First Round

Where “imagine if” gets to work. We've helped 500+ companies (like @NotionHQ, @Roblox, @Uber, @Square) take a straighter path from idea to product-market fit.

[First Round @firstround]

After @tobi published his now-famous AI memo, you probably saw similar posts from other founders and CEOs flood this platform. But most companies are still in the “memos and demos” phase — ambitious plans and mandates, “AI-first” roadmaps on board decks, flashy features and demoware.

Yet scalable implementations and real results remain murky.

So today, we’re launching a brand new publication to close the gap: Applied Intelligence. It aims to share how builders are using AI at their companies and the meaningful impact they’re seeing.

Our inaugural essay is with none other than Shopify, following up on Tobi Lütke’s memo. We learn from VP & Head of Engineering @fnthawar about the non-obvious insights, tactics and workflows Shopify used to bring an ambitious memo to life.

Read the essay below.

[First Round @firstround]

@AppliedInt Full essay here: https://t.co/voCFOTFRM0

[First Round @firstround]

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.

[Brett Berson @brettberson]

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

[Liz Wessel @lizwessel]

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. https://t.co/4F5Q8X5I5h

[Brett Berson @brettberson]

"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

[Liz Wessel @lizwessel]

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.

[First Round @firstround]

@qasar Read here: https://t.co/voCFOTFRM0

[First Round @firstround]

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."

[Malhar Patel @malharhar]

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 :)

[Todd Jackson @tjack]

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.

[Todd Jackson @tjack]

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 👇

[Jean-Denis Greze 💡 @jgreze]

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.

[Hayley Bay Barna @hayleybay]

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.

[Brynn Putnam @BrynnPutnam]

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.

[Josh Kopelman @joshk]

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:

https://t.co/gm6oy75Veq

[Brett Berson @brettberson]

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

[First Round @firstround]

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.

[Bill Trenchard @btrenchard]

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.

[Parag Agrawal @paraga]

We started @p0 based on the belief that AI agents will use the web 1000x more than humans, and we need new tech and business models as a result.

We are already seeing agents scale on our infrastructure, and this is the starting point for a new business model for the web.

[Todd Jackson @tjack]

This may be the AdSense moment for the agentic web.

When @firstround invested in Parallel’s seed, the core thesis was a bet: AI agents would use the web far more than humans ever had, and the infrastructure to support that didn’t exist yet.

Now, Parallel has over 100,000 developers and companies like Harvey, Granola, Modal, Manus, Attio and Profound relying on their APIs daily.

Watching this thesis play out has surfaced a huge problem no one is tackling: if agents are using content from across the web, who gets paid and how do you even calculate that fairly? Until now, the answer has been closed-door licensing deals between the biggest AI labs and biggest publishers.

Today, Parallel is launching Index as a first step toward a scalable, democratic solution.

Humans still own content. They’re the writers, data owners, and publishers whose work those agents depend on to do anything useful. Index gives site owners a dashboard showing how agents are using their content and how much it contributes to the value of the work those agents are doing.

Compensation is tied to contribution — calculated using impressions, citations, uniqueness, and value (tasks with the highest compute spend). All of this is presented transparently. Launch partners show the breadth of scale: from major news outlets like The Atlantic and Fortune, to data providers like PitchBook and ZoomInfo, to independent creators like Packy McCormick and Mario Gabriele.

Proud to keep backing @paraga and the team at @p0.