First Round Capital
includes First Round Review
13 statements across 3 episodes · 5 bullish · 1 bearish · 3 people on the record · first statement Aug 18, 2022 by Arielle Jackson · said 73 times in 14 episodes since 2022 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Lenny Rachitsky (33), Arielle Jackson (23), Camille Ricketts (5), Madhavan Ramanujam (3), Sean Ellis (2), Emily Kramer (2), Pete Kazanjy (1), Paige Costello (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 5 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
- Superhuman's secret to success | Rahul Vohra (CEO and founder)
- A guide to difficult conversations, building high-trust teams, and designing a life you love
- Inside ChatGPT: The fastest growing product in history | Nick Turley (OpenAI)
- How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? | Jerry Colonna
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2023 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2022 61 mentions in 5 episodes 12 per episode
- The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, First Round Capital)
- How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts
- The art and science of pricing | Madhavan Ramanujam (Monetizing Innovation, Simon-Kucher)
- How to build a powerful marketing machine | Emily Kramer (Asana, Carta, MKT1)
- Founder-led sales | Pete Kazanjy (Founding Sales, Atrium)
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
Everything said about First Round Capital, oldest first
Aug 18, 2022 neutral
Apr 11, 2024 positive
Jackson: Best early customers have already failed to build internal solutions
“If a customer has a problem and like, I really think they have a problem and they know they have the problem and they're looking for a solution for the problem, or they've even tried to build their own solution to it and failed. That's like the best customer, …”
Apr 11, 2024
Jackson: Strong PMF requires >60% gross margin, <10% churn, and >110% NRR
“So like, you know, we're talking about our gross margin needs to be above 60%, hopefully above 70%. Our burn multiple is now below three, right? Like ideally we're in like the, ideally we're like close to one, right? Burn multiple, like in the one to three zon…”
Apr 11, 2024 neutral
Apr 11, 2024
Jackson: As PMF strengthens, marginal customer acquisition should get progressively easier
“And if you have product market fit, and as you are progressing along this journey, the marginal customer should be getting easier and easier and easier to get, like easier to acquire them, easier to give them good service with a good product. And that's means …”
Apr 11, 2024 positive
Jackson: Founders should view markets as people, not abstract categories
“I think it's like much more tangible for a founder to think of the market as like a collection of people. Right? Like Jack Altman was thinking about his market as all of the HR leaders out there. And he was thinking about how many of them are there and what ar…”
Apr 11, 2024 negative
Apr 11, 2024
Jackson: Startups seeking nascent PMF must prioritize satisfaction over efficiency
“Of the three dimensions that you just recapped, Lenny, it's satisfaction first, demand second, efficiency last, when you're at level one. Like, it's actually okay to be inefficient at this stage, if it helps you uncover something that delivers an insanely good…”
Apr 11, 2024 neutral
Jackson: 60% to 70% of startups stall before achieving strong PMF
“The majority of companies, so greater than 50%, probably closer to 60 or 70% are gonna get stuck at L one or L two. And so that leaves, you know, roughly, let's say, 30%, make it to L three or L four, just in our experience looking broadly.”
Apr 11, 2024
Apr 11, 2024 positive
Looker's founder did 40 hours of hands-on consulting to close early prospects
“Looker is interesting because they spent actually kind of a long time at level one, but then like flew through level two. And the reason is because they, Lloyd, the founder, the first five customers of Looker, he was basically going in and doing consulting for…”
Apr 11, 2024 positive
May 2, 2024 positive
Duke: First Round uses structured forms for independent investment opinions
“We do this, like, for example, at first round, we do this for, we have a structured forum for evaluating a company in terms of whether you should invest in it. Because, you know, there are facts and then there are the way that you model those facts. And so it'…”