462 Posts found for Source: First Round Review

When my managers have been great, they’ve looked at my situation with compassion above all, above what they (or the company) need from me. The same goes for when I’ve been my best as a manager. That doesn’t mean the company’s priorities don’t prevail — it just means I feel acknowledged as a human being in whatever the situation is.

Content: Quotation | Author: Devan Goldstein | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

The best managers are incredibly consistent — they’re almost always on time, follow-up, and close the loop on open items. The diligence and consistency seem straightforward but are rare in a leader.

Content: Quotation | Author: Liz Kosinski | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

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 ]

Content: Article | Author: Annie Duke | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

Naivety is an important quality for entrepreneurs to possess — there are no assumptions about what is and isn’t possible. The ability to not know what lies around every single corner is actually an advantage because it forces you to look around corners that you normally would never go towards.

Content: Quotation | Author: Irving Fain | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

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 ]

Content: Article | Author: Laura Del Beccaro | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Culture, Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

Too often HR or legal policies solve for the exception — but then you force everyone to operate in a worse environment simply because someday there could be a bad actor who does a bad thing. I’d much rather solve for the 99%.

Content: Quotation | Author: Marco Zappacosta | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Legal, Management

When you’re hiring a role, you make your list of what you want this person to be great at, and your list is 12 items long. What happens is you end up hiring for lack of weakness rather than exceptional strength in any one area — that leads to a mediocre outcome. Push yourself to define the role in terms of three specific key attributes … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Marco Zappacosta | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources

The cultural attributes and values of an organization are really a reflection of who joins early on — the shared values that bring the early team together. Building the culture starts with who you hire, and it’s nothing more than that. It’s a mistake to be too explicit about the culture and values upfront in the earliest days of a startup. You don’t know yet … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Marco Zappacosta | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Culture, Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

It’s useful to recognize the ways in which you’re not a special flower. In the early days, you think you and your company are special in every way, and then over time, you realize there’s a lot of stuff that everybody goes through.

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

Usually, post-mortems is the word you use to describe analyzing the things that don’t go well, but we do post-mortems when things go well, too. That is the way in which you continually build this muscle of analyzing the outcome and asking what all of the inputs were that led you there and try to do your best in the moment when everything’s fresh in … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeff Lawson | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

The thing that I’ve noticed about OKRs is the objectives aren’t prioritized in most companies. At most companies, the energy of OKRs is really around the key results. Everybody gets very focused on the metrics. And I actually think the most important part of our BPM is not the measures, it’s the priorities.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeff Lawson | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

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