451 Posts found for Source: First Round Review

You’ve got to send people out in different boats to explore new ideas, but when you see the signs of success, make sure you’ve got the ability to double down in real-time on the winning boat.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeff Lawson | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation

If I can start to get people to really work that muscle — the curiosity before judgment, the listening before developing an action plan — I know I can get them down a road where they become empathetic leaders and amazing listeners who will create very safe, transparent environments for people to feel seen and heard.

Content: Quotation | Author: Mark Frein | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

At early-stage companies, where you’re still wrestling with product/market fit and building up the company foundation, management often falls to the back burner, leaving folks to generally figure it all out for themselves. However, many of the cracks that emerge as startups scale can be traced back to those missing managerial cornerstones.

One root cause? Manager training, which is largely ignored by startups as a BigCo bucket … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Johnathan Nightingale, Melissa Nightingale | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Human Resources, Management, Training & Development

No leader I’ve ever talked to has said, “I want to create the kind of environment where I can coerce everyone. I’ve also never met a single leader who says, “I want to create an organization that demands conformity.” We know that’s not going to create good results or produce innovation. And yet too often, that’s exactly what happens. There’s a reticence to examine our … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Kim Scott | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

As a rule of thumb, I don’t think most leaders can handle scaling back more than one order of magnitude in org size — for example if you currently have a 10 person sales team, look for someone who’s led a 100 person sales team, but not 1000.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeanne DeWitt Grosser | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Human Resources

Arielle Jackson has helped shape hundreds of startup brands. “Working with hundreds of brands has cemented the importance of focusing on the fundamentals of your purpose, positioning, and personality early on. These are the essential elements of a brand strategy. When you get this stuff right, everything flows from there. You don’t get distracted by the competition. Your website writes itself. Your messaging breaks through … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Arielle Jackson | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales

You get the behavior that your comp plan designs for. In the early days, I prefer to keep comp plans simple with two metrics, max. I also love plans that have a component focused on the entire customer lifecycle. For example, comping teams on bookings and retention can be a powerful way to ensure teams pursue the right users who will be longtime customers.

Content: Quotation | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Compensation, Customer Related, Human Resources

In order to truly serve a customer, you need to understand two things: What are their goals and what is standing in their way?

Content: Quotation | Author: Meka Asonye | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Customer Related

As individuals, we focus way too much on one decision versus another, but not nearly enough on the meta question of the context that would cause that decision to change.

Content: Quotation | Author: Rick Song | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

For most of my interviews, I actually ask very little about how they would solve a particular problem. When it comes to questions like “What was the hardest challenge you’ve ever faced?’ often a lot of candidates have canned answers. Instead, I focus on the incentives. What do they care about? What motivates them? What drives them? If it’s an hour-long interview, I’ll spend 40 … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Rick Song | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources

“Why would a customer not want this?” is often a far more interesting question than why they would. When you’re working on a product idea, there’s a thesis for why you believe you’re right and it’s really easy to constantly confirmation bias yourself into believing it’s the optimal decision. But once you can also find the counterpoint, the scenario where you’re wrong, you can start … [ Read more ]

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

Since 2013, First Round Review has committed itself to an annual ritual, one that serves as an opportunity to both take stock and remind ourselves of that early promise to stay tactical. Each time we turn the page to the new year, we comb through every article we published over the last one to concentrate the standout tactics into one actionable guide of advice. As … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management

We’ve built out job architectures, which we call a job framework because we don’t want it to be a ladder where people feel like they have to go directly up. Instead you want people to feel like they can maybe take a path somewhere else or do something else, and that would still be career growth.

Content: Quotation | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Human Resources

I think a lot about how we are telling our story and our narrative inside of the company, but also equally important, how are we telling that narrative outside of the company? It’s incredibly important that those two things match, because if they don’t, you’re going to run into issues on either side. If they don’t match, then internally people will get their information or … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Colleen McCreary | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Organizational Behavior, Public Relations

What some investors say is that the only problem you can’t fix is the problem of market size. But most folks’ intuition about how big a market or a problem is typically quite off

Content: Quotation | Author: Waseem Daher | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

OKRs only work if there is a ritual of reviewing progress and holding owners accountable for hitting their goals.

Content: Quotation | Author: Kevin Fishner | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

While I definitely agree that people are your most important asset, I’ve noticed that most content doesn’t talk as much about the systems. While early employees are of course a driving factor for the company culture, they’re only half the equation. The other half is the foundational systems. The comparison I like to draw is the nature versus nurture debate. Both your genes and your … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Kevin Fishner | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

Language/market fit is the most under-appreciated concept for early-stage startups. For starters, most founders are focused on finding product/market fit, zeroing in on the right set of features to match their prospects’ needs. Moreover, fine-tuning language seems like “marketing,” which is usually seen as a later priority, not step zero. Lastly, people also don’t tend to like going out of their comfort zone — and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Matt Lerner | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales

Just think of a business as a process. It can be a complicated process, but essentially, it spits up outputs like revenue and profit, numbers of customers, and growth rates. To be a good operator, you can’t just focus on those output metrics — you need to identify the controllable input metrics. […] If you do the things you have control over right, it’s going … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Colin Bryar | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

Most people are actually trying pretty darn hard, and they have good intentions. So when we ran into an issue or a problem, [Jeff] Bezos would always ask, ‘Do we have a mechanism in place so it doesn’t happen again? Because if this high-performing or well-intentioned person tripped up, there’s probably a process that we need to fix.

Content: Quotation | Author: Colin Bryar | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior