Richard Alfonsi

Dad & husband. Advisor & Investor. Board Partner @FirstRound. Formerly @Stripe, @Twitter, @Google. Duke basketball zealot. Optimist.

[Richard Alfonsi @ralfonsi]

@dps @hbarra @alcor @ficus @ninaachadjian @jillchase124 Congrats!

[Bill Trenchard @btrenchard]

We’re hiring an investor to join @firstround and work alongside me on every aspect of pre-product market fit investing — from finding extraordinarily talented founders to doing all that we can to support their ambitions as their companies start to take shape.

Partnering with founders at the earliest stages is my life's work. I’m looking for someone who thinks it might be theirs, too.

If you’re a fit for this role, you’re technical and likely in the first few innings of your career. You don't need to have previous investing experience, but it’s also fine if you do.

You may not be certain about your path just yet, but you can at least picture devoting your professional life to becoming an extraordinary partner to pre-product market fit founders.

Here is more on what I’m looking for:

-You don’t see a tradeoff between being technical and commercial. You’re as likely to geek out on the technical aspects of a new AI model, as you are to dig into the details of how ServiceNow became a $183B company.

-You’re an aspiring student of startups and business. That means you’re probably a builder of sorts yourself, and at the very least, embedded in the startup ecosystem. You understand, perhaps from firsthand experience, the challenges of creating something from nothing.

-You tend to be an obsessive type and your happy place is going unreasonably deep on obscure ideas. You see the world in systems, and you pride yourself on an ability to get up to speed on complex topics, fast.

-You’re based in the Bay Area or willing to move.

-You build relationships easily, and you’re always looking to expand your orbit and meet interesting people.

-You’re often one of the first users of new products.

-You’d describe yourself as intensely curious. You’re a “learn-it-all,” not a “know-it-all.” You know when to share what you think you know — and when to listen and learn.

-You have a desire to work outrageously hard. You’d describe yourself as high agency and high ownership. You work all the time — because you love it, not because you are required to. If work-life balance is a priority, this role isn’t for you.

If your motivation is to “lead investments” as soon as you join, this role isn’t a fit. Instead, this is a chance to be an apprentice in the truest sense of the word.

You’d spend your first couple of years at First Round focused on developing your craft by working closely with our team on every aspect of pre-product-market fit investing.

You’d get an inside look at all we’ve learned in the last two decades, while building a long-term career of your own here, too.

The work is demanding and often unglamorous. But you will learn and grow more than in any job you’ve had before. I will partner with you closely every day to make sure that’s true.

If the above sounded like something interesting to you, you can apply by following the link below.

[Brett Berson @brettberson]

I’m kicking off the search for a role on our team @firstround , and I think it's shaping up to be one of the most important additions in a long time.

I’m hiring a VP of Marketing charged with building and running a full-stack marketing team at First Round as we partner with incredible founders to tackle company building firsts. I’m eager to team up with this person to build on what we’ve established and create something new.

If you were to join, you’d be responsible for figuring out the best ways to make sure that as many talented and ambitious builders in tech as possible know about First Round.

I realize that many talented marketers may not be itching to get into VC.

Marketing doesn't seem particularly important to most venture firms. It doesn’t seem creative or entrepreneurial. It’s not a traditional motion, with clearly defined inputs and outputs. It sounds like a gig filled with a series of generic dinners, market maps, press placements and puff pieces for portfolio companies. And it’s generally not seen as the bastion of quality and craftsmanship.

This is not that.

Instead of depending on traditional media and venture capital thought leadership to build our brand, we've spent over a decade cultivating a large audience from the ground up by sharing unique, tactical and extremely high-quality content focused on founders. The cornerstone here is First Round Review and our “In Depth” podcast, which reach hundreds of thousands of people.

Further down our “funnel,” we run programs and community events that founders say stand out in a sea of VC events. Through 5 years of Angel Track, we’ve built a tight-knit community of 400+ exceptional angel investors. And whether it’s customer salons, founder retreats, or our builder unconferences, our painstakingly-designed events always result in attendees walking away with both tactical ideas and a sense of connection.

You’ll have the full support of a leadership team that deeply cares about brand and craft. You’ll get to meet founders on the frontiers of every industry, tackling every kind of challenge.

And in my (admittedly biased) view, you’ll get the rare opportunity where you won’t have the hurdle of starting from scratch, but you’ll still have tons of white space to pioneer, own, and reinvent our approach to marketing — however you see fit.

Here’s what I’m looking for (and yes, I know it’s a bit of a unicorn profile, but I have a hunch that this person is out there):

-You’re unabashedly on the side of startups. You’re often one of the first users of new products. Your favorite kind of stories to dig into are the ones of how tiny companies got big, against the odds. You want to see founders and builders win. Plain and simple, you love startups and have joined one — or better yet, started one yourself — in the past.

-You’re not looking to just run the same marketing playbook. You should have a track record of first-principles problem solving using marketing as a primary tool, versus just running marketing programs. You’re excited to engage and debate the best ways to approach and solve a challenge and generally enjoy pioneering and doing new things.

-You’ve got experience building a marketing engine. You love using data to tackle problems, and you can take disparate programs and products and turn them into a single machine that fits together and produces results.

-You have breadth in all areas of marketing, but depth in a couple of areas such as growth marketing or product marketing. As our friend (and Angel Track alum) @emilykramer says, you’re not a T-shaped but probably a π-shaped marketer — expert in one area and very competent in a few others. Ideally, you’re deep into your career, with 10-15 years of experience.

-You’re as comfortable playing as you are coaching. You have sharp people instincts and you have effectively led teams, but you’re low ego and love diving into the details to execute alongside them.

-You’re an impatient person who biases towards action and finds slowness irritating. Some may describe you as “intense.” You work a lot, not because you have to, but because it’s how you choose to fill your days.  Said another way, you have an unusually high will to win.

-You believe in the importance of quality craftsmanship in your work, almost to a fault. You have a trained eye, refined taste, and you know the importance of holding up high standards to defend a brand.

-You voraciously consume a wide-range of content and take inspiration from both within and outside of tech — from discovering niche Substacks and Reddit threads to carefully curating your “Following” feed on X.

If the above sounded like something you want to dedicate the next chapter of your career to, you can apply by following the link below.

[Ryan Glasgow @ryanglasgow]

🎉 Big news! Today, we’re launching @Sprig 2.0—the next generation of our AI-powered product experience platform! 🚀

With Sprig 2.0, you can ask anything about your product. Sprig AI doesn’t just observe and analyze your user experience—it gives you actionable product recommendations to help you hit your targets. 🎯

Sprig 2.0 leverages AI in three groundbreaking ways so you can deeply understand your user experience at scale to build a better product:

💬 Ask: Ask Sprig AI any question about your product, and it will identify the most relevant experience data to collect from your users and product.

🔍 Observe: Sprig AI observes your users' experience in your product to capture real-time data and uncover insights into their behavior and feedback.

💡 Recommend: Sprig AI analyzes your experience data and recommends specific actions you can take to improve your product.

I’m beyond proud of what our team has accomplished—it’s a huge leap forward for Sprig, and I can’t wait to see how product teams around the world use Sprig 2.0 to create amazing experiences!

Oh, and if you’re in SF, look out for our billboards along Highway 80 and 101, and our bus ads cruising around the city! 🙌

[Bob Moore @robertjmoore]

Excited to share that @Crossbeam and @reveal_platform are merging to form a single network and change GTM forever! https://t.co/00GfLdgBQZ

[Richard Alfonsi @ralfonsi]

@kevinweil @OpenAI @instagram @twitter @planet Huge congrats, Kevin! Love this - really excited for you, and they’re very lucky to have you!! 🎉🎉

[Richard Alfonsi @ralfonsi]

Just listened to this podcast, and it's REALLY good. The discussion between @lennysan & @tjack gives a great overview of the new @firstround framework around product-market fit. Definitely worth a listen if you have any interest in B2B startups!

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Todd Jackson (@tjack) was VP of Product and Design at @Dropbox, Director of Product at @Twitter, Product Lead for @Gmail, PM for @Facebook's Newsfeed, Photos, and Groups, and also the founder of Cover (which he sold to Twitter).

Today, Todd is a partner at @FirstRound Capital, and over the past year, he and his team have analyzed all of their internal data and the journies of the hundreds of startups they’ve worked with to put together a highly actionable framework to help founders find PMF. And it's phenomenal.

In our conversation, we discuss:
🔸 First Round Capital’s four-part PMF framework
🔸 Examples of companies at each level
🔸 How to know if you’re stuck at a level, and how to get unstuck
🔸 What to change when you’re stuck: persona, problem, promise, and product
🔸 The specific goals at each stage of PMF
🔸 The most common pitfalls at each stage
🔸 Much more

[Richard Alfonsi @ralfonsi]

Love how @firstround is focusing on helping founders take a straighter path to product-market fit. We just launched a free new program & published the first session, a super-practical framework with tons of data. Huge congrats to @tjack & the team who brought this to life! 🙌

[Todd Jackson @tjack]

Big @firstround news today!

We’re launching Product-Market Fit Method (a free intensive 14-week experience for early founders building epic B2B SaaS companies) and publishing the first session on our internal framework for all to read (with benchmarks, Looker's real data, and tactical advice from iconic enterprise founders).

Even though finding product-market fit is the single most important thing for a startup, it’s still underexplored and seen as more art than science. We wanted to change that.

I’ve personally talked to hundreds of founders about this topic, digging into what they did in the first 6-9 months of company building. (We’ve published dozens of those interviews on The Review in our “Paths to PMF” series.) This video previews some of what we learned — thanks to @christinacaci, @zachperret, @lloydtabb, @jboehmig, & @jaltma for sharing their lessons!

In addition to that research, we’ve also drawn from our own 20 years of data and 500+ pre-PMF investments. What emerged was a very consistent set of patterns for sales-led B2B companies — the basis for our new framework and PMF Method’s 8 tactical sessions.

In the program, we help early founders discover what customers really want, build the right v1 product, and close their first enterprise sales. We ran a beta version late last year with a tight-knit group of founders (ex Stripe, Plaid, Airbnb, Twitter, Greenhouse, Grammarly) and the feedback was great — my personal favorite was: "I feel like I shaved 12 months off the time it would take us to get to PMF.”

Here are a few key dates and details:

- The Summer 2024 session of PMF Method runs 5/29 - 8/28.
- Application deadline is 11:59 PDT May 7th.
- Any early founder working on a new B2B SaaS company is welcome to apply. Bonus points if you’re technical, have a clear product idea but haven’t raised yet and are <12 months into working full time on your idea.
- PMF Method is 100% free. It costs you $0 and we own 0% of your company.

Like with The First Round Review and Angel Track, our mindset is to openly share knowledge that we’ve put hundreds of hours of work into curating with the broader startup community, and give it away for free. That’s why we’ve also published our framework, so every builder can use this resource, even if they don’t do the program (it’s linked in the next post).

Check out the links below for more details. Can’t wait to read applications!

[First Round @firstround]

There are no words that can adequately capture the profound sadness of the past few days. Our hearts are heavy — and with the people of Israel.

The terrorist attacks by Hamas this past weekend were barbaric, and the loss of innocent lives is utterly devastating. There is no justification for this violence, and we unequivocally stand in support of Israel, its people, and the worldwide Jewish community.

The First Round partnership has already contributed over $500,000 to support charitable organizations focused on humanitarian efforts in Israel.

Am Yisrael Chai.

– The First Round Capital Partnership

[Richard Alfonsi @ralfonsi]

Welcome to First Round, @lizwessel - thrilled to get a chance to work with you!

[Liz Wessel @lizwessel]

Very excited to share that Ive joined @firstround as their newest Partner🎉🎉 After 7 years as an entrepreneur, 6 years as an angel, &amp; then a few batches as Visiting Partner @ YC, joining First Round feels like a dream, and Im so thrilled to join the team: https://t.co/8TluCGwgy2

[Ryan Glasgow @ryanglasgow]

🚀 Today, I’m excited to announce that @Sprig is launching an industry-first capability: AI Analysis for Surveys!

⬇️ @VentureBeat covered the exciting news:
https://t.co/Eto0MrA8MH

✨ In addition, we’re also expanding our Free and Starter plans and publicly announcing new marquee customers: PayPal, Figma, Ramp, Peloton Interactive, and Mixpanel.

[Richard Alfonsi @ralfonsi]

@aunder @jess @Adverbvc Congrats to you both - very exciting!

[Richard Alfonsi @ralfonsi]

@cjc @linear Congrats, Cristina - excited for you and this next chapter!

[Brett Berson @brettberson]

We're thrilled to announce version 2 of @firstround AI Forum. This time it will be all in person in San Francisco.

Last fall we announced an experiment with the idea of bringing together a small group of founders at the earliest stages of exploring new companies predicated on the recent advancements in AI. After hundreds of applications, we chose 6 fantastic founders (who came from places ranging from @OpenAI to @Stripe), including first-time builders and repeat founders.

After 2 months of tactical group discussions with folks sharing their thorniest problems (and hard-won advice), we walked away even more steadfast believers in the power of community to unlock critical discoveries faster. We also left believing that keeping the group extremely small unlocks a ton of value.

With that, we’re thrilled to open up applications for @firstround’s next AI Forum for a new cohort of builders.

You're a good fit for this program if you’re exploring opportunities in applied AI/ML (and its enabling infrastructure) — but don’t yet have a fully-defined product out in the market. Over the course of a few months, a small cohort of early founders will meet weekly to share their blockers and seek tactical advice in a safe, off-the-record environment. You’ll also receive 1:1 support from dedicated members of the First Round team. Weekly in-person group sessions (along with other events) will be held in SF, so applicants need to be based in the Bay Area.

By intentionally keeping AI Forum small, we're proud to offer this program at no cost to remarkable founders, with no expectation that you'll need to raise capital from First Round if you go on to start a company. The aim is for the relationships folks build across these sessions to be just as valuable as the tactical advice they receive from fellow founders in the room. We’re excited to continue building a space where explorers can learn faster than if they were going about it alone.

Apply now (or share with a builder you know): https://t.co/QY2YIJyQ9N

[Richard Alfonsi @ralfonsi]

@JoeF @Electric_AI Congrats, Joe - excited for you and @Electric_AI !!

[Richard Alfonsi @ralfonsi]

I’ve been lucky to work with @chughesjohnson for years at Stripe &amp; Google. She’s one of the best people-first leaders I’ve ever seen - and scaling teams is her superpower. Huge congrats on the book - can’t wait to see it!

[Stripe Press @stripepress]

Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building by @chughesjohnson is a practical guide to building a company’s operating systems and scaling the most important resource a company has: its people.

Available for preorder now: https://t.co/8dsexrOjEB 📈

[Richard Alfonsi @ralfonsi]

Jon Scheyer era off to a solid start in Cameron. Room for a 6th banner in these rafters? Let’s go Duke!! 🏀🏀

[Richard Alfonsi @ralfonsi]

@Julianna 10+ years! Congrats on an epic run, Julianna - hope you take some time to catch your breath!

[Richard Alfonsi @ralfonsi]

Last chance to make your voice heard - our democracy needs you.

VOTE!! ✅✅

[Richard Alfonsi @ralfonsi]

To my Stripe friends: Yesterday was a tough one, for sure. Thinking of the great folks that parted ways with the company, and the massive impact that Stripes past and present are certain to have going forward. I’m here to help any way I can!