First Round Capital

We’re not a traditional venture firm.

We move at startup speed. We’re transforming a portfolio of individual companies into a connected community of entrepreneurs who inspire, support and educate each other.

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Investment team

Our investment team works side-by-side with founders to offer strategic advice and help solve unique challenges.

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    Rob Hayes

    Rob has led investments in companies such as Mint.com (acquired by Intuit), HomeRun (acquired by Rearden Commerce), Uber, TaskRabbit,AppFog, Get Satisfaction, and DNAnexus. Prior to joining First Round...

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    Cece Cheng

    Before joining First Round Capital, CeCe was the Director of Communications at internet startup Qwiki where she led all PR and marketing efforts. Prior to Qwiki, CeCe was at Dan Klores Communications, a boutique PR agency in New York City. She has...

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    Howard Morgan

    Howard was Professor of Decision Sciences at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Professor of Computer Science at the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania from 1972 through 1985. He has been a Visiting Professor at the...

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    Chris Fralic

    Chris Fralic is a Partner at First Round Capital. He joined the firm in 2006 and is based in their New York office. Chris has focused on a number of the firm's investments in areas such as Advertising Technology including Invite Media (acquired by...

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    Josh Kopelman

    Josh has been an active entrepreneur and investor in the Internet industry since its commercialization. In 1992, while he was a student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Josh co-founded Infonautics Corporation – and took...

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    Kent Goldman

    Kent joined First Round Capital in 2008.  He is based in the firm's San Francisco office. Kent has led investments in companies such as Hotel Tonight, Liftopia, Artillery and Threadflip.  Additionally, he created & led First Round's...

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    Phin Barnes

    I am a Partner at First Round Capital and am fascinated by design+technology+startups. Before joining First Round, I worked at AND 1 from “day 2″ and founded a fitness video game company.    After college I spent six years...

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    Bill Trenchard

    Bill is a partner at First Round Capital.  As a founder, operator, advisor and angel investor, Bill has helped dozens of companies launch, manage through hyper growth and win. Before joining First Round, Bill led LiveOps to $100 million in...

In addition to our investment team, our Platform Team digs in to help them recruit awesome talent, connect with each other and find those first crucial lighthouse customers. We have one goal: help our entrepreneurs build better companies. And we do it all at the seed stage.

We believe that entrepreneurs can change the world.

We’re on a mission to find those few that can bend reality and build a new future. Our investment team is always here to help founders. We work side by side with you and help solve unique challenges and offer strategic advice. We to want to be the founder’s first call -- literally, day or night – as you raise money and throughout the life of your company.

How we work

Seed stage

First Round doesn’t have a separate seed program. Seed stage investing is all we do. We love to dig in and join boards for those first 24 months.

Innovate

We might be a venture fund by definition, but we don’t act like one. We move at startup speed and test and iterate on the products, events and services we deliver. On average, every year we launch over a dozen new products.

Capital

Raising capital isn’t the best measure of success, but it’s usually required to build big. We work hard to help our companies raise additional capital. How hard? Members of the First Round Capital Community have raised over $2.5 billion in follow-on capital to date.

Connect

We don’t have all the answers – but we can always connect you with someone who does. We make thousands of introductions every year.

Founders first

Entrepreneurs, not VCs, build great companies. We play a supportive role and align ourselves with our founders.

Collaborate

We believe in teamwork. Each portfolio company gets the support of the entire First Round Capital team, not just one board member.

Our Platform

Our Platform team digs in to help our entrepreneurs recruit awesome talent, get lighthouse customers and learn and connect with each other. We have one goal, to help our entrepreneurs build better companies.

The First
Round Network

We’re probably one of the only venture firms with engineers on staff, building new technology to connect our entrepreneurs and wire up our community. That network lets our CEOs ask questions, share content and learn from each other, so better decisions get made faster. Every year brings hundreds of questions and thousands of great answers.

Killer Content

Every year we hold 30+ in-person events, but of course not everyone can make each one. So we put every Workshop, Town Hall and Summit online with video, slides and summaries. And these tools also help attendees take lessons learned back to their teams.

Ratings & Reviews

The average startup struggles to find 10-15 service providers every year. The process is painful: too often it starts with quizzing friends for leads and ends dozens of hours later with a relationship that doesn’t work out. After seeing members of our community struggle with this search, we built a better way: a platform that shows who the best providers are, who uses them within the First Round Community, and how to engage with them for service. The dozens of categories include 409A Valuations, Venture Debt, accountants, lawyers and PR Consultants. To date we have over 500 different providers and more than 1000 reviews.

Business Development

To connect First Round companies to new customers and partners.

Business Development Meetings

A few lighthouse customers can often mean the difference between success and failure for an early stage company.

As a startup with limited resources and brand awareness it’s often tough getting meetings with Fortune 500s and the largest brands and agencies – so every month we bring in some of the largest and most important companies for private 1:1 meetings with our portfolio. It’s a chance to start a conversation and have a dialog with people that matter at some of the largest companies on earth.

Exclusive
Conferences

Every year we put on invite-only conferences for one purpose, to help our companies get customers – and it’s worked. We jam the room with hundreds of media buyers and potential customers and over the past 4 years our conferences focused on Advertising and eCommerce have generated millions of dollars in new business for our portfolio.

Select Attendees

Learning and Development

To make every First Round entrepreneur world-class.

We believe we're all learners.

Every month hundreds of First Round Capital Entrepreneurs come together
to learn how to be the best at their jobs.

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    CEO Summit

    On one insanely special day each year, CEOs from all our portfolio companies gather for our annual CEO Summit in San Francisco. Attendees connect, share ideas, ask questions, and work together to make each other stronger. The day is packed with breakout sessions, game-changing resources and tactical talks from some of tech’s most influential leaders

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    CTO Summit

    We support our CTOs and VPEs as strongly as we do our CEOs. Our annual CTO Summit lets our engineering community dive into technical topics and engineering management. As with the CEO Summit, we bring in the world’s best tech minds to share their frank and off-the-record advice and lessons learned.

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    Workshops

    We scour the world to bring in the brightest minds and smartest operators to teach our entrepreneurs how to be the best. Workshop topics have included:

    • Building and Managing Product Teams
    • Continuous Deployment
    • Virality
    • Objectives and Key Results
    • Startup Security
    • Dashboarding and Cohort Analysis
    • Facebook Ad Optimization
    • Agile Development
    • Building a Growth Team
    • Best Practices in Content Marketing
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    Town Halls

    Once each quarter, in both San Francisco and New York City, we invite CEOs from the fastest-growing companies on Earth to share off-the-record tactical advice with hundreds of our entrepreneurs. You can learn from the best then take those insights back to the office and make an impact hours later.

    Research

    To deliver actionable insights to the First Round Capital Community

    More data is always better, so our research team works tirelessly to deliver insights to every First Round Company.

    Venture Concierge

    Founders have to answer thousands of questions every year, some of them trivial and others company-changing. Our amazing Venture Concierge exists to answer questions that require one-off research. Think of it as your on-demand consulting service for questions like these:

    Sometimes founders need help

    Compensation Data

    How much equity and salary should you offer? The right numbers can mean the difference between winning and losing a great candidate. We’ve collected compensation data from across our portfolio and wrapped it in a web interface so our founders can make better, smarter decisions.

    Model board decks

    One huge advantage of working with so many startups is that we’ve seen thousands of board meetings run. We’ve seen many great ones and others... not so great. More importantly, we’ve seen the impact that great board meetings have on companies. So we’ve connected the dots and distilled what we’ve learned into template board decks that you get the most out of your board meetings.

    Talent

    To help First Round Capital companies
    attract the best talent in the world.

    Everyone says “Hire A+ Players,” but we help you do it. Category-killing businesses are built by amazing founders and world-class teams. We help you find and retain the best engineers, designers and business geniuses at the seed stage.

    Building a great
    team is a skill that can
    absolutely be learned. We
    work one-to-one with
    founders to make them better
    at recruiting, from crafting
    their story to standing out
    in the marketplace.

    Coaching

    A world-class recruiter can
    help a founding team get
    leverage, run a better process and
    grow the top of the funnel – and that’s
    where our Recruiter Network comes in.
    We plug our companies into the best
    contract recruiters out there to
    help them jumpstart their
    talent search.

    Recruiter network

    Education and coaching
    are huge in recruiting. But
    sometimes you need an extra
    edge. We scour the country to find
    the best engineers, marketers
    and designers and deliver them to
    our founders’ inboxes. And
    since we focus solely on the
    seed stage, you know you’ll get
    attention even when
    you’re small.

    Talent Network

    HR & benefits are
    a pain. Founders shouldn’t
    have to waste time with them.
    We plug you into the right prov-
    iders and share best practices
    to make HR as turnkey as
    possible, so you spend hours
    and not days on
    the topic.

    HR Made Easy

    Our in-person
    workshops make our
    founding teams and hiring
    managers better at recruiting –
    so they close more candidates
    and build better teams, faster.
    Isn’t that what it’s all about?

    Recruiting Workshops

    See our community in action

    Check out our library

    Founders win by creating more moments of truth

    The other day I was lucky enough to witness a moment of truth – the moment when an entrepreneur gets to face the market and see if they are right. The best founders relentlessly pursue these moments and face them with no fear....

    Posted in Library | Feb 6, 2013
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