451 Posts found for Source: First Round Review

Life is just time and how you use it. Every product or service in your life either helps you spend time or save time. […] The only exceptions are rare products … that add a time-consuming action to your plate while also making that experience faster than it normally would be.

Content: Quotation | Author: Scott Belsky | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Innovation, Marketing / Sales

Simple is sticky. It is very hard to make a product—or any customer experience—simple. It is even harder to keep it simple. The more obvious and intuitive a product is, the harder it is to optimize it without adding complication.

Content: Quotation | Author: Scott Belsky | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Innovation

As Vinod Khosla has observed, your market entry strategy is often different from your market disruption strategy. And too many people focus on how small the market entry side is, but the entry point almost definitionally has to be small, because you have to find a space that isn’t covered or saturated by incumbents. If you find a gap and push your way through, often … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Elad Gil, Vinod Khosla | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Strategy

A lot of founders will go to customers and say “Hey, would you want to use this?” And customers will say “That’s great, we’d love to use it.” And so the founders go off and build it, but when then they come back with a product, no one’s using it. That’s because what they should have asked is, “Would you pay for this?” Being interested … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Elad Gil | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Entrepreneurship, Market Research

Markets with potential usually have a changing dynamic that allows new players to climb in and make room for themselves. It could be falling costs, new tech or a new distribution channel. Whatever it is, if you’ve heard something was difficult, you can’t just stop there because things have probably changed.

Content: Quotation | Author: Elad Gil | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Strategy

As a general rule, when I make investments, it’s market first and the strength of the team second, which is quite different from a lot of other angel investors who are more founder-driven. I think that’s a mistake. Even if you have a strong founding team that’s able to pivot, they’ll probably stay trapped in the market they’re already in. Many great teams get taken … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Elad Gil | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

You can have more decisions than decision-makers, but if you have more decision-makers than decisions, that’s when you run into problems.

Content: Quotation | Author: James Everingham | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management

When you think of transparency, you usually default to the communication aspect: telling everyone what’s happening or admitting when you’ve made a mistake. But when folks say that things aren’t transparent, what they’re probably getting at is that decision-making isn’t transparent. It’s the feeling that decisions sometimes roll on down from the lofty perch of the leadership team, seemingly out of nowhere. Instead, pull back … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: James Everingham | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

As a two-time founder and a seasoned engineering leader, Bethanye McKinney Blount has seen misunderstanding around comp rear its head time and time again. And in her experience, this hesitation to pull back the curtain on paychecks and think more deliberately about a compensation philosophy tends to cause problems down the line as startups scale. In this exclusive interview, Blount tackles the thorny questions startups … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Bethanye McKinney Blount | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Compensation, Human Resources

I’m a big believer in teaching leaders to fish. That’s why we’ve rolled out a weekly(ish) email for leaders … that summarizes all the things they need to be thinking about in terms of managing and messaging to their team. We break it down into a few sections: things to know, things to do, things to share. It sounds simple, but let’s be real, leaders … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Terra Carmichael | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Human Resources, Leadership, Management

The double-edged truth of the fast-scaling startup: If the company grows as it should, it will outgrow many of its people.

Content: Quotation | Author: Khalid Halim | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

The law of startup physics: humans grow linearly, companies grow exponentially.

Content: Quotation | Author: Khalid Halim | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

I started noticing patterns in startups — which I’ve validated with executives and VCs over the years — that how companies scale and break matches military groupings. So, the most efficient group in the military is a group of three, then a group of eight, and then three groups of eight, so 24. Look across companies and you’ll see that around 24 people, someone speaks … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Khalid Halim | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

Scott Belsky’s new book, The Messy Middle, covers an expansive range of topics, from constructing teams (“If you avoid folks who are polarizing, you avoid bold outcomes”) to culture and tools (“Be frugal with everything except your bed, your chair, your space, and your team”) to anchoring to your customers (“empathy and humility before passion”). We’re pleased to present Belsky’s introduction to his “Optimizing Product” … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Scott Belsky | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Innovation, Management

There’s a behavioral design professor at Stanford, BJ Fogg, who has developed a model that says for any behavior in the world to occur, you need three things to happen at the same time: motivation, ability and a trigger. Motivation can play off of many things, like pleasure or pain, hope or fear. Ability refers to how easy it is to execute the behavior. And … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Payal Kadakia | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

You know, in the beginning, people would say, “Oh, well, we need to build this thing to scale.” But, honestly, let the site go down. If people keep coming back, it’s a pretty good sign that you’re onto something. If they don’t due to a brief technical lapse, it’s likely not just the tech; there’s a dangerous fragility with your business or business model.

Content: Quotation | Author: Payal Kadakia | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

For Elad Gil, an important lesson for aspiring founders and investors alike is that nonobvious markets can lead to hypergrowth, but they’re hard to spot in the moment. The trick lies in finding what bucks conventional wisdom before anyone else and scaling that unlikely idea into a high-growth company — something Gil is very familiar with.

In his roles as an operator and angel investor, Gil … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Elad Gil | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Strategy

How many times have you seen a [job description] that defines the position by listing a dozen different skills? Don’t describe the entire position in exquisite form, even though all those skills may be useful. That laundry list of requirements won’t exist in a human. Invariably you end up with someone who’s mediocre at all of them, but not exceptional at the ones at which … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Marco Zappacosta | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Human Resources

Howard Morgan is an encyclopedia of tech history and startup lessons. And all that he hasn’t experienced firsthand, he soaks up, too. (He keeps a running list of all the books he’s read over the last 30 years; it’s over 5,700 entries long.) In this exclusive interview, we dig into the practice Morgan has seen differentiate good founders from great founders: the ability to relax … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Howard Morgan | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Most people choose not to take action because humans are very loss averse. We all want to minimize regret, and we tend to ascribe more regret to acting rather than failing to act. Failing to act doesn’t really feel like our fault. If you’re trying to be persuasive, you can anticipate this instinct. If you desire a particular outcome, make sure that your stakeholders need … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tyler Odean | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Persuasion