Opinion
Most Silicon Valley VCs default to cheerleading to protect founder-friendly reputations
“I'd say in the Valley today, there's really two types of investors and most fall in the first bucket. There's the cheerleaders and the people that'll give you the tough love. And I fall in the second bucket for sure. And I think the reason why a lot of people …”
Opinion
Founders would likely fire half the operating staff at most VC firms
“If a founder walked into most venture firms, I think they would probably fire half the team from an operating standpoint, because it is not the thing that is traditionally driven returns is building great services and delivering great quality of service to fou…”
Disclosure
First Round partners silently score pitches in Airtable before debating disagreements
“When a founder leaves the room, we don't talk. So they come and pitch typically for an hour. We ask questions. It's relatively conversational type of approach when we, when they're pitching the partnership. And then we literally just write for about 15 minutes…”
Insight
Hybrid work models are often harder for individual employees than fully remote
“The partially distributed model is actually harder than the fully distributed model for a lot of the individuals, because being the one that's on the TV, on the screen, and having everyone else in a conference room feels very disconnected versus if everyone's …”
Insight
Venture capital is commoditized; strong founders choose investors based on value-add
“Capital is a commodity now. Good founders with good ideas are making a decision about who should have their equity based on what value they bring. If they're good, they've got plenty of options for getting where they get the capital. It didn't used to be the c…”
Insight
Former operators turning VC often mistakenly evaluate ideas instead of founding teams
“Think about the chef versus the recipe. This is advice I got relatively early on in my career as an investor. Think about the team bet that you're making and whether they can execute this, not how you would execute this idea. A lot of times early on as an inve…”
Disclosure
First Round partners act as an independent board for their operating team
“Our partnership. Acts like a board of directors for our operating team, and we've released a very much a board operating cadence with them that we meet every four months, and they present an operating plan to us. All the senior level, senior members of the tea…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
First Round reviewed over 1,000 applications for a public venture partner listing
“We posted publicly and rethought the whole process. We said, we're hiring a new partner. We put out a post. We had a lot of people apply over a thousand people apply for the job. We looked at every single one of them.”
Disclosure
Seed checks of $500K to $750K no longer buy 10-15% equity
“It used to be that when we wrote a 500 K check to seven 50 K check, we could buy 10 to 15% of the company when we were early in the life of first round. That is no longer the case. That is not the market price clearing price for a seed round today.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Venture capitalists share an unspoken rule against scooping reference-call deals
“Typically in the industry, there's an unspoken rule that you don't scoop other people's deals if you learn about it from them.”
Disclosure
First Round avoids calling larger funds for references to prevent deal scooping
“If they're part of a larger fund, typically we won't be calling them because we do not want to highlight the deal for them.”
Opinion
The 30-minute VC travel rule for board meetings is now completely irrelevant
“It used to be the venture capitalists didn't want to travel more than 30 minutes for a board meeting, and that's completely irrelevant.”
Disclosure
First Round's average initial seed investment check is now $3 million
“Seed rounds are much higher value and our average initial investments about three million dollars these days.”
Disclosure
First Round holds two weekly partner meetings to ensure 72-hour pitch turnarounds
“We have two partner meetings a week now rather than one. We used to have just one on Thursdays. Now we have one on Monday and one on Thursdays. And so you're never more than 72 hours from getting in front of the whole partnership.”
Assertion Supported
Idealab raised $1 billion at the peak of the dot-com bubble
“This is late 99, early 2000. We raised a billion dollars, which was a lot of money, an unusual amount of money back then.”
