time working closely together, I’ve been continually amazed by the learning opportunities that Annie has helped the First Round team unearth. The impact on both our ability to evaluate previous decisions and make better ones in the future is already clear.

But as Annie often reminds me, this effort to make higher-quality decisions by reducing noise and bias is a constant work-in-progress — and to quote the final sentence of her book, if we “keep learning and calibrating, we might even get good at it.”

The post Welcoming Annie Duke to First Round appeared first on First Round Capital.

Welcoming Dr. Regina Benjamin, Our New Healthcare Expert-In-Residence

flickerbox — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 16:54:46 +0000

More than a year after the COVID-19 pandemic first started, healthcare sits at the very top of the list of transformed industries. The field is reorienting after a telehealth surge, embracing new digital relationships between providers and patients, and recognizing the gaps in technology infrastructure needed for this new paradigm. There are a record number of early-stage founders focused on healthcare, excited to tackle the challenges and opportunities in reimagining the patient and provider experience.

At First Round, we see a bright and hopeful healthcare future through the lens of over 30 healthcare companies in our community. In the past five years, healthcare companies have grown to account for over 25% of our new investments — from impactful players that have seen successful outcomes (like Flatiron Health and PatientPing), to consumer-focused disruptors (like Modern Fertility and Thirty Madison), to exciting new entrants empowering providers (like Alma and Suki). Through partnering closely with these companies in their earliest days, I’ve seen firsthand the urgency and weight of responsibility that healthcare founders face today.

This is one of many reasons we are thrilled to welcome Dr. Regina Benjamin as our new Healthcare Expert-in-Residence.

Over the past few months, she has evaluated potential healthcare investment opportunities as well as supported the First Round community with her background in patient-centric care and deep understanding of healthcare policy. She has mentored founders on topics ranging from navigating payor relationship and regulatory changes to upholding quality of care.

We connected with Dr. Benjamin via Ed Zimmerman, co-founder of Venture Crush and long-time friend of First Round. As each First Round partner met Regina, we were all incredibly inspired and instantly knew her expertise would be invaluable to our community.

Dr. Benjamin has led an extraordinary career. She was appointed by President Barack Obama as the 18th United States Surgeon General in 2009 and served a four-year term. Her journey in medicine has first and foremost been rooted in community care. Early in her career, she established a rural clinic in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, a small town near the Gulf Coast where 80% of her patients were uninsured and lived below the poverty level. The clinic battled challenges of catastrophic fires, floods, and even Hurricane Katrina. But Dr. Benjamin always persevered. Her leadership has been driven by a remarkable blend of compassionate care and forward-thinking strategy.

Over the years, Dr. Benjamin has been internationally recognized with accolades including the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights and the MacArthur Genius Fellowship. Today, she serves on the board of several health organizations including Ascension, Kaiser Hospitals, HealthQuest, ConvaTec and Computer Programs & Systems, Inc to name a few.

First Round is honored to benefit from Dr. Benjamin’s profound clinical experience and unique perspective on healthcare policy and regulation. In recent weeks, Dr. Benjamin has already delivered immense value to our founders and fueled meaningful dialogue around how to support rural markets across the United States, including her home base of Alabama.

We look forward to our continued collaboration with Dr. Benjamin to accelerate the success and impact of our community.

The post Welcoming Dr. Regina Benjamin, Our New Healthcare Expert-In-Residence appeared first on First Round Capital.

Meet Meka Asonye, Go-to-Market Expert, Stripe Veteran — and First Round’s Newest Partner

flickerbox — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 16:52:57 +0000

Why he’s the investor technical and product focused founders need in their corner.

As you might have read in the digital pages of Forbes this morning, the First Round partnership is thrilled to announce that Meka Asonye will be joining our team as a Partner.

Since 2016, Meka has been an active angel investor, which is how our paths first intersected. Building on the startup investing and advising he’d done over the years, Meka joined the Spring 2019 cohort of Angel Track. (Given that we’re currently in the midst of preparations for launching the Spring 2021 cohort applications, we can’t help but reflect on the full-circle nature of this moment.)

Ever since, we’ve been fortunate to count Meka as part of the First Round fold, both as an Angel Track alum and as a mentor in Fast Track. So this past summer, when we opened up our partner search for the first time and Meka threw his hat in the ring, we pursued him immediately

Meka’s been both a company’s early sales hire and also a VP leading a 100-person global, robust sales org, a rare combination that isn’t often found in an early-stage investor. We were immediately impressed with the arc of his career and the depth of experience he’ll be bringing to the First Round partnership and the founders we serve.

Uniquely, he went from Princeton to player development and baseball operations for the Cleveland Indians — perhaps a farsighted start to his career, given the parallels between spotting hidden minor league talent and coaching them up to the majors, and finding early-stage founders of scrappy startups and partnering with them on their path to IPO. Meka left the world of Moneyball to join Bain’s technology practice as a case team leader, where he partnered with the C-Suites of Fortune 50 companies and dove deep into the legacy tech spaces that today’s startups are taking on.

From there, he cut his teeth at Stripe, spending four years at the company as it scaled from 250 to 2000 people and matured its sales org. He spent a year as one of the first AEs as the startup attempted to go upmarket and land enterprise logos. Meka then moved into leading Stripe’s Startup/SMB business, which involved launching outbound sales, optimizing self-serve, building a customer success function, opening new offices, and finding creative ways to holistically support startups, from reviewing YC applications to workshopping business models.

Most recently, Meka served as VP of Sales and Services at Mixpanel, where he ran the more than 100-person global revenue team, mastered another highly technical B2B sales process, and owned the customer lifecycle from first website visit to renewal.

Along the way, Meka stepped up his angel investments, backing companies like Rimeto (acquired by Slack), Coda and Stych, and investing alongside First Round in startups like Snackpass. He’s advised more than 100 companies on go-to-market strategy, rolling up his sleeves to craft product messaging and outbound content, build and refine sales and conversion funnels, define revenue goals, coach founders, and mentor their early sales hires.

Given how critical it is for an early-stage founder to nail not just product, but early go-to-market efforts, we couldn’t be more thrilled to add Meka’s expertise to the team. For technical or product oriented founders looking to go from zero to their first couple million in revenue, we’re convinced that he is the investor you need in your corner.

Here’s why:

You can lean on his GTM playbook. From top-down enterprise sales or bottoms-up product led growth strategies, to the tactical weeds of structuring pilots, winning your first 10 customers, and mapping GTM motions to ACV and pricing, he’s spent his career building repeatable playbooks for organizations small and large. Whether it’s prematurely abandoning founder-led sales, or layering on marketing too late, there are many pitfalls founders can fall into — and Meka’s uniquely well-equipped to help them see around these corners. (He’s also got a strong network of sales, growth and customer success leaders to introduce you to.)
He’s been in your shoes — recently. In our job description, we noted that we were looking for someone with in-the-trenches experience as a founder or operator at different stages. Meka is fresh off the frontlines and his experiences are incredibly relevant to what founders are facing right now — as he puts it, he owned a quarterly number just one quarter ago.
He’s committed to helping you win. With his fast ramp attitude and intense commitment, he’s been an immediate culture add to our team. As part of the interview process, Meka wrote up a few thoughts on his approach that we had to share here:

“I’m a first generation American with a founder mentality. My Nigerian immigrant parents and grandparents are both entrepreneurial — it runs in my blood… I also love to win. In my time at the Indians, we won multiple Minor league championships and played in the American League Championship series for the first time in 10 years. Moreover, players that were drafted and developed during my tenure were cornerstones on the team that won 3 consecutive division titles and went to the World Series. At Stripe, my teams never missed their number. As a consultant and investor, I’ve worked across numerous spaces, many unknown to me on Day 1. I bring the same fast ramp attitude to my personal endeavors. I received my pilot’s license four months after my first lesson. You can count on me bringing this curiosity, commitment, depth, and intensity to all our endeavors.”

Meka’s sharp go-to-market chops, world-class leadership skills, track record as an angel, dedication to early-stage, and experiences scaling Stripe and Mixpanel will make him an exceptional investor.

We’re certain our partnership is stronger with him at the (as of now, still virtual) table, and we’re confident our community will benefit from his guidance. We could not be more excited to have him join First Round’s investment team.

If you’re building a company and think Meka could help, please get in touch with him here: meka dot asonye at firstround dot com.

The post Meet Meka Asonye, Go-to-Market Expert, Stripe Veteran — and First Round’s Newest Partner appeared first on First Round Capital.

Reflections & Lessons Learned from Roblox, After More Than a Decade of Partnership

flickerbox — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 17:46:11 +0000

With their direct listing on the NYSE, today Roblox becomes $RBLX. It’s a day that’s both well-earned and a long-time coming. After more than 13 years of knowing and partnering with David Baszucki and the entire Roblox team, I’ve seen the incredible amount of work they’ve put into building this company firsthand.

A photo I snapped of Roblox founder and CEO David Baszucki this morning

To mark the occasion, I thought I’d expand on the handful of memories and reflections I shared about Roblox’s journey (and First Round’s front-row seats) over on Twitter this morning.

Investors, take a second look. Founders, keep iterating.

This has become one of my favorite stories to tell. Many investors will tell you about when they “just knew” a startup was going to make it big, the moment that solidified their conviction to cut the check. In the case of First Round and Roblox, that wasn’t how things played out.

We were originally introduced to Dave in late 2007 by Rick Lewis, a friend of ours who we knew from the myYearbook board and later worked with on HotelTonight and Stensul. The game had just launched out of beta a year earlier.

We spent some time exploring, but we ended up passing on the investment opportunity. The game was really early and very basic. Additionally, the investment didn’t perfectly fit our model, given that the valuation was close to $10M, so I had to tell Dave we were passing.

A screenshot from our notes in 2008 in First Round’s Salesforce account.

While we were originally learning about the investment opportunity, I had asked my son Max — who was 8 at the time — to test out the game. Even after we ended up passing, he kept playing and playing. I’d see him on Roblox night after night.

Thankfully, I had kept in touch with Dave. I would even visit Roblox’s early office sometimes on my trips out to California. There were about 8–10 people in the company at the time, including Matt Dusek, Keith Lucas and John Shedletsky.

I remember Dave sharing updates with me, and I was impressed with the growth. In the 12 months since we first looked at Roblox, they had gone from 300K to 1.6M hours played per week, with revenue jumping from about $15K to over $220K per month. But the number that impressed me most? Dave said he was on version 87 of his business model already.

Here, Max and a buddy can be seen playing on the first day avatar clothing was introduced on Roblox, discovering that pants can be underpants.

Here’s what I wrote to my fellow partners at First Round:

My 9Yr old Beta Tester Max has been using it more and more, as have his buddies. Been talking to CEO David Baszucki and there *might* be a chance to join in at least partially…This thing is rocking and I love the way that [Dave] is tracking the business.

We ended up investing in July 2009 — all thanks to Max sticking with the game and our willingness to take a second look and rethink the valuation piece.

I found an email from 11 years ago from @chrisfralic about his excitement in @Roblox. He said, "My 9Yr old Beta Tester Max has been using it more and more, as have his buddies. Been talking to CEO David Baszucki and there *might* be a chance to join." Grateful for Max

— Brett Berson (@brettberson) February 27, 2020

Slow vs. fast bake: Patience and non-linear growth.

As an investor, I’ve been fortunate enough to partner with a wide range of companies, from Ring and Hotel Tonight, to Warby Parker and Flurry. Through the repeated process of raising a fund and deploying capital to back founders as they bet big on unique ideas in different markets, you start to see patterns emerge across each “vintage.”

Looking back, it’s notable that First Round’s investments in Roblox, Square, and Uber all came from the same fund. It goes without saying, of course, that we were incredibly lucky to partner with their respective founding teams from their earliest startup days, sitting courtside and lending support wherever we could as these impactful businesses took shape. Although each of these companies wound up at incredible destinations, their journeys looked very different — and their arrivals were not preordained.

After our initial investment in 2009, we ended up leading Roblox’s next round, and I joined the board of directors, a seat I held for several years. The honest truth is that across all of those board updates, there were highs and lows, fits and starts, growth spurts and lulls. Sometimes they made their numbers and sometimes they wildly missed. Certain key hires worked out and scaled alongside the business, while others parted ways. For many years, the company struggled to raise capital.

Fellow First Round community members like Uber and Square were more of what we’d call a “fast bake,” where the ingredients seemed to coalesce from the start. They had momentum, off-the-charts growth, and widespread recognition and buzz in and around the tech world.

With Roblox, I watched the company grow, but remain well under the radar. During that time whenever I’d mention it as a company to watch to fellow investors — or anyone really — I’d usually get the response “ROAD BLOCKS???” While the company wasn’t a household name yet, Dave was always steadfast in his vision to create a new category of the “human co-experience” and the “metaverse” — even when others didn’t fully see it.

Me and Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki in 2019.

For both founders and investors alike, this is a reminder of the role that patience plays in company building— many breakout startups aren’t built overnight or immediately off to the races. Some, like Roblox, are more of a “slow bake.”

The lesson here is that it takes a long time to build a transcendent company, and you’ll often be misunderstood or undervalued for most of that time.The bulk of Roblox’s journey was steady, heads-down community building and product refinement. As a 2019 TechCrunch article highlighted, “Roblox experienced 10x growth in about 3 years, from 9 million users in February 2016 to 90 million in April 2019” — just one leg of their 17-year company building journey.

My partner Josh Kopelman made this slide a while back, which captures this dynamic well:

We now, of course, have the benefit of seeing how the story shook out. Eventually others began to catch on. The game climbed the charts in Apple’s App Store and has become one of the top-grossing apps on Apple and Google devices. Journalists started writing “The hot game kids are playing that you’ve never heard of,” or “The best kept secret in Silicon Valley” type of stories. (Take this recent PCGamesN example— “Somehow, Roblox keeps escaping my attention, despite the fact that it’s one of the biggest games in the world.”)

In 2017, they crossed 1M concurrent players for the first time, and Mary Meeker mentioned Roblox in her famous internet trends report. Brand affinity and recognition continued to grow, as toys and gift cards popped up in physical stores, while the team offered weekly tours of their HQ for users.

It’s all @Roblox and Fortnite at this Barnes and Noble end cap. pic.twitter.com/gbVdtzssji

— Chris Fralic (@chrisfralic) September 26, 2019

My personal “Wow, this is going to be big” moment was in 2011 when I visited their office and saw all of these letters from kids mailed to Roblox HQ and taped to the walls.

Looking to the future

Now, we’re a decade on from that “envelopes on the wall” moment. So much has changed about our world in the last 10 years — particularly in this past one. Roblox faced real uphill challenges all along the way, such as expanding into iPad/mobile, going international, “aging up” their audience, dealing with new competitors, and creating a new category by borrowing from social, gaming, and toys. Over the course of 2020 and the pandemic, their business accelerated dramatically, with more users spending more time than ever with the product.

Despite the exciting nature of today’s direct listing, it’s not an endpoint in Roblox’s journey. There are markers still to come on the road ahead, from virtual concerts to the ability to build more polished experiences.

And stepping back even further, I’m excited about all of the nascent ideas and new opportunities that are shaping up in the gaming space. As an example, First Round has also partnered with Rec Room. It’s a virtual hangout and game creator that has seen explosive growth across all platforms since it was first released in 2016 — they just announced their activity stats were only a year or so behind the gaming company that just went public today.

So here’s to the tiny team that’s just getting started, the next Roblox of whatever space you’re in — whether you bake fast or slow, I’m rooting for you.

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