We scale wonderful businesses.

The biggest factor in our decision-making is always the founding team. How innovative, resourceful and resilient are you? What’s your superpower? Why are you going to be the ones to prevail where others won’t? What moments in your history show that you thrive off the beaten path? Of course, we evaluate product and market too, but to be honest, we mostly look at that to evaluate the strength of founders too. Looking at what you’ve done already for this company — and before in your career — gives us a record of hundreds if not thousands of decisions you’ve made to get to where you are today. And that’s where success lives or dies in this industry: the ability for founders to make really quick, good decisions. We want to understand how you do it, and we give that a lot of weight.

These answers vary from company to company, but there are some general steps every founding team goes through. While we often try to move at the pace of the founder, an important rule applies: the less time we have to make a decision, the more conviction we have to feel about a company. Sometimes we spend months developing a relationship. Sometimes we move from intro to close in under a week. Generally speaking, here’s what you can expect:
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1. Initial meeting: Before an initial meeting, we’ll look at any materials sent by the founder, determine whether the business fits our basic investment criteria, and try to ensure it’s not directly competitive with any of our existing investments. Your first meeting (or phone call) with a member of the investment team will typically be between 45 minutes and an hour. We let the founder do most of the talking, and hope they use the opportunity to dig into the specifics of their team and business.
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2. Follow-up: Most of our “passes” occur after the initial meeting. If you’ve made it past that meeting, you’ll spend more time with your First Round point partner as we both continue to learn more about each other. At the same time, our partnership makes all decisions as a team. We sometimes introduce promising founders to another First Round partner for an additional conversation, typically the partner with the most “domain expertise” in that company’s area.

3. Partner meeting: If these conversations go well for both of us, we’ll typically make some reference/diligence calls and invite you to meet with the rest of the partners at our twice-weekly investment meeting. Here, you’ll have about an hour to tell your story to the entire partnership and answer questions.
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4. Final Decision: After your presentation, our partnership will discuss your company in great detail with the goal to give you a final answer usually within 24 hours of the meeting. Typically, we fund about half of the companies that make it to our partner meeting.

We’re focused on being the world’s best partner for founders at the very first stages of company creation — so we’ve designed the firm to do just that. When you work with First Round, you get super active partners (most of whom are former founders themselves) working side-by-side with you on your biggest and smallest challenges. Whether it’s setting the strategy for a fundraise or thinking through your organizational design, we’re in your corner through the thick and thin of company building over those first few critical years.

On top of that, you get access to our 20+ person Platform Team, working to help you fast forward through the tough nitty-gritty of building a company so you can focus on what makes yours special. Whether it’s our Go-To-Market team mapping out your initial sales strategy, or our Talent Team connecting you with top-tier candidates for your critical early hires, we’re here to help across all your needs.

Most importantly, we pioneered the concept of transforming a portfolio into a community. When our partners were entrepreneurs themselves, the most valuable advice and support they ever received came from other founders. That’s why we provide the tools and forums you need for folks throughout your company to learn from and help their peers. If you’re a PM, a CFO or a junior marketer, you can benefit from the collective wisdom of many others.

Above all, we look for compelling and contrarian insight into how the world works. What do you understand about a market or a need that no one else does or that other companies in the space get wrong? And why is your company the most likely to win at addressing this gap?

Second, if you have a product in market, a group of passionate customers is a strong indicator for us. If there are people using your product or service who wouldn’t know what to do without you, we want to hear about it. That’s one of the strongest data points you can offer. As an extension of this, we want to see creative thinking around go-to-market strategy as well as product. The best partner companies take both seriously.

Third, we take a close look at the market you’re going after. Let’s say you win the whole thing — is the prize worth winning? The game is long and hard, and some markets are more rewarding than others. SaaS companies have a different range of opportunities than on-premise software makers. First-party retailers are valued very differently from third-party ecommerce sites. To mix our metaphors, before a founder starts building their castle, they have to make sure they’ve picked the right piece of land.

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