First Round Review

It should be noted that First Round have done a great job putting out content for many years. https://review.firstround.com is a great resource for founders

https://review.firstround.com/ is great, too (not 100% leadership/management)

A highly curated list of books like this is awesome coming from Stripe. Wouldn't mind seeing a similar type of curated release from First Round(1) who also releases great info for anyone working or founding startups. (1) https://review.firstround.com/

First Round Capital - Software Engineer - Remote. Open to visa sponsorship for transfers. First Round is reinventing venture capital. We connect entrepreneurs with the knowledge, people and companies they need for maximum impact. Square, Uber, Roblox and Warby Parker are some of the companies we’ve been fortunate to partner with — and we’re just getting started. To make it all happen, we design and build our own unique products that our core and extended community of founders, CEOs, and their teams use every day. That’s where you come in. When you join our team, you’ll plug into our community of entrepreneurs. You’ll have a front row seat to company creation from day one, with unparalleled access to technology founders. Your software will help this next generation of founders and teams go farther, faster. And there’s this: We’re a small, lean team, so you’ll drive product strategy and implement your vision as you best see fit. First Round engineers have gone on to join fast growing startups in our community and have founded their own startups. More about First Round: https://firstround.com/ If you're interested please apply here: https://jobs.lever.co/firstround/acd7ca1e-09db-4702-8e1d-629558e03d5f

The network, for sure. There's a reason you should connect with all your old work colleagues on LinkedIn whenever you switch jobs. I've always wanted to try this: https://review.firstround.com/mine-your-network-for-early-stage-hiring… Never done that, but it seems like a great way to systematize the network hiring process.

From a (great) podcast: https://review.firstround.com/podcast/episode-11 Today’s episode is with David Lieb, the Director of Google Photos. Previously, he was the founder/CEO of Bump, an app that allowed users to swap contact information by physically bumping phones. Bump was acquired by Google in 2013, and formed the basis for the design of Google Photos, which launched in 2015 and passed the 1 billion users mark in 2019.

I'm on the editorial team at First Round Review, and we actually just launched a new series aiming to share more stories about how different founders went about finding PMF. Check it out here: https://review.firstround.com/airtables-path-to-product-market-fit-les… In terms of measuring vs. optimizing, I liked this advice from Sprig founder Ryan Glasgow: https://review.firstround.com/8-product-hurdles-every-founder-must-cle… He makes a distinction between validating whether you have PMF, but recommends using a different framework, specifically the Outcome-Driven Innovation method, for discovering or finding PMF in the first place.

I can simply just agree with this. Keeping a ToDo app as simple as a word doc or sth is sometimes the best way to set good habits. Also, maybe have an excel file to not loose track of your projects. This article can be helpful as well https://review.firstround.com/ditch-your-to-do-list-and-use-these-docs…

Slack is a great story. Basically a tool they built in-house, the company were going bust and they realised that the "tool" had some value and out popped Slack https://review.firstround.com/From-0-to-1B-Slacks-Founder-Shares-Their…

The best advice I ever got on this was to “give away your legos”. https://review.firstround.com/give-away-your-legos-and-other-commandme… You have to intentionally give away ownership of the things you made and entrust other people to figure them out as well as you did.

At my startup [0] it's still early days, but we're trying to use the Superhuman "engine" [1] for testing PMF. Basically this is a survey where you ask your users how disappointed they'd be if they couldn't use your product anymore, and if enough say "very disappointed", then you're on to something. By no means is it the only/best measure of PMF, but it's a data point. 0: https://kitemaker.co 1: https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-p…

The First Round post “Madhavan Ramanujam–It’s Price Before Product. Period” captures about 80% of the value for startups so I would start there. Its at https://firstround.com/review/its-price-before-product-period/ I reviewed the book when it came out and extracted "9 Rules for Monetizing Innovation" at https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2016/11/16/nine-rules-from-monetizing-in… There are better books on pricing: for a straight up analysis of product pricing "The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing” by Thomas Nagle is the best book that I have read. It's on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing-Profitable-Decision/dp/…

I personally don't use this approach because I feel like it leads you to a grab bag of features and not a cohesive product. A lot of product management in my experience is laying conceptual groundwork that no client or stakeholder directly asks for. That said, the following article expands on the "Monopoly money" approach, but applied to stakeholders: https://firstround.com/review/This-Product-Prioritization-System-Nabbe…

While researching, I found this inspiring post by Gokul Rajaram who is someone I respect tremendously. If you haven't heard of Gokul, he's considered the Godfather of Google AdSense, creator of FB's ad platform and now a leader at Square. It's worth at least considering his advice :-) Here's the article where Gokul recommends this approach: https://firstround.com/review/square-defangs-difficult-decisions-with-… "After a decision is made, each participant must commit support out loud. Pledging support aloud binds you to the greater good." To my surprise, this technique is highly effective. Might be worth giving it a try?

I have learned a lot from HBR, but i also find it's skewed, rightfully so, to larger corporations. I enjoy https://firstround.com/review/ quite a bit. Excellent quality articles.

I had high hopes for /r/ProductManagement/, but it's not very active. That said, here are a few of my favorite product management resources: - https://medium.com/@johnpcutler - https://www.productplan.com/blog/ - http://firstround.com/review/ - https://www.kennorton.com/

https://firstround.com/review/give-away-your-legos-and-other-commandme… I found this post to be in a similar vein, and helped lessen the scare of growing (or not growing) with my current startup, Starsky Robotics. What it made me realize is I loved the ability to switch direction, to "give away my legos", and I needed to focus more on making that an easy transition if I wanted to do it successfully. Learning to onboard a new employee or a new team onto your "complex tower of legos" is high impact and extremely important as teams scale.

Our studio, Marquee (https://www.marquee.studio), has an in-house publishing platform called Proof (https://www.proof.pub) that we started back in 2012 which couples fully customizable editorial tools and content model, a headless CMS, and React/Serverless based SDK to compile static websites specifically for editorial and content marketing teams. An example that was designed by our team and managed through Proof that HN is probably familiar with is The First Round Review (http://firstround.com/review/). It's a similar approach that Netlify has put together and works great. Can't advocate for it strongly enough.

This is a great post and founders/hiring managers/junior recruiters are advised to listen to them. After a continual refinement of our own process over many years we've landed on almost this exact process near completely independently. This is a standard for a reason. You will save yourself A LOT of headaches if you incorporate this feedback into your own hiring processes. I also highly recommend Marco Rodgers' advice http://firstround.com/review/my-lessons-from-interviewing-400-engineer… For people that are "too good for this process" - well, in my experience those are the ones that aren't a good fit for most organizations. You're self selecting out and limiting your own options. For some people that's totally fine, but for most I don't think that's good advice.

My sympathy for the guy, stuff like this sucks deep on a personal level and he should have gravitated towards a higher level team that values his contributions more. That being said, I've worked with my share of brilliant jerks and couldn't say it any better than this Firstround article: http://firstround.com/review/why-firing-brilliant-assholes-is-required… I'm tolerating exactly one brilliant jerk in my team right now, but it's just because he's the rare "selfless brilliant jerk type" ( http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-13/brilliant-jerks.html ) and he's just so damn productive and such a nice guy from the inside...

I read a quote of Drew's a while back that stuck with me. Just googled and found it: "When Dropbox was getting off the ground in 2007, there were hundreds of small storage companies. It was almost a cliche, the way that many people believe mobile photo sharing is a cliche now, he says. “The important thing was, I would keep asking people if they used any one of these hundred options, and they all said no. These are my favorite problems to solve. You can’t focus on what everyone else is doing — it has to be about what’s really broken and what you can do to fix it.”" http://firstround.com/review/How-to-Win-as-a-First-Time-Founder-a-Drew…

I've subscribed to their excellent First Round Review and this seems like a collation and organization of that. http://firstround.com/review/ And I guess that over time, they've accumulated a lot of material. So this is quite useful (to me, at least). The other platform that I've come across recently (cuz I'm slow) is On Deck Daily which is more HN-like in its engagement. http://www.ondeckdaily.com/

This article is great for those who view the parent comment optimistically http://firstround.com/review/give-away-your-legos-and-other-commandmen…

http://firstround.com/review/why-firing-brilliant-assholes-is-required… For me, it's always been just to make sure the person isn't toxic to other employees From some other comments I skimmed: I think it's a bonus if you have opinions on software. I want to hire people that challenge the team to grow and challenge me to grow with their differing opinions. It is very important as to how that opinion is conveyed though.

Interesting data, BUT... "Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team." - this is gender discrimination and it is illegal. How about actually making the workplace attractive to woman applicants? Things like ridding your careers page of implicit biases and bro culture, putting extra emphasis on personal as well as professional growth, attending/hosting various women-oriented events/meetups/conferences, involving your leadership with mentoring at and recruiting from places like the Hackbright Academy, etc. etc. It costs money, it costs time, hell, it takes a long time to produce results, but you know what - it's worth it! They are an outlier, but I do like Etsy's approach (and results) to gender diversity - http://firstround.com/review/How-Etsy-Grew-their-Number-of-Female-Engi…

As someone on the other side of the table at a startup, I always ask, and it depends on the answer. -- Con: flight risk, collaboration risk -- Pro: for valid reasons, they don't want the founder stress, risk, focus, whatever (say due to family, time, whatever), but love the environment. Such people are amazing: a classic "barrel" (http://firstround.com/review/Keith-Rabois-on-the-role-of-a-COO-how-to-… . We've been working the past few months with someone like this, and he is basically a multiplier on our ability to execute!

Yeah that is reasonable. Large companies can probably make a big difference. Small startups have a tough enough job already without also optimizing for employee diversity. Max Levchin talks about this as well: http://firstround.com/review/the-trick-max-levchin-used-to-hire-the-be…

I get asked this a fair bit so I started to collect a few of my favourite links together in a blog post: http://www.andykelk.net/leadership/the-big-list-of-management-and-lead… Specifically to new tech lead roles, I'd recommend "Peopleware" and "Behind Closed Doors" And a couple of articles specific to your situation: http://firstround.com/review/this-90-day-plan-turns-engineers-into-rem… and https://blog.stackexchange.com/2015/08/developer-turned-manager/

yammer's head of engineering kris gale also left microsoft last month[1]. he was a great voice of startup/agile culture inside of microsoft. and likely a bigger loss to the company. he also gave similar talks externally that I'd recommend[2]. [1] https://twitter.com/kgale/status/481876033746919426 [2] http://firstround.com/article/Why-Yammer-believes-the-traditional-engi…

This talk/interview of Keith Rabois is great when it comes to talking about what a COO does: http://firstround.com/article/Keith-Rabois-on-the-role-of-a-COO-how-to…