Can’t find DGX Sparks in stock, so my AI bot is building a voice agent to call and track some down. AI building AI to find compute for more AI.
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Bill Trenchard
@btrenchard
First Round
First RoundPartner at First Round Capital
8.7KFollowers
782Following
1.1KPosts
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Just four months since we co-led their Series A, @quartermasterai has grown its coverage by 77% and raised a preemptive $100M Series B from @insightpartners. Even for a software company, this pace would be very impressive, but @SobinNeil is doing it with hardware, out at sea, in incredibly volatile geopolitical conditions.
Neil started Quartermaster with a simple premise: the only sensing network that can actually scale to the ocean is the one that's already on the ocean.
This team is moving quickly, putting their SmartMast product on 650 working vessels from 25 countries. It very cleverly combines HD video, AI, radar, RF sensing, and AIS to turn working vessels already on the water into a live sensor network for the ocean’s surface.
This increased visibility helps mariners of all types navigate congested waters and busy ports, avoid potential hazards, and call for help in an emergency.
It also comes with tremendous built-in network effects that only become more valuable as they scale up. Neil has gone unreasonably deep on how all these different pieces of the business fit together, and we are so fortunate to be his partner here @firstround.
Neil started Quartermaster with a simple premise: the only sensing network that can actually scale to the ocean is the one that's already on the ocean.
This team is moving quickly, putting their SmartMast product on 650 working vessels from 25 countries. It very cleverly combines HD video, AI, radar, RF sensing, and AIS to turn working vessels already on the water into a live sensor network for the ocean’s surface.
This increased visibility helps mariners of all types navigate congested waters and busy ports, avoid potential hazards, and call for help in an emergency.
It also comes with tremendous built-in network effects that only become more valuable as they scale up. Neil has gone unreasonably deep on how all these different pieces of the business fit together, and we are so fortunate to be his partner here @firstround.
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More aspiring founders should go into sales. Very few start their careers carrying a quota and talking to customers, even though that’s most of what building is in the beginning. And while AI is able to take on more of the mechanics of selling, being exceptional at the human craft will matter more than ever before.
We’re launching the @firstround Sales Combine today to help more folks get their start in sales. It’s completely free and there’s no previous experience required. After two days of training, we’ll introduce graduates to companies like @NotionHQ, @fal, @togethercompute, @p0, @clay, @omni, @VerkadaHQ, @RilletHQ, @getserval and many others.
Apply by 10/3: firstround.com/sales-combine
We’re launching the @firstround Sales Combine today to help more folks get their start in sales. It’s completely free and there’s no previous experience required. After two days of training, we’ll introduce graduates to companies like @NotionHQ, @fal, @togethercompute, @p0, @clay, @omni, @VerkadaHQ, @RilletHQ, @getserval and many others.
Apply by 10/3: firstround.com/sales-combine
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When @firstround led @RilletHQ 's seed, @nicckopp was signing up for one of the harder builds in software: a new ERP, from scratch. The kind of long, multi-year grind that scares off most founders and most investors.
Today, Rillet just announced their $100M Series C at a $1B valuation - the company's third round in about a year, and its first as a unicorn.
The pace tells the story. Rillet doubled new ARR again heading into this raise, crossed 600 customers, and is now ripping legacy systems like NetSuite, SAP, and Oracle out of finance teams that had long treated their ERP as untouchable.
Couldn’t be more excited for the entire Rillet team on this milestone and for everything that’s ahead!
Today, Rillet just announced their $100M Series C at a $1B valuation - the company's third round in about a year, and its first as a unicorn.
The pace tells the story. Rillet doubled new ARR again heading into this raise, crossed 600 customers, and is now ripping legacy systems like NetSuite, SAP, and Oracle out of finance teams that had long treated their ERP as untouchable.
Couldn’t be more excited for the entire Rillet team on this milestone and for everything that’s ahead!
Nicolas Kopp@nicckopp · Aug 18Today we're announcing our $100M Series C at a $1B valuation, led by @ICONIQCapital. It's our third round in 14 months and brings our total funding to over $200m
The round came together in less than 48 hours.
We weren't planning to raise. Then new ARR doubled last quarter and we crossed 600+ customers including public companies and enterprises with $2B in revenue. Rillet AI agent usage is growing 70% each month and CFOs are replacing Oracle Fusion, SAP and Workday to run their companies on Rillet.
We also announced our alliance with EY and officially partnered with more than half of the top 20 CPA firms.
@RilletHQ is creating an entirely new category of finance infrastructure. With Rillet, the ERP becomes the harness for the modern finance organization, where people and agents share the same financial data, apply the same accounting policies and controls, and work from a single, continuously updated view of the business. Agents perform increasingly complex financial work, while finance teams retain visibility, approval authority and a complete audit trail.
Thank you to our customers for believing in the mission and building the future of finance with us. We could not do this without you.
Thank you to the Rillet team. As I say often, building Rillet is our own version of sending rockets to Mars. It is incredibly difficult. You make it look easy.
Finally, thank you to our investors. To ICONIQ for leading the round and to our existing and new investors for building with us. @sequoia , @a16z, Sequoia Global Equities, @BainCapVC, @oakhcft, @BatteryVentures, @FirstMarkCap, @scalevp, and @creandum.
Back to work :)
The round came together in less than 48 hours.
We weren't planning to raise. Then new ARR doubled last quarter and we crossed 600+ customers including public companies and enterprises with $2B in revenue. Rillet AI agent usage is growing 70% each month and CFOs are replacing Oracle Fusion, SAP and Workday to run their companies on Rillet.
We also announced our alliance with EY and officially partnered with more than half of the top 20 CPA firms.
@RilletHQ is creating an entirely new category of finance infrastructure. With Rillet, the ERP becomes the harness for the modern finance organization, where people and agents share the same financial data, apply the same accounting policies and controls, and work from a single, continuously updated view of the business. Agents perform increasingly complex financial work, while finance teams retain visibility, approval authority and a complete audit trail.
Thank you to our customers for believing in the mission and building the future of finance with us. We could not do this without you.
Thank you to the Rillet team. As I say often, building Rillet is our own version of sending rockets to Mars. It is incredibly difficult. You make it look easy.
Finally, thank you to our investors. To ICONIQ for leading the round and to our existing and new investors for building with us. @sequoia , @a16z, Sequoia Global Equities, @BainCapVC, @oakhcft, @BatteryVentures, @FirstMarkCap, @scalevp, and @creandum.
Back to work :)
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When the entire satellite industry was building smaller satellites, @KaranKunjur and @neelkunjur of @K2SpaceCo did the opposite — built bigger. The thesis has already translated into $500M in signed contracts from government and commercial customers.
Their contrarian bet became real when they launched Gravitas, one of the highest-power spacecraft ever built.
This is the story of how Karan, Neel and the whole K2 team made it happen.
Their contrarian bet became real when they launched Gravitas, one of the highest-power spacecraft ever built.
This is the story of how Karan, Neel and the whole K2 team made it happen.
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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.
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.
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We love @TownAI @firstround! Amazing to see the viral growth inside our firm (special thanks to my townie, Orion, for all the help every day 😀). Congrats to @jgreze @tonydevincenzi and the entire team @TownAI on the Series A!!
Todd Jackson@tjack · Jun 3Back 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 👇
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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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.
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.
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Beginnings matter.
My mom quit smoking in her early thirties and became a marathoner, and then an ultramarathoner (50-100 mile races). This was practically unheard of in the 80s — ultras are only something we’ve accepted recently as something human bodies can do.
I went to all of her races. Often fewer than 100 people ran them. I cheered her on as she’d run up to 24 hours straight, usually laps around a boring track or stadium, watching her push through pain most people will never experience to reach the finish.
It taught me in a very visceral way that we’ve all got more fuel in our tanks than we think.
This June will mark 9 years since my mom passed. But I try to honor her perseverance in the work I do every day. At @firstround, I’m lucky to work with founders who share that same grit, so I try to pay some of her dedication back in kind.
We put together a special video to honor all the big and small ways moms’ fingerprints touch everything these founders have built.
My mom quit smoking in her early thirties and became a marathoner, and then an ultramarathoner (50-100 mile races). This was practically unheard of in the 80s — ultras are only something we’ve accepted recently as something human bodies can do.
I went to all of her races. Often fewer than 100 people ran them. I cheered her on as she’d run up to 24 hours straight, usually laps around a boring track or stadium, watching her push through pain most people will never experience to reach the finish.
It taught me in a very visceral way that we’ve all got more fuel in our tanks than we think.
This June will mark 9 years since my mom passed. But I try to honor her perseverance in the work I do every day. At @firstround, I’m lucky to work with founders who share that same grit, so I try to pay some of her dedication back in kind.
We put together a special video to honor all the big and small ways moms’ fingerprints touch everything these founders have built.
Liz Wessel@lizwessel · May 10Beginnings Matter.
Behind so many founders are the moms who first shaped them. Happy Mother’s Day.
Behind so many founders are the moms who first shaped them. Happy Mother’s Day.
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Putting better AI tools into the hands of firms still operating the same way, with the same incentive structure, isn’t the solution that many think it is. The billable hour has been the default for decades and decades. Lawyers spend roughly two-thirds of their day on admin and coordination rather than actual legal work, and billing rates keep climbing.
@mishindan1 is a repeat founder and an immigrant, so he’s experienced the cost, opacity, delays, and intricacies of the legal system directly as he stressed over his own immigration status while building multiple venture-backed companies.
Rather than arming existing firms with better software, his bet was to build a completely new kind of firm from the ground up: @ManifestLaw_, powered by @manifest_os — pairing AI-driven workflows with fixed-fee, outcomes-based pricing to make sure the incentives line up.
They started in corporate immigration, where the status quo is especially painful, as Dan knows all too well, and now they’re expanding globally. Manifest has had over 3,000 client engagements ranging from startup founders to some of the largest technology companies in the world.
Proud to be early backers of Dan and the Manifest team at @firstround as they celebrate their Series A today.
@mishindan1 is a repeat founder and an immigrant, so he’s experienced the cost, opacity, delays, and intricacies of the legal system directly as he stressed over his own immigration status while building multiple venture-backed companies.
Rather than arming existing firms with better software, his bet was to build a completely new kind of firm from the ground up: @ManifestLaw_, powered by @manifest_os — pairing AI-driven workflows with fixed-fee, outcomes-based pricing to make sure the incentives line up.
They started in corporate immigration, where the status quo is especially painful, as Dan knows all too well, and now they’re expanding globally. Manifest has had over 3,000 client engagements ranging from startup founders to some of the largest technology companies in the world.
Proud to be early backers of Dan and the Manifest team at @firstround as they celebrate their Series A today.
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Huge congrats to the @K2SpaceCo team on achieving Tier 1 success with their Gravitas mission!
Neel Kunjur@neelkunjur · Mar 31I'm excited to announce we have achieved our Tier 1 mission success criteria and have begun gathering a tremendous amount of data on how this brand new spacecraft performs.
On March 30th, 13:17:08Z, the Gravitas spacecraft separated from the SpaceX Transporter-16 stack to begin its mission as one of the highest power free-flying satellites ever launched.
Immediately after separation, the spacecraft autonomously:
- Executed detumbling maneuvers
- Established two-way communications with the ground (on our very first ground station pass)
- Deployed its 20kW solar arrays
- Slewed to a safe and stable attitude to await further ground commands
These actions alone are a testament to the incredible work of our in-house engineering, software, and GNC teams to build a robust spacecraft.
Since then, our operations team completed all initial system activations and checkouts, confirming the vehicle is in a power positive and thermally stable state with no major anomalies observed at this time.
We completed this phase of the mission ahead of schedule. Next up we will be powering up and downlinking data for all payloads aboard the Gravitas spacecraft in support of our customers and partners while continuing to put the spacecraft through its paces.
As we noted ahead of launch: The goal of this mission is to experiment and push our systems to the limit to inform future missions. I look forward to sharing more on our successes and challenges as the mission proceeds.
Video of our satellite below; link to full T-16 webcast: x.com/SpaceX/status/…
On March 30th, 13:17:08Z, the Gravitas spacecraft separated from the SpaceX Transporter-16 stack to begin its mission as one of the highest power free-flying satellites ever launched.
Immediately after separation, the spacecraft autonomously:
- Executed detumbling maneuvers
- Established two-way communications with the ground (on our very first ground station pass)
- Deployed its 20kW solar arrays
- Slewed to a safe and stable attitude to await further ground commands
These actions alone are a testament to the incredible work of our in-house engineering, software, and GNC teams to build a robust spacecraft.
Since then, our operations team completed all initial system activations and checkouts, confirming the vehicle is in a power positive and thermally stable state with no major anomalies observed at this time.
We completed this phase of the mission ahead of schedule. Next up we will be powering up and downlinking data for all payloads aboard the Gravitas spacecraft in support of our customers and partners while continuing to put the spacecraft through its paces.
As we noted ahead of launch: The goal of this mission is to experiment and push our systems to the limit to inform future missions. I look forward to sharing more on our successes and challenges as the mission proceeds.
Video of our satellite below; link to full T-16 webcast: x.com/SpaceX/status/…
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When I was a CEO, learning how to be a great executive while also growing super fast was the most important, but also under resourced and hardest thing for me and my team to learn. This is why I'm super excited by Executive Function, which focuses directly on how some of the best startups do this 👇
Brett Berson@brettberson · Feb 3At hypergrowth companies like Vercel, Harvey, and Cognition, executives face a brutal challenge: keeping pace with a company that might grow 5-10x in a year. That means hiring aggressively without lowering the bar, figuring out how to mature the org without slowing down, operating at different altitudes, solving novel problems, and much more. Their role changes quarter to quarter, and the margin for error is razor thin.
I'm really excited to launch our newest podcast, Executive Function, which explores a simple question: what is the difference between a good and truly great scaleup executive? We learn what these exceptional execs are doing differently, how they approach their work, how they make decisions, and how they make a difference for their companies.
The first episode drops later this week. Learn more at: review.firstround.com/executive-func…
I'm really excited to launch our newest podcast, Executive Function, which explores a simple question: what is the difference between a good and truly great scaleup executive? We learn what these exceptional execs are doing differently, how they approach their work, how they make decisions, and how they make a difference for their companies.
The first episode drops later this week. Learn more at: review.firstround.com/executive-func…
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Calendar invite spam is an escalation we didn’t need. Hard to believe it works at all.
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Meeting and working with @joshk was career-defining for me, now someone has an incredible chance to learn and invest alongside him at @firstround. If you're obsessed with early-stage founders and ready for a transformative experience, check this out 👇
Josh Kopelman@joshk · Jan 8In 20+ years of building @firstround, I’ve never hired for this specific role before.
I’m kicking off a search to hire an Investor who will work directly alongside me. They will share my obsession to meet with the highest potential founders as early as possible, often before they even have a clear “imagine if” yet.
Although the role itself is still being defined, my commitment is to work closely with this person to help them build the foundation of their investing career.
Here’s what’s probably true about you if you’re the right fit:
- You’re enthusiastic and obsessive. Following your curiosity has taken you down often weird and winding paths.
- You already know a lot of brilliant builders — and more importantly, they enjoy spending time with you. You have a unique ability to generate followership, likely because you give more than you take.
- You actually enjoy the work of building relationships from scratch: the cold emails, the endless events, the persistent follow-ups, the months of coffee chats. It requires relentless execution, and that excites you. You go about this work in an authentic way that isn’t conventional “networking.” If you’re looking for a role where the title does all the heavy lifting for you, this isn’t it.
- You don’t find it difficult to put unreasonable hours into your work because it doesn’t feel like work to you. You’d call yourself a “work enthusiast.”
- You’ve been immersed in the startup world long enough to have real context. What matters most is you’ve been close enough to startups to understand how they actually work and what great looks like.
- You obsess over markets, customers, and why some businesses work while others don’t, but you can also hang when a conversation goes deep into technical choices.
- You’re an exceptional communicator who tends to be more of a “simplifier” than a “complexifier.”
- We’ll work together incredibly closely, but you aren’t someone who needs to be managed. You learn best by watching, by doing, by asking well-calibrated questions — preferring to “take the wheel” instead of being a passenger. You’d rather shape a role than fill one.
If you want to spend your time with builders at the very beginning — and learn this craft of early-stage investing alongside someone who’s been at it for two decades and still thinks it’s the best job in the world — I’d love to meet you.
SF or NYC only, with long days and lots of travel in both directions. Apply below.
jobs.ashbyhq.com/firstround/4f2…
Open quoted post →I’m kicking off a search to hire an Investor who will work directly alongside me. They will share my obsession to meet with the highest potential founders as early as possible, often before they even have a clear “imagine if” yet.
Although the role itself is still being defined, my commitment is to work closely with this person to help them build the foundation of their investing career.
Here’s what’s probably true about you if you’re the right fit:
- You’re enthusiastic and obsessive. Following your curiosity has taken you down often weird and winding paths.
- You already know a lot of brilliant builders — and more importantly, they enjoy spending time with you. You have a unique ability to generate followership, likely because you give more than you take.
- You actually enjoy the work of building relationships from scratch: the cold emails, the endless events, the persistent follow-ups, the months of coffee chats. It requires relentless execution, and that excites you. You go about this work in an authentic way that isn’t conventional “networking.” If you’re looking for a role where the title does all the heavy lifting for you, this isn’t it.
- You don’t find it difficult to put unreasonable hours into your work because it doesn’t feel like work to you. You’d call yourself a “work enthusiast.”
- You’ve been immersed in the startup world long enough to have real context. What matters most is you’ve been close enough to startups to understand how they actually work and what great looks like.
- You obsess over markets, customers, and why some businesses work while others don’t, but you can also hang when a conversation goes deep into technical choices.
- You’re an exceptional communicator who tends to be more of a “simplifier” than a “complexifier.”
- We’ll work together incredibly closely, but you aren’t someone who needs to be managed. You learn best by watching, by doing, by asking well-calibrated questions — preferring to “take the wheel” instead of being a passenger. You’d rather shape a role than fill one.
If you want to spend your time with builders at the very beginning — and learn this craft of early-stage investing alongside someone who’s been at it for two decades and still thinks it’s the best job in the world — I’d love to meet you.
SF or NYC only, with long days and lots of travel in both directions. Apply below.
jobs.ashbyhq.com/firstround/4f2…
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Huge congrats to @srikanthatcache and the team @usecache on hitting $1B+ in Assets in record time!!
Srikanth Narayan@srikanthatcache · Dec 18, 2025“It can’t be done. Too many have tried and failed.”
“Dead on arrival. I haven’t used one in decades.”
“You’re starting a what?”
“Are there even a hundred people who have a ‘concentrated portfolio’?”
This is what I heard from the largest wealth managers and RIAs in the country when I first floated the idea of building a modern exchange fund.
In 2022, I realized that many Americans were becoming more concentrated, driven by the growing trend of stock-based compensation and a historic bull-market run. Yet tax-efficient investing was limited to a small set of clients.
I saw this as a massive opportunity.
For decades, exchange funds had been a duopoly. And like most markets without competition, progress had slowed. It felt like a product from the 80s that hadn’t even met the internet. Minimums, fees, and the barriers were high.
We believed that it didn’t have to be true.
So we set out to build what many said couldn't be done: a modern exchange fund that was transparent, accessible, and efficient.
Just twenty months after launch, the market has spoken.
Cache recently crossed $1B in assets, likely one of the fastest to reach this milestone among digital investment platforms.
But this milestone isn’t about speed. It’s about a shift in who gets access to tax-efficient investing. The walls have been broken. This category no longer feels like a closed room with a velvet rope.
In 2025 alone, we grew approximately 4×. Our flagship exchange funds delivered performance in line with our goals. For example, UNIX achieved a ~0.99 correlation through our Index Sync approach.
We're grateful to the clients who trusted us early—and to the incredibly talented team that brought this vision to life.
Here’s to 2026, and here’s to building what the experts said cannot be done!
#wealthmanagement #personalfinance #financialplanning #concentratedstock
“Dead on arrival. I haven’t used one in decades.”
“You’re starting a what?”
“Are there even a hundred people who have a ‘concentrated portfolio’?”
This is what I heard from the largest wealth managers and RIAs in the country when I first floated the idea of building a modern exchange fund.
In 2022, I realized that many Americans were becoming more concentrated, driven by the growing trend of stock-based compensation and a historic bull-market run. Yet tax-efficient investing was limited to a small set of clients.
I saw this as a massive opportunity.
For decades, exchange funds had been a duopoly. And like most markets without competition, progress had slowed. It felt like a product from the 80s that hadn’t even met the internet. Minimums, fees, and the barriers were high.
We believed that it didn’t have to be true.
So we set out to build what many said couldn't be done: a modern exchange fund that was transparent, accessible, and efficient.
Just twenty months after launch, the market has spoken.
Cache recently crossed $1B in assets, likely one of the fastest to reach this milestone among digital investment platforms.
But this milestone isn’t about speed. It’s about a shift in who gets access to tax-efficient investing. The walls have been broken. This category no longer feels like a closed room with a velvet rope.
In 2025 alone, we grew approximately 4×. Our flagship exchange funds delivered performance in line with our goals. For example, UNIX achieved a ~0.99 correlation through our Index Sync approach.
We're grateful to the clients who trusted us early—and to the incredibly talented team that brought this vision to life.
Here’s to 2026, and here’s to building what the experts said cannot be done!
#wealthmanagement #personalfinance #financialplanning #concentratedstock
Open quoted post →
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In just 90 days since their Series A, @getserval has grown revenue by 500%, tripled headcount, and raised another round at a $1B valuation. This team is moving at a pace I’ve rarely seen in all my years @firstround.
I've known @jakeserval since his product building years at Verkada, so it’s been a special privilege to partner closely with him and the team right from the very beginning of Serval’s journey.
IMO, it’s the customer love that’s driving this wild momentum. Companies like Perplexity, Mercor, Clay, and Together AI are now able to automate 50%+ of IT tickets with zero human touch, something that would have been unthinkable just a year or two ago.
And Serval’s already catching on beyond IT, with HR using the platform to automate onboarding, finance rebuilding procurement, and legal spinning up NDAs straight from Slack.
Very proud of this team, and very much looking forward to what the next 90 days will bring.
I've known @jakeserval since his product building years at Verkada, so it’s been a special privilege to partner closely with him and the team right from the very beginning of Serval’s journey.
IMO, it’s the customer love that’s driving this wild momentum. Companies like Perplexity, Mercor, Clay, and Together AI are now able to automate 50%+ of IT tickets with zero human touch, something that would have been unthinkable just a year or two ago.
And Serval’s already catching on beyond IT, with HR using the platform to automate onboarding, finance rebuilding procurement, and legal spinning up NDAs straight from Slack.
Very proud of this team, and very much looking forward to what the next 90 days will bring.
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If I had to pick one founder every early-stage builder should study, Filip Kaliszan would be near the top of the list. He’s not on X, he rarely gives interviews, and @VerkadaHQ doesn’t really chase headlines.
But I’ve learned a great deal from him ever since we first partnered together, all the way back to his first company in 2008, and again in 2017 when @firstround was lucky enough to lead Verkada’s seed.
When the Verkada team first started out, you could buy high-end cameras with cloud-based software to protect your home, but options were lacking and outdated in enterprise.
Just under a decade later, they’ve hit 30K+ customers, $1B+ in annualized bookings, 2M+ devices deployed and a $5.8B valuation in a new round led by @CapitalG.
But whether it’s hacking together Raspberry Pi cameras to build the early prototype in 2016 or figuring out how to apply advances in AI and computer vision to physical security in 2025, Filip’s product building philosophy has remained remarkably consistent (and effective): he’s a student of the problem.
“If you're willing to do the work, have the customer conversations, get on the plane and get out of your bubble to see how customers are using different solutions and build a picture of what will work for them, it's more of a well-defined process than it is a guessing game.”
Filip gets at more of this idea below where he walks through Verkada’s path to PMF in an interview he did with us last year.
Massive congrats to Filip and the entire Verkada team on this very well-deserved milestone today.
But I’ve learned a great deal from him ever since we first partnered together, all the way back to his first company in 2008, and again in 2017 when @firstround was lucky enough to lead Verkada’s seed.
When the Verkada team first started out, you could buy high-end cameras with cloud-based software to protect your home, but options were lacking and outdated in enterprise.
Just under a decade later, they’ve hit 30K+ customers, $1B+ in annualized bookings, 2M+ devices deployed and a $5.8B valuation in a new round led by @CapitalG.
But whether it’s hacking together Raspberry Pi cameras to build the early prototype in 2016 or figuring out how to apply advances in AI and computer vision to physical security in 2025, Filip’s product building philosophy has remained remarkably consistent (and effective): he’s a student of the problem.
“If you're willing to do the work, have the customer conversations, get on the plane and get out of your bubble to see how customers are using different solutions and build a picture of what will work for them, it's more of a well-defined process than it is a guessing game.”
Filip gets at more of this idea below where he walks through Verkada’s path to PMF in an interview he did with us last year.
Massive congrats to Filip and the entire Verkada team on this very well-deserved milestone today.
2:15 4 9 1 92 30.7K 85
I’m kicking off a search for a Chief of Staff to join me @firstround in San Francisco.
This is a role we’ve had at First Round for more than a decade. It’s a rare opportunity for someone who’s interested in both startups and investing to learn about both from the inside. You’ll be my right hand in everything I do, from running customer references before we invest to supporting founders after we do.
Former Chiefs of Staff have gone on to lead operations at a venture firm (@natewcollins), build at a breakout startup (@juliagovberg), invest full-time (@almostcmb), and everything in between.
I’m looking for someone who’s a learn-it-all, unreasonably organized and proactive, as well as unusually high-agency. They should be able to manage me more than the other way around. This person should also consider themselves a “work enthusiast,” as one of our founders likes to say.
I’d really appreciate getting the word out and anyone can apply below.
Application is here: jobs.ashbyhq.com/firstround/8ce…
This is a role we’ve had at First Round for more than a decade. It’s a rare opportunity for someone who’s interested in both startups and investing to learn about both from the inside. You’ll be my right hand in everything I do, from running customer references before we invest to supporting founders after we do.
Former Chiefs of Staff have gone on to lead operations at a venture firm (@natewcollins), build at a breakout startup (@juliagovberg), invest full-time (@almostcmb), and everything in between.
I’m looking for someone who’s a learn-it-all, unreasonably organized and proactive, as well as unusually high-agency. They should be able to manage me more than the other way around. This person should also consider themselves a “work enthusiast,” as one of our founders likes to say.
I’d really appreciate getting the word out and anyone can apply below.
Application is here: jobs.ashbyhq.com/firstround/8ce…
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Seek out the hard things. It’s so much harder for somebody to come in after you when you decided to go hard early. That was @jakeserval’s biggest takeaway from his years at Verkada.
It’s a lesson he’s applied relentlessly @getserval, whether it’s building enterprise features and a full platform from day one, or choosing to go after ticketing, even though it’s an existing category with legacy players.
As a result, he and his team have built a product that’s genuinely many orders of magnitude better, automating repetitive IT work for Perplexity, Clay, TogetherAI, and many others.
My partner @brettberson had a great conversation digging into other lessons that have shaped Jake’s unique approach to Serval.
He has some really interesting takes on the future of PMs, how they’re using FDEs, and the specific hiring bar he needs candidates to clear.
Full conversation below. Worth watching if you're building in enterprise or thinking about how AI is reshaping existing markets.
It’s a lesson he’s applied relentlessly @getserval, whether it’s building enterprise features and a full platform from day one, or choosing to go after ticketing, even though it’s an existing category with legacy players.
As a result, he and his team have built a product that’s genuinely many orders of magnitude better, automating repetitive IT work for Perplexity, Clay, TogetherAI, and many others.
My partner @brettberson had a great conversation digging into other lessons that have shaped Jake’s unique approach to Serval.
He has some really interesting takes on the future of PMs, how they’re using FDEs, and the specific hiring bar he needs candidates to clear.
Full conversation below. Worth watching if you're building in enterprise or thinking about how AI is reshaping existing markets.
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My house was one of the first install sites when Verkada was expanding into alarm products, and I remember being struck by how product lead @jakeserval came over to do it himself. After 4+ years he and his co-founder Alex McLeod left Verkada to build an AI platform for IT teams with @getserval, and I jumped at the chance to back them @firstround.
Today, they’re sharing the strong enterprise momentum they’re seeing automating repetitive IT work for companies like Perplexity, Clay, TogetherAI, (and of course, Verkada), along with a $47M Series A led by Redpoint.
Back when we invested in Serval’s seed round early last year, they were still very early in their discovery journey. But after working closely with the Verkada team since investing in their seed in 2017, I was very bullish on the emerging Verkada mafia. There’s so much high caliber talent that’s spent years learning what extreme PMF looks like.
What’s most impressive about Serval’s trajectory since then is how much product they’ve built out and how much better of an experience it is. Over the last 10 years, so much software was only getting incrementally better.
But Serval is a great example of how AI can help build something that is *massively* better, with the potential to upend markets and displace legacy tools.
More on what they’re up to below.
Today, they’re sharing the strong enterprise momentum they’re seeing automating repetitive IT work for companies like Perplexity, Clay, TogetherAI, (and of course, Verkada), along with a $47M Series A led by Redpoint.
Back when we invested in Serval’s seed round early last year, they were still very early in their discovery journey. But after working closely with the Verkada team since investing in their seed in 2017, I was very bullish on the emerging Verkada mafia. There’s so much high caliber talent that’s spent years learning what extreme PMF looks like.
What’s most impressive about Serval’s trajectory since then is how much product they’ve built out and how much better of an experience it is. Over the last 10 years, so much software was only getting incrementally better.
But Serval is a great example of how AI can help build something that is *massively* better, with the potential to upend markets and displace legacy tools.
More on what they’re up to below.
2 8 1 26 12.8K 6