Josh Kopelman

Father. Husband. VC. INTJ. Dad Joke Lover. Partner @FirstRound.

[Ivan Burazin @ivanburazin]

As a founder, your number one job is to eat shit.

You're on the call with the upset customer. You need to fire people by telling them directly. You're listening to the engineer who wants to quit due to burnout. You have to read the 40-page vendor contract, which is a nightmare to go through.

Every hard, uncomfortable thing lands on your desk. That's the whole job. You're here to absorb the bad stuff so everyone else can keep moving.

[Josh Kopelman @joshk]

@danprimack Add a “vomitous deal of the week” section to Pro Rata!

[Bill Trenchard @btrenchard]

Over the last decade, we’ve built robots that can run marathons, harvest food, and even dance. But robots still aren’t very good at the simple tasks we use our hands for, like unpacking groceries or tying a shoelace. Most rely on simple grippers that aren’t much better than a claw machine.

Dexterous manipulation has long been one of the hardest unsolved problems in robotics, but humanoid robots need it to be useful in the real world, from warehouses to homes. The traditional approach to training robotic hands involves collecting data through teleoperated robots, but it’s expensive, slow, and unscalable.

@_jaku_xu and @JayLiStanford Li got to know this problem well while building humanoid robots at Tesla, where they had the idea to flip the paradigm: instead of having a human control a robot via teleoperation to train AI, they wanted to get better data from actual human hands.

With @proceptionAI, Jack and Jay have built the hand that robots have been waiting for: ProHand. They worked closely with hand surgeons to get the anatomy right, using the latest hardware breakthroughs like “soft,” skin-like sensors and finger actuation that mimics tendons. When they showed ProHand at Y Combinator Demo Day, everyone kept asking them whether there was a human underneath the table with their hand sticking out.

They’ve also built a data layer with ProGlove, a sensorized glove that humans can wear to collect real motion data to train ProHands �� because the ProHand so closely resembles a human hand, a human can wear the same glove that covers the robotic hand (no robot in the loop required).

Proception is officially shipping ProHand and ProGlove to researchers and robotics companies today. I’m proud that @firstround got to lead their Seed Round, alongside BoxGroup and Y Combinator.

[Lexi Rovner @lexrovner]

We’re launching LV Apex Suite today, our second Apex Suite after AAV. Each new modality adds data on what’s shared, what’s different, and how to engineer production systems in an integrated way. That’s tied to a core view at @64xbio:

Cell lines, reagents, and process aren't separate levers, they're interdependent parts of a single production system. If we want better productivity, quality, and scalability, we need to understand and engineer that system more holistically.

That’s what we’re building toward with CellMap: data-rich experimental maps of production biology that we can learn from computationally, to guide the design of better cell lines and reagents. Biologics are next, and existing suites will keep expanding with additional tools.

With this, we’re also growing our commercial and ops teams. If you’re excited about building next gen biomanufacturing tools, DM me.

Incredibly proud of the team today for all the work behind this launch. Much more to come.

[Josh Kopelman @joshk]

Heartbroken by this news. @om’s kindness, class, and warmth touched everyone who knew him. He will be missed.

[Techmeme @Techmeme]

Om Malik, a longtime technology writer, founder of Gigaom, and a partner at True Ventures, died on Wednesday at 59 (@om / On my Om)

(Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

[Nick @nickrubin]

https://t.co/12BxsGCrmc

[Todd Jackson @tjack]

Back in 2013, when I was starting Cover, I was introduced to @bryantchou. I was so impressed by his technical chops and raw intensity that I tried to hire him as our founding engineer. He politely declined to start his own new company instead, called Webflow.

But we stayed in touch. I followed his journey at Webflow for the next 12 years, watching him flourish as co-founder and CTO — but also the person who ran sales and marketing during the company’s fastest period of growth. He’s one of those rare engineers who understands the product, the customer and business equally.

Today, Bryant is launching Ploy (@ployai), and @firstround is proud to be backing it alongside Y Combinator.

Most marketing teams spend more time on operations than creative execution. Bryant felt this pain acutely at Webflow, which some marketers call “measureship” — stitching tools together, building dashboards, chasing attribution. So much of the craft of marketing gets buried in this overhead.

Ploy is a marketing platform that treats your website as the hub and all your growth channels as spokes. Agents handle the work end-to-end: designing pages, writing copy and running campaigns. It creates a loop that brings your static website to life, learning from traffic and acting on signals in real time.

As agents browse on behalf of users and LLMs summarize your content, your website is the source of truth they pull from. It matters more in the AI era, not less.

Hex is already using Ploy for account-based marketing, scaling the creation of personalized landing pages without waiting on engineering. Clay uses Ploy to run programmatic SEO, turning one-off builds into a content engine.

Congrats to Bryant and the whole Ploy team. Insanely excited to see where this goes.

[Josh Kopelman @joshk]

No AI tax needed. Graduate corporate tax rates based on the ratio of profits to payroll. A firm earning $1B with $500M in payroll shouldn't pay the same tax rate as one earning $1B with $5M in payroll. If profits decouple from labor, corporate tax rates should adjust accordingly.

[Liz Wessel @lizwessel]

Founders: what is one piece of tactical advice (I'm not talking "try hard" or "don't give up"... i mean a small, simple, tactical piece of advice) that can make a founder's life easier, even just slightly?

I'll give a few popular examples:

[Todd Jackson @tjack]

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!

[Nate Dalva @dalvabaird]

Human biology matters. Scientists and AI need human data to understand health and disease.

Crownlands is open sourcing Gateway 4M, the largest single-cell tissue dataset ever released from living humans, to advance research on brain aging and neurodegeneration.

[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

[Liz Wessel @lizwessel]

This has to be a top 3 most memorable startup video I’ve seen…

[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.

[Josh Kopelman @joshk]

In just a few months @TownAI has transformed how I (and most of @firstrouhd) get work done.

Congrats to the entire Town team on their $55M Series A!

[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 👇

[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

[Josh Kopelman @joshk]

Watch @CNN take a test flight on @MerlinAero's autonomous plane. The plane's AI pilot controls the plane from takeoff to landing -- and responds over the radio to air traffic controllers.

[Josh Kopelman @joshk]

@brettberson

[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

[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.