First Round Capital

Most people describe finding PMF as an art, not a science. We're here to change that. Introducing PMF Method. After 20 years and 500+ investments in pre-product-market fit companies, we've drawn on our data and worked with some of the world's most iconic enterprise founders, distilling what they did in their first 6 months into a free 14-week intensive experience that helps sales-led B2B founders build epic companies. In tactical sessions, we help early founders discover what customers really want, build the right v1 product, and close your first sales — all while keeping 100% of your equity. You'll work alongside a tight group of other builders at your same stage, and get to learn from the hard-earned insights from founders of $1B+ B2B companies, like Vanta's Christina Cacioppo, Looker's lloyd tabb, Plaid's Zachary Perret, Ironclad's Jason Boehmig, Lattice's Jack Altman, and Verkada's Filip Kaliszan. The Summer 2024 session of PMF Method runs from 5/29 to 8/28. Any early founder working on a new B2B SaaS company is welcome to apply — just get your application in by 5/7 (or tag a founder friend below!) More details, FAQs, and application link in the comments below 👇

We're hiring a Director of Program Operations! You'll join our Enablement team, where you'll lead and execute the programs and events that bring together future founders, industry leaders, investors, and other key members of the tech ecosystem. This is an important role that collaborates directly with our Partners and leadership to deliver initiatives like our Product Market Fit Method, Angel Track, Supper Clubs, Salons, and Retreats. If this sounds like you, apply with the link in the comments. If it sounds like someone you know, send this their way!

Owner.com's product-market fit had evaporated overnight. After starting a business to help restaurants drive dine-in customers, March 2020 would bring all of that progress to a halt. And founder Adam Guild would need to act fast to save the company. What happened next on In Depth: https://lnkd.in/gyj53aR9

Sam Corcos tracked every 15-minute block of his time for 5 years as co-founder and CEO of Levels. The result? 17,784 hours worth of data that tells an unvarnished story of what being a startup founder actually looks like. Along the way, Sam unpacks: -How he manages 20+ direct reports while spending less time in meetings -The engineering reboot that saved the product after 2 years of declining velocity -Why burnout correlates more with energy-draining work than total hours worked For founders wondering where to put your time when everything feels urgent, this deep dive is essential reading.

The story of Owner.com is a wild ride: -Founder Adam Guild dropped out of high school to focus on the Minecraft server network he'd started at age 12 -He started helping his mom's struggling dog grooming business find new customers -That pivoted into Placepull, a platform for helping restaurant owners drive dine-in customers -The pandemic hit, evaporating all PMF overnight -With a quick pivot to online ordering, Owner was (re)born and quickly amassed thousands of new customers. On In Depth, Adam walks us through each twist and turn on the path to extreme PMF and 8 figures in ARR. Listen wherever you get your podcasts: https://lnkd.in/dH--r-Cm

17,784 hours. That’s exactly how long CEO Sam Corcos has spent on Levels since founding the startup 5 years ago. Today on the Review, he shares an ultra-detailed and minute-by-minute breakdown into where that time went. If you’re a longtime Review reader, you’ll recognize this as a follow-up to Sam’s extremely popular piece he published 3 years ago: https://lnkd.in/gcNCqTar But a lot changes when a startup graduates from the 0-1 to the 1-10 phase. So how did Sam’s calendar change with it? Here’s a sneak peek at 3 of the counterintuitive findings: -His direct reports more than tripled from 6 to 20—but time spent on team management barely changed. How? By ditching recurring 1:1s and focusing solely on decision-making meetings. -Strategic work took just 5% of his time, proving you don't need countless strategic planning sessions or offsites to set direction. Instead, he uses quarterly "Think Weeks" to reset the company's course. -Stepping away from the codebase was "a costly mistake that was painful to undo." It took completely rebooting the engineering org to get back on track. Read the full article (linked in the comments) for an unvarnished look at the data.

Getting to back exceptional founders a second time around is one of the most rewarding parts of this job — it means you know exactly where they’ll spike and what they’ll bring to the table (and that your team was at least helpful enough to warrant another first call). When Lindon Gao and York Yang told me they were tackling robotics next, I was instantly intrigued. At First Round Capital, we were fortunate to work closely with this founding team as they built Caper (an investment that my partner Hayley Bay Barna led for us). They were acquired by Instacart in 2021 after displaying a tremendous amount of grit and developing unique expertise at the intersection of hardware and software. Jason Ma is also joining as a co-founder, an excellent addition as a former DeepMind research scientist — his research is very impressive. There’s no sugarcoating that robotics is notoriously tough. But I’ve long been interested in the space and have been excited by recent developments. We're witnessing a massive shift from conditional models that chase edge cases to generative AI that can learn and develop a model of the world — the same breakthrough powering recent advances in self-driving. So I went very deep here last year, meeting with dozens and dozens of companies building with very different approaches. Dyna Robotics was by far and away the one that had me feeling most excited. While others chase humanoid robots with astronomical price tags, Dyna is taking a practical approach, mastering one task at a time with affordable, stationary robotic arms that companies can actually deploy today. It’s a specific → general play, focusing on one task at a time (like folding or food preparation) that allows models to learn and improve in production environments, collecting the real-world data needed to build toward general-purpose robots. The ultimate vision is to build robots that can do anything that people want them to do. It’s a big swing — but this is the founding team to do it. This team is moving super fast (and hiring quickly as well). More news on their $23.5M seed round (which we are excited to co-lead with Max Gazor at CRV) below.

Excited to finally announce Dyna Robotics $23.5M seed round co-led by CRV and First Round Capital. Big thanks to Sharon Goldman for breaking the news! https://lnkd.in/gwx5vCtf Yes, robotics is becoming a crowded field. However, current technical challenges significantly hinder the widespread commercial viability of robots. Most robotic foundation models today operate at just 10-30% of human-level speeds, impacting productivity on high-speed production lines. They also lack generalization capabilities, requiring extensive data collection even for minor environmental or task variations. Additionally, robot hardware remains expensive and insufficiently durable, limiting deployments to scenarios where ROI is easily justified... And these are just a few of the issues. After conversations with hundreds of potential customers, we discovered that people don’t care about fancy designs—they just want robots to perform reliably, maintain high throughput, and deliver clear ROI. To succeed, we knew we had to simplify by deciding what not to do (at least initially): - No legs: Over 60% of manual tasks involve repetitive actions with minimal mobility. - No human-like grippers: Complex finger designs significantly raise costs without proportional benefits. - No unrealistic expectations: Customers prefer robots excelling at one task (instead of many) repeatedly, reliably, and efficiently. We believe mastery of one beats mediocrity in many. We’re laser-focused on achieving general-purpose capabilities by perfecting one task at a time. Today, we’re bringing cost-effective, easy-to-deploy robotics solutions to businesses of all sizes. How do you know you have product-market fit? When your robot looks like shit but delivers so much value that customers happily pay for it.

GOAT Social dining app → marketplace friction → sneaker resale platform CLAY Horizontal data platform → no retention → vertical GTM data platform LATTICE OKR tool → users wouldn’t pay → performance management tool PLAID Consumer budgeting app → consumers didn’t want the product → banking API for businesses IRONCLAD AI legal assistant → lawyers didn’t understand the new category → repositioned as a contract lifecycle management platform On The Review, we broke down why, how and when these startups pivoted their way into product-market fit.

When hiring a new exec, should you “build” or “buy”? “When you’re looking for a new leader, you’re looking for a skillset that doesn’t exist in the organization,” says Stripe Head of Global Product Eeke de Milliano. “The question you should always ask yourself is: What are the skills you want to build versus the skills you want to buy?” She outlines the tradeoffs of each route: -Hire someone internally who has domain knowledge and cultural cache, but you’ll have to train them into it -Buy someone’s external expertise, but you’ll take a risk on their culture fit While it won’t make sense for every leader, she says hiring internally is “really, really good for company culture.”