Emily Ann Stanford

Content @notablecap
Formerly @firstround

[Chelcie Taylor @chelcietay]

Really enjoyed teaming up with @vercel for our AI Design Night!

Our presenter lineup was amazing. Huge thanks to @andymadrick @yescynfria @pablostanley @thisiscsim for the live demos and to our packed audience for the great vibes.

Let's do it again! If you're a designer who loves experimenting with AI and wants to show off your latest project, DM me and we can get you on the list for our next design night.

cc: @notablecap

[Notable Capital @notablecap]

"I don't blame people for thinking it's all hype. Because truth be told, it's 95% hype. But that 5% is improving faster than any technology ever before."

Flo Crivello (@Altimor) on what people get wrong when they talk about AI hype: https://t.co/afqpkzDKsd

[Emily Ann Stanford @emannstan]

@glennsolomon @Altimor @getlindy What a great guest! Excited to listen

[Emily Ann Stanford @emannstan]

@notablecap @Altimor @Lindy @glennsolomon Great first guest!

[Notable Capital @notablecap]

Congratulations to @fal on its $140M Series D!

3 rounds in ten months tells you everything about the size of the generative media opportunity fal is capturing and just how relentlessly this team executes with @burkaygur & @gorkem at the helm.

[Tanay Kothari @tankots]

1000 posts from loving customers got us trending #1 on twitter😍

you guys ❤️❤️❤️

[Tanay Kothari @tankots]

we just raised another $25M after 10x'ing our ARR in 5 months. the crazy part is this almost never happened.

17 years ago, I watched Iron Man as a 10-year-old kid in Delhi. that night, I pulled my first all-nighter teaching myself to code. not because I wanted to build apps or make money.

because I wanted to build Jarvis.

my parents gave me 1 hour of screen time per day. so I coded in secret, sleeping every alternate night through middle school and high school. built 50+ apps. got a cease and desist from Google at age 12.

all for this one obsession: making computers understand us like humans do.

fast forward to today:

- we've raised $81M total to build the voice operating system
- growing revenue 40% month-over-month this year
- 70% user retention after one year (unheard of in consumer)
- teams at 270 of the Fortune 500 use Wispr Flow daily

our Series A2 was led by @hanstung at @notablecap (who was an early investor in five companies that made it to $100B valuation like Slack, Tiktok, and Airbnb). we also brought on @StevenBartlett as an investor and partner.

but here's what matters more than the money:

we cracked voice input. not transcription - actual understanding. our users hit "send" in under 0.5 seconds without checking. they trust it blindly. that's never existed before.

in a recent benchmark, Wispr came out as 3-4x more accurate than OpenAI, ElevenLabs, and Siri.

and we're just getting started. voice input was step one. now we're building the assistant that actually does things for you.

to my co-founder @SahajGarg6 - there's no one else I'd rather build Jarvis with than my college roommate and closest friend.

to our team pulling all-nighters and shipping magic - you're the reason that 10-year-old kid's dream is becoming real.

we're hiring cracked engineers and growth marketers who want to build the future of human-computer interaction.

the keyboard had a good 150-year run.

time to build what comes next.

PS: like, retweet, and bookmark to get wispr flow for free for 3 months ❤️

— Written with @WisprFlow

[Notable Capital @notablecap]

The internet wasn't built for AI agents. But billions are coming online anyway.

How can we tell the good bots from the bad ones?

@rarescrisan dove deep into the new digital arms race & the emerging solutions to the internet's bot identity crisis

https://t.co/Jj8pwX0nQM

[Meka Asonye @BigMekaStyle]

Your ICP can’t be “anyone with a budget.”

It should be so narrow that when you describe who your product’s for, your friends think you’re kinda crazy for building something so niche.

And in my view, defining a radically specific ICP is one of the most overlooked steps in going from 0 to your first few million in ARR.

So I just dropped a new article in the 0-$5M series exploring exactly how now-massively successful startups found their initial ICP. (Spoiler alert: Most of them started way off the mark before pivoting to the right buyer.)

You’ll learn directly from:
-@christinacaci, founder of Vanta
-@kareemamin, founder of Clay
-David Hsu, founder of Retool
-@waseem, founder of Pilot
-@bryantchou, founder of Webflow
-@ericberg, former CPO of Okta
-@hpalan, founder of Productboard
-Mike Molinet, founder of Branch

[Celine Halioua @celinehalioua]

feeling self conscious about my love of em-dashes

[Matthew Zeitlin @MattZeitlin]

Jeff is if anything underselling this

[Josh Kopelman @joshk]

Most founders go through an invention phase and then an execution phase. The best founders never stop inventing -- and @celinehalioua is world class at this. @loyalfordogs is a complex business with a big ambition: “Imagine if” we had more time with the dogs we love.

Celine mapped every scenario, milestone, and contingency on the path to making that possible, and while there’s still more road to travel, she’s gotten further than anyone ever has (securing the FDA's first- and second-ever acceptances that a drug could extend lifespan).

There wasn’t much advice for her to pull from, so she’s had to come up with her own frameworks along the way. Today on the @firstround Review she shares the deep tech company playbook she wishes she had when she was first starting out.

Article below.

[First Round @firstround]

17,784 hours.

That’s exactly how long CEO @samcorcos has spent on @levels since founding the startup 5 years ago.

Today on the Review, he shares an ultra-detailed and minute-by-minute breakdown into where that time went.

[Emily Ann Stanford @emannstan]

@SamODonnell22 @ForerunnerVC not nearly enough bowls or bananas

[Emily Ann Stanford @emannstan]

It's been months in the making & we sat down with an epic group of founders & first startup sales hires to find out exactly how they've managed to build their GTM motion from scratch.

The 1st article in the 0-$5M series is all about founder-led sales.

https://t.co/HvEHjezc7W

[Emily Ann Stanford @emannstan]

Flashy growth curves with startups sprinting past millions in ARR might go viral on X, but they don't tell the whole story. Building a commercial engine that compounds over time is usually a lot less glamorous.

That's what our new series with @BigMekaStyle is all about.

[Meka Asonye @BigMekaStyle]

The basic blocking and tackling of early GTM still matters, even (especially) in the AI era.

That’s why I’m pumped to put my years in the GTM trenches to use in a new series launching today on the @firstround Review, called 0-$5M. I spent months sitting down with an epic group of founders and early revenue leaders to dive really deep into the commercial side of early-stage startups, and what it takes to cross the threshold of that first few million in ARR.

Each month, we’ll publish a new installment on GTM topics that I’ve seen all sorts of founders grapple with, along with hard-won advice from folks who have been in those shoes before. Think of it as the early GTM brain trust you wish you had on speed dial.

First up in the series: how to nail founder-led sales. Here’s the stacked group you’ll hear from:

-Mike Molinet, founder of @branchmetrics ($100M+ in ARR) and now @thenaplatform
-Sam Taylor, first enterprise sales rep @dropbox, also GTM leader at @quip, @loom
-@martabralic, founder/CEO of @pomelocare, early at @flatironhealth
-@laskerer, one of the first sales hires at @stripe, now CRO at @VardaSpace
-@alexa_grabell, founder/CEO of @getpocus

These aren't your typical LinkedIn bro tips about "crushing your number.” These are proven tactics that worked, focused on laying a sound commercial foundation.

[Emily Ann Stanford @emannstan]

This piece is EPIC (and @jessicraige is being very generous with the word "we" here). It's an editorial feat that was truly a sight to behold how it all came together — and the startup community is all the better for it as these lessons from @evolution_iq are shared more widely.

[First Round @firstround]

Most acquisition stories just skim the surface. So when @evolution_iq announced its $730M acquisition in December, marking one of the first major vertical AI exits, we did what we do best on The Review: We went deep.

11K+ words, 45-pages deep. We spent weeks interviewing founders @tvykruta, Mike Saltzman, and Jonathan Lewin right after the acquisition, digging through @btrenchard’s 2019 investment notes, and unpacking every decision that shaped EvolutionIQ’s path to PMF.

The result is one of our most detailed breakdowns in our 10+ years of publishing. Inside the essay, you’ll find out how they:

🔹Built in a small market (~150 buyers)
🔹Eventually got first design partner data set
🔹Built trust with frontline adjusters & CIOs
🔹Pulled off a premium pricing strategy
🔹Navigated 12+ months-long sales cycles
🔹Sold into majority of carriers w/ 6 sales folks
🔹Built an elite early ML team

It’s a detailed examination of exactly how they built an enduring AI business — and a must-read for AI founders attempting to do the very same thing today. More below.

[Emily Ann Stanford @emannstan]

There’s no shortage of advice for transitioning into eng management, but there’s much less for the flip side: pivoting back to IC. That's why this @firstround Review article w/ @dloft is such a gem.

This 90-day plan help EMs return to their coding roots. https://t.co/cLkmVTwSkf

[Mihika Kapoor @mihikapoor]

Had a blast sharing the BTS story of @figma Slides! 🛝

Taking this project from hackathon project to Config was both so challenging & incredibly rewarding. And one of the most fun parts was making “flides” go internally viral 📈

Ty to @firstround for capturing the story!

❤️