Jackson: Founders rarely practice picking ideas, while VCs train it constantly
Todd Jackson · Twitter's former CEO on rebuilding the web for AI | Parag Agrawal (Co-founder and CEO of Parallel) · Aug 14, 2025 · at 17:18
First Round Partner Todd Jackson discusses the critical nature of idea selection for startup founders with Parag Agrawal.
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“As an engineer, as a founder, you, you've developed these muscles on how to build, and you are very good at building. But what you only do once or twice is pick the thing to work on. And VCs, you know, one of the, I think the luxuries that we have VCs, we get to look at a lot of things, and we get to pick many things, and the picking muscle gets developed. And when, as a founder, you choose the thing that you're going to work on, that, that kind of sets the boundaries and constraints for, you know, if the company's doing well in the next 10 years of your life.”
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