986 Posts Found

Sam Corcos, co-founder & CEO of Levels, shares a detailed look into exactly how he spent 5 years building the company, with reflections on what changed in the transition from very early-stage to scale up.

Editor’s Note: This is a follow-up article. Corcos first published something similar after only two years building Levels. See An Exact Breakdown of How One CEO Spent … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Sam Corcos | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Personal Development, Productivity / Work Tips

We always talk about scaling companies, but companies are just collections of people. If you’re not really thoughtful about them and what they need to succeed, it’s going to be hard to succeed as a company.

Content: Quotation | Author: Claire Hughes Johnson | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Organizational Behavior

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was that when you’re starting a company, you often think you’re picking an idea, but you’re really picking a customer. It’s actually pretty easy to change your idea, but it’s way harder to change the customer you’re serving.

Every time you change customers, you leave all this learning on the table and start from scratch. Whereas … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Abhishek Agrawal | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Expert advice from Dropbox, Figma and Stripe on timing your first sales hire, finding the right candidate profile and creating effective onboarding to successfully transition from founder-led sales to a scalable revenue team.

Content: Article | Author: Meka Asonye | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Hiring, Human Resources, Marketing / Sales

Not all investors are created equal. Entrepreneurs should look for ones who share their vision.

Content: Article | Authors: Jeffrey Eschbach, Seb Murray | Source: Kellogg Insight | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

The great myth of entrepreneurship is that the founder’s path will get you all the autonomy, validation and recognition that you’re craving. It won’t — definitely not right away, and often not at all.

Content: Quotation | Author: Emily Anhalt | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

As a founder, instead of thinking, “Can I do this by myself?” you should be thinking “Do I have to do this by myself? Or would someone else benefit by taking this on?”

Content: Quotation | Author: Emily Anhalt | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Founders work for 10 years like no one else will so they can live a life no one else can. They take smaller salaries and sacrifice relationships for the 1% chance that their company will exit.

Content: Quotation | Author: Emily Anhalt | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

First Round partner Meka Asonye sits down with founders and first sales hires to unpack 6 specific tactics for learning to embrace founder-led sales instead of avoiding it.

Content: Article | Author: Meka Asonye | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs invent and create enduring change in one of three ways: by scaling supply, scaling demand, or scaling simplicity.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Derek Lidow, Tom Ehrenfeld | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Entrepreneurship

For the 12th year in a row, First Round Review rounded up 30 timeless company-building insights they published from the year before.

Content: Article | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Stephen Covey used to talk about your circle of influence, and Buffett talks about your circle of competence. Macro things are not things that start-ups can impact or control. So there’s not much reason for them to affect your thoughts about whether you would start a company or not. They might add anxiety, but I don’t know that they have any real impact.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bill Gurley | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Accelerator programs boost startup performance across the board, but maximizing that success depends on program design, Wharton research shows.

Content: Article | Authors: Raffi Amit, Seb Murray, Valentina Assenova | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subject: Entrepreneurship

A startup’s biggest competition isn’t an established player, it’s inertia.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jonah Berger | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

[A cold outbound strategy] gives you a very good sense of how something resonates. On the other hand, if you get a warm intro, people will take the call and maybe ask for a demo. It’s very non-committal and vague, and I actually think that’s harmful to startups because it can make them think they have product-market fit when they don’t.

Content: Quotation | Author: David Hsu | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

If you want to launch a startup, you need to have differentiated beliefs about the world. If your beliefs are the same ones that everyone else has, there’s no reason why you’re going to find success when others didn’t.

Content: Quotation | Author: David Hsu | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

When moving from a BigCo to a startup, about half of what you know will be innovative and incredibly useful to your new company and the other half will only work at the later stage. Your job is to figure out as quickly as possible which half is which.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeanne DeWitt Grosser | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Career, Entrepreneurship, Personal Development, Work

Product-market fit is one of the most important, yet elusive, concepts in company building. It’s not a clear metric you can measure or a milestone you can easily check off your to-do list. I think of product-market fit as the transition moment you feel as a founder when you go from “pushing” your product on people to them “pulling” it out of your hands. But … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Todd Jackson | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

In their work with more than 10,000 startup leaders across 70 countries, the authors identify three common management myths among startup leaders looking to grow their companies: the myth of scaling without hierarchy, the myth of structural harmony, and the myth of sustained heroics.

Content: Article | Authors: Josh Yellin, Martin Gonzalez | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Organizational Behavior

One of the things that give startups an advantage is that they’re exploring in a way that established companies aren’t able to. Enterprises have an innovation problem. Startups are exploratory. But what we have to realize is that the very act of setting a goal makes you become more and more enterprise-like. You stop exploring other avenues, strategies, products, and motions that you could be … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Annie Duke | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation