🎯 Practical: First Round (@firstround) / X

First Round

15.1K posts

First Round

@firstround

Where “imagine if” gets to work. We've helped 500+ companies (like @NotionHQ, @Roblox, @Uber, @Square) take a straighter path from idea to product-market fit.

SF, NY, PHL

Joined July 2008

Pinned
First Round
@firstround
Jul 15, 2025
After @tobi published his now-famous AI memo, you probably saw similar posts from other founders and CEOs flood this platform. But most companies are still in the “memos and demos” phase — ambitious plans and mandates, “AI-first” roadmaps on board decks, flashy features and
39K
First Round reposted
Todd Jackson
@tjack
20h
Back in 2013, when I was starting Cover, I was introduced to @bryantchou. I was so impressed by his technical chops and raw intensity that I tried to hire him as our founding engineer. He politely declined to start his own new company instead, called Webflow. But we stayed in
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First Round reposted
brryant
@bryantchou
21h
AI is making marketers lazy. So we made the website do the work instead. Today, we're launching @ployai: the all-in-one marketing platform that turns your website into your hardest working employee. And we're coming out of stealth today with a $27M seed led by @ycombinator and
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First Round reposted
Notion
@NotionHQ
Jun 15
“People [at Notion] are really only concerned about one thing which is making the product good and our customers happy. So Sesame characters are in every single conference room to remind us that it's not our own internal thumbs up that we're looking for. We're really looking to
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Notion
@NotionHQ
Jun 10
We take Sesame Street very seriously. There's a character in every meeting room — a small reminder that we're building for the people outside the room, not the ones in it.
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First Round reposted
Todd Jackson
@tjack
Jun 11
The demand for clean, always-on power is exploding, and the grid can't keep up. The team at Endurance Energy is going after one of the biggest untapped sources on the planet: geothermal heat beneath the seafloor. They're building systems to deliver gigawatts of zero-emission
Endurance Energy
@endurancegeo
Jun 11
Endurance is proud to announce our $54M Series A, led by @foundersfund, to develop subsea geothermal energy. We're building mass-manufacturable and mass-deployable generators to access terawatts of low cost, clean, baseload power.
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First Round
@firstround
Jun 5
There’s no single archetype of someone who works at @AppliedInt. But most fall into one of three buckets: The domain specialists (like AV simulation PhDs), new talent (there’s always a big cohort of recent grads) and ex-founder or CTO types (they infuse the “startup” energy, even
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First Round
@firstround
Jun 5
Full essay here:
Firsthand: Seven Years Inside Applied Intuition
From review.firstround.com
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First Round reposted
Brett Berson
@brettberson
Jun 4
I think this point from @malharhar, who is one of the earliest employees @AppliedInt is so right.
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First Round reposted
Liz Wessel
@lizwessel
Jun 4
There are few people in the world I've met who are as dedicated, intense, and ambitious as @SurbhiSarnaSF. I had the honor of first getting to know Surbhi when we were both working at YC, and it was so obvious from my very first interaction that she was someone who would leave a
AI Startup Collate Raises $95 Million To Automate Life Sciences Paperwork
From forbes.com
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First Round reposted
Brett Berson
@brettberson
Jun 4
"The only team that sits at the intersection of product, revenue, users, perception, and community is marketing." Sheila Joglekar Vashee's definition of great marketing isn't storytelling. It's creating coherence. Excited to share our next episode of Executive Function with the
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First Round reposted
Liz Wessel
@lizwessel
Jun 4
I remember first meeting @jakebolling & being 'wowd' by his desire to transform an otherwise overlooked industry. We knew we had to invest. 12 months later, Scotch launched. 3 months after that, pre-empted for their A. Now, Scotch has passed a $1B GPV run-rate. Scotch is
Jake Bolling
@jakebolling
Jun 4
Today I’m thrilled to announce Scotch has raised a $20M Series A, led by VMG Partners, with participation from @firstround , @LererHippeau , and @TobaCapital . In 2024, we set out to fix something that's been broken for 30 years: the technology running America's 40,000+
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First Round
@firstround
Jun 3
Applied Intuition has a practice called the culture table. Co-founders @qasar and Peter Ludwig, plus a few other leads (specifically, not managers) meet regularly to make sure manager bloat isn’t creeping in as the headcount has scaled past 1,000. Every six months, ICs score
3.8K
First Round
@firstround
Jun 3
Read here: review.firstround.com/firsthand-appl…
2.8K
First Round reposted
Malhar Patel
@malharhar
Jun 3
When I joined @AppliedInt, back in early 2019, it was just a handful of engineers working above a bar in Sunnyvale. The website didn’t really tell you what we were. We just wanted to build amazing products for the real world, from fighter jets to hundred ton trucks to autonomous
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First Round reposted
Todd Jackson
@tjack
Jun 3
It’s rare to find a former CTO who’s both technically world-class and a commercial savant. @jgreze is one of the few I’ve worked with who’s both. He’s putting that combo to work building @TownAI with @tonydevincenzi, an insanely talented product thinker and designer. I've known
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