How Corporations and Startups Are Redefining Corporate Venturing

The Mack Institute’s Corporate Venturing Report presents a data-driven analysis of how corporations are engaging with startups today. Based on a systematic review of the world’s 500 largest companies, it reveals a corporate venturing landscape defined by structured, mutually beneficial partnerships. These collaborations enable corporations and startups to access new technologies, build business ecosystems, and tackle complex challenges.

How I Spent 17,784 Hours in 5 Years as a Startup Founder

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 ]

0-$5M: When, Who, and How to Make Your First Sales Hire

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.

5 Tips for Finding the Right Angels

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

0-$5M: How to Nail Founder-Led Sales

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.

Do Accelerators Improve Startup Success Rates?

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

3 Management Myths That Derail Startups

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.

Levels of PMF: Product-Market Fit Isn’t a Black Box — A New Framework to Help B2B Founders Find It, Faster

Most people describe finding product-market fit as an art, not a science. But when it comes to sales-led B2B startups, we’ve reverse engineered a method to increase the odds of unlocking it. We’ve worked with some of the world’s most iconic enterprise founders and distilled what they did in their first six months into a series of tactical sessions for taking a straighter path to … [ Read more ]

How Companies Can Speed Up the Business of Business Building

New ventures often fail—but digital capabilities change the odds. By following a business-building playbook based on your company’s strategic assets, you can accelerate growth dramatically.

Building Your First Board: Lessons for Founders

It takes more than intuition and expertise to assemble a team of directors who can help firms stay profitable and healthy.

The Secret to Running Effective Growth Sprints — Follow This Process to Learn Faster

Early growth at startups comes down to a few insanely successful tactics. If you look back at the early days of any great startup, you’ll see that 90% of their early growth came from 10% of the stuff they tried.

This phenomenon is no coincidence — it’s physics. Big companies can grow by deploying heaps of cash and armies of people, using every channel, hoping one … [ Read more ]

A practical guide to new-business building for incumbents

Five lessons for incumbents on how to build and scale new digital ventures—and increase their odds of success.

Four Questions Every Marketplace Startup Should Be Able to Answer

Marketplace businesses can be messy, and every gain is hard earned. After all, you’re dealing with an ecosystem of participants — buyers and sellers — that’s constantly in flux, their needs and desires changing over time. Unfolding in both online transactions and offline interactions, marketplaces are organic and dynamic.

Marketplace leaders need to be experts in the dynamics of their platforms. Identify those dynamics in … [ Read more ]

Pull, Don’t Push: How Catalysts Overcome Barriers and Drive Product Adoption

Trying to change someone’s mind often feels like a fruitless pursuit, almost as if it requires waving some sort of magic wand or casting an enchanting spell.

Trying to change someone’s mind often feels like a fruitless pursuit, almost as if it requires waving some sort of magic wand or casting an enchanting spell. On a smaller scale, you might think of a particularly sticky … [ Read more ]

How to build a unicorn: Lessons from venture capitalists and start-ups

New data highlights five things incumbent businesses could learn from venture capitalists and unicorns.

The Tactical Guide to Making Better Decisions When Starting and Scaling Companies

For the past couple of years, Annie Duke has been sharing her advice with founders and angel investors in closed sessions for the First Round community, but given our focus on open-sourcing so others in the tech ecosystem can learn, we thought readers of The Review would be curious to see a few pages from her decision-making playbook, tailored specifically for the startup context.

In this … [ Read more ]

Run This Diagnostic to Thoughtfully Build (and Evaluate) Your Startup’s Culture

Most founders tend to remain high-level when the topic of culture comes up. For starters, there are tons of reads on why culture matters, but strikingly few on how to actually architect it. We all understand what it means to some extent, but it’s rarely defined or broken down. There are frameworks for product/market fit or founder-led sales, but when it comes to culture, the … [ Read more ]

When Pitching an Idea, Should You Focus on “Why” or “How”?

There are two camps on the most effective way to frame an innovative idea. One contends you should emphasize why the idea is desirable. The other says you should focus on how to implement the idea. Which one is right? A research project found that the answer depends on your audience. If you’re making a pitch to novices, focus on why. If you’re making it … [ Read more ]