First Round @firstround

“People [at Notion] are really only concerned about one thing which is making the product good and our customers happy. So Sesame characters are in every single conference room to remind us that it's not our own internal thumbs up that we're looking for. We're really looking to build these things for our customers and it's their approval that we're looking for.” - David Tibbitts, Product Marketer

Notion @NotionHQ

5 days ago

We take Sesame Street very seriously. There's a character in every meeting room — a small reminder that we're building for the people outside the room, not the ones in it.

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The demand for clean, always-on power is exploding, and the grid can't keep up. The team at Endurance Energy is going after one of the biggest untapped sources on the planet: geothermal heat beneath the seafloor. They're building systems to deliver gigawatts of zero-emission power faster and cheaper than conventional sources. Today, they're announcing $54M Series A funding. At @firstround, we're excited to have backed Andrew Redd and the team since the pre-seed. Huge congrats!

Endurance Energy @endurancegeo

4 days ago

Endurance is proud to announce our $54M Series A, led by @foundersfund, to develop subsea geothermal energy. We're building mass-manufacturable and mass-deployable generators to access terawatts of low cost, clean, baseload power.

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@AppliedInt Full essay here: review.firstround.com/firsthand-appl…

There’s no single archetype of someone who works at @AppliedInt. But most fall into one of three buckets: The domain specialists (like AV simulation PhDs), new talent (there’s always a big cohort of recent grads) and ex-founder or CTO types (they infuse the “startup” energy, even in a company of 1,300+ people). One of Applied's earliest employees, @malharhar — who was a new grad when he joined in 2019 — shares a firsthand account of what makes the company culture so distinctive.

I think this point from @malharhar, who is one of the earliest employees @AppliedInt is so right.

There are few people in the world I've met who are as dedicated, intense, and ambitious as @SurbhiSarnaSF. I had the honor of first getting to know Surbhi when we were both working at YC, and it was so obvious from my very first interaction that she was someone who would leave a massively impactful mark on the world. Then you have @nateps -- one of the smartest, kindest, and most genuine people out there -- who also happens to be an EPIC builder. Put them together, and you get an unstoppable team. I am so thrilled for the entire Collate crew on this huge financing milestone. I know Collate customers have been loving the platform, and I can't wait for so many more people to experience it soon. forbes.com/sites/innovati…

"The only team that sits at the intersection of product, revenue, users, perception, and community is marketing." Sheila Joglekar Vashee's definition of great marketing isn't storytelling. It's creating coherence. Excited to share our next episode of Executive Function with the CMO of @figma. Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 00:07 What excellent marketing actually is in 2026 01:36 Why giving teams different goals creates dysfunction 02:36 The most important decision Sheila made as CMO last year 04:26 The real difference between an SVP and a CMO 06:05 Marketing is one engine - not separate pieces 07:15 The tension between brand and growth 09:25 The decisions a CMO should never be making 09:55 Running marketing like a portfolio of moonshots 12:46 "Ubiquity is the opposite of cool" 15:11 Why a few companies get a flywheel of momentum 16:44 The Silicon Valley clock and irrational perception cycles 19:25 How to actually scale taste across an org 21:09 What changes for a CMO in a post-LLM world 23:15 Why the artistic side of marketing never really left 26:05 Whether taste can ever be encoded in software 27:15 Telling an optimistic, yet realistic story about AI 30:50 You need to make people care 32:11 What surprised Sheila about being a public-company CMO 33:46 Why Figma won enterprise where Dropbox couldn't 35:25 Sheila's favorite campaign ever 37:10 Why announcement videos full of humans lack humanity 38:55 Playbooks are obsolete, but the fundamentals are not 40:25 Why marketing in 2026 demands disruptive energy 41:54 How Sheila architects her week 48:55 Where corporate politics actually come from 53:55 "Sheila, are you going to change the world in this job?" 58:09 What's unique about the CMO and CEO relationship

I remember first meeting @jakebolling & being 'wowd' by his desire to transform an otherwise overlooked industry. We knew we had to invest. 12 months later, Scotch launched. 3 months after that, pre-empted for their A. Now, Scotch has passed a $1B GPV run-rate. Scotch is quickly becoming the defacto operating system for liquor stores nationwide. Kudos to the entire Scotch team, and a big 🍻 to Jake — one of the best operators out there.

Jake Bolling @jakebolling

2 weeks ago

Today I’m thrilled to announce Scotch has raised a $20M Series A, led by VMG Partners, with participation from @firstround , @LererHippeau , and @TobaCapital . In 2024, we set out to fix something that's been broken for 30 years: the technology running America's 40,000+

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@qasar Read here: review.firstround.com/firsthand-appl…

Applied Intuition has a practice called the culture table. Co-founders @qasar and Peter Ludwig, plus a few other leads (specifically, not managers) meet regularly to make sure manager bloat isn’t creeping in as the headcount has scaled past 1,000. Every six months, ICs score their managers by answering 50 questions about how they’re doing. The culture table will then discuss the results to see whether a team is both meshing well and operating effectively. This system reveals the well-liked manager who doesn’t drive results, and the effective manager who makes everyone miserable. One of @AppliedInt's early employees, @malharhar, took us inside HQ to share what makes the company culture so distinctly "Applied."

When I joined @AppliedInt, back in early 2019, it was just a handful of engineers working above a bar in Sunnyvale. The website didn’t really tell you what we were. We just wanted to build amazing products for the real world, from fighter jets to hundred ton trucks to autonomous vehicles. But we’ve always been really paranoid about losing the special culture we built in the early days to the monotony of corporate scale. Somehow, even as we’ve grown into a thousand+ person company, a lot has stayed the same since (like being in the Manhattan of the Bay, Sunnyvale). And of course, we’re still building amazing products. Continuing from my prior video, we captured the culture that pulled me in all those years ago and how we’ve protected it as we’ve grown in this @firstround Review. These are all questions I’ve been asked about in the last few years from founders of all company sizes so might as well put it in one place. P.S. At the minimum, there’s some awesome photos inside so take a look :)

It’s rare to find a former CTO who’s both technically world-class and a commercial savant. @jgreze is one of the few I’ve worked with who’s both. He’s putting that combo to work building @TownAI with @tonydevincenzi, an insanely talented product thinker and designer. I've known these guys for over a decade, since we all worked together at Dropbox. I met them both my first week. I remember being introduced by @adityaag to a room full of eng directors, including JDG, who immediately asked what made me qualified to be the VP of Product and interrogated my ideas for the product roadmap. From that very first exchange, I could tell he was hyper-intelligent, competitive, and gave zero fucks about offending anyone (founder DNA!!). I liked him immediately. Tony was running the design team at the time, after Dropbox had acquired his startup. Not only was he much better dressed than Jean-Denis, but every product Tony touched across the company was incredibly elegant — combining a designer’s taste with a product-builder’s practicality. Jean-Denis went on to spend seven years as Plaid's CTO. We kept in touch and he eventually joined @firstround's 2024 PMF Method cohort. Meanwhile I'd admire Tony's work from afar — watching him found a product studio that Google acquired and later as he took the stage for the main Google I/O keynote in 2024. Backing them from the very beginning and getting to be an early user of Town has been such a fun, full-circle moment for me. Huge, huge congrats to Jean-Denis, Tony and the whole team on their $55M Series A and more importantly on building a product I now can’t imagine living without.

Back in February, I got early access to @TownAI. Now 93% of @firstround is using it. There was never a top-down mandate — it went viral inside First Round the way great products do. Today, Town announced its $55M Series A. Huge congrats to @jgreze, @tonydevincenzi and the whole team! It’s hard to imagine getting my work done without my Townie “Brock” helping me. Here’s how Town took off at First Round: 1) Most AI assistants want you to come to them. Town comes to you. It learns how you work and then starts working. After connecting email, calendar and Slack, Town gives you a briefing — who you work with most, what’s high priority, your communication style and patterns. Everyone gets a custom version of this. Connect Town to more tools (Granola, Notion, Google Drive, etc.) and it starts drafting perfect emails and nailing investment snapshots. Customization even extends to “Townies,” the names, avatars, and personalities people assign their Town assistants. 2) First Rounders create routines in Town to solve real problems…then share them. Chiefs of staff were nodal users. Town is a glass of water in the desert for them. So much of their work is processing email, filling out updates, checking spreadsheets and gathering context. Town does this natively. Roy Rosin, one of First Round’s board partners, automatically tracks all his follow-ups (“commitments I made to founders”) at the end of each day. We share new routines in a # town-square Slack channel so it’s easy for other people to use the same routines the chiefs or Roy created. 3) Town works for every function — even people who’d never set up Mac minis to get the benefits of using agents. Our finance team saves hours on repetitive work it can now automate. Our marketing team tells me it “essentially replaced Claude and ChatGPT” for them. Without skills or markdown files but with persistent memory, the more you use it, the better Town gets over time. A few specific routines we’re using across First Round 👇

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Today, we’re launching @TownAI: the AI assistant that learns you. We’re coming out of beta with a $55M Series A led by @ARampell at @a16z, with participation from @KirstenGreen at @forerunnervc and continued support from @firstround, @altcap, and @conviction. Right now, getting real value from AI means prompting, configuring, building workflows, managing agents. We think that’s backwards. The future of AI is a companion that already knows you and how you work. Town connects across your inbox, calendar, Slack, docs, messages, and workflows to understand what you need, then starts doing the work with you. Drafting. Scheduling. Project tracking. Follow-ups. Context gathering. Multi-step tasks. And it only acts when you say so. All adapting to your voice, priorities, routines, and relationships over time. Your Townie is the AI assistant you actually need.

When I first unboxed my @Boardisfun at home last fall, it felt both futuristic and nostalgic to watch my kids mesmerized by a beautifully designed tabletop console. We dove in, playing Bloogs, a game that reminded me of old-school Lemmings. Since then it’s become a fixture at playdates and multi-generational game nights and reliably produces squeals of delight from players of all ages. So thrilled for @brynnputnam and the Board team to announce their $20M Series A today, led by @mignano and @usv. I’m excited for Board Studio coming later this year, which will allow anyone to make their own games and experiences for Board using AI. Can only imagine what kinds of wild games my kids will dream up for us to play together.

Michael Mignano @mignano

2 weeks ago

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Today @boardisfun is thrilled to announce our $20M Series A, led by @usv. USV’s newest partner, @mignano, will be joining our board, and we could not be more excited. Joining USV in this round is an amazing group of new investors: @haystackvc, @biz, @elanlee, @eshp, @JesseDorogusker, @kayvz, @scottbelsky, and @tferriss. In addition to our incredible existing investors; @adjacent, @patronfund, @LererHippeau, @BoxGroup, @svangel, @firstround, @kevintwohy, @nabeel, @jduyan, IRL Ventures, @MetrodoraVC, @coalitionvc, and @twelve_below.

One of @firstround's founders is hiring a Founder's Associate -- and it's one of the best front-row seats in tech right now. If you aspire to be a founder one day or are looking to break into tech, this role is one of the fastest ways to learn -- and an opportunity to drive real impact at the 0 to 1 stage. Work with a technical YC founder on AI infrastructure. SF, in-person. Apply here: jobs.ashbyhq.com/firstround/3cb…

There are a small number of elite go to market leaders. Graham Moreno is one of them. He recently joined @p0 to help lead GTM. Before that, he was at Cognition, Grafana, and MongoDB. One of his core philosophies is that a great go to market system raises the floor and introduces predictability while still leaving space for exceptional people to use their judgment to delight the customer. “One of my favorite stories is, one of the best reps I’ve ever worked with, during the pandemic found out that the son of a champion at one of his companies had been taking guitar lessons and couldn’t anymore because of COVID. So he ended up teaching this guy’s kid guitar over Zoom during COVID. And he also didn’t tell anyone. No one found out about this for a long time. Then the champion at this account brought it up on a call with me six months later and was like, ‘Oh yeah, Isaac has been teaching my son how to play guitar.’ At no part in our process does it say, ‘teach someone guitar.’” This is one of my favorite deep dives on what it means to be an executional revenue leader in a post AI world. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Timestamps 00:32 Has the sales playbook changed in the AI era? 02:13 Why "showing up" beats letting the marketplace decide 06:50 Why great salespeople sell to engineers and executives in one motion 11:37 Selling to AI-native buyers who grew up on ChatGPT 13:49 Same seller, different tempo: 8 weeks vs. 8 business days 15:57 How AI-native buyers handle build vs. buy decisions 17:48 The rep who taught a champion's son guitar over Zoom 19:03 Raising the floor without capping the ceiling 22:09 Why too much process narrows the kind of seller you attract 25:46 The three pillars of GTM excellence 31:00 Building peers who are 80% aligned, not 100% 38:03 Whether AI is changing what good enablement looks like 41:35 Selling against direct and implied competitors at once 42:45 Instrumenting the funnel from stage zero to close 45:57 Why post-sales should always roll up to the revenue leader 48:19 The case for outsized commissions 52:02 The 96 hours of panic before Cognition acquired Windsurf 53:04 How far out should a GTM leader be planning? 57:53 What a normal week looks like in hypergrowth

Long before founding Clay, Kareem Amin learned grace under pressure from his mom. One time in high school, he crashed her car. He was scared to tell her. But she just reacted the same way she did any time he came to her with a problem: By being calm and helpful, making him feel like they could fix it. It's a lesson he's carried with him as a founder — because when you're running a company, you want people to feel comfortable bringing you problems, so you can work together to solve them. Beginnings matter.

The world’s oceans span roughly 140 million square miles and carry 80% of global trade, and yet most of that area is effectively unmonitored. All of the existing methods for ocean surveillance fall short: Satellites see broadly but inconsistently, often going dark for hours or days in between snapshots. The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is effective but only works for honest actors, because it’s easy for a vessel that doesn’t want to be seen to turn it off. Fully autonomous vessels exist, but they’re insanely expensive and hard to scale. @SobinNeil has built both the hardware and software needed to tackle the massive scale of this physical-world problem. At Hivemapper, he went deep in hardware, creating a decentralized network of cars by mapping the world block by block. And at Scale AI he learned that any AI solution is only as good as the data it has. He’s applying both lessons with @quartermasterai, which just announced their $43M Series A, co-led by @firstround and @QuietCapital. Instead of building entirely new infrastructure, they’re installing hardware on existing fleets to collect live maritime data, and then feeding that data into a software layer to turn those raw feeds into actionable intelligence. They’ve already covered more than 10 million square miles of ocean, adding 2.8 million square miles in April alone, and they have over 600 active vessels across 25 countries and four continents. Couldn't be prouder to partner with Neil and the Quartermaster team. More on what they're up to below.