First Round Review

First Round Capital - Software Engineer - Remote. Open to visa sponsorship for transfers.

First Round is reinventing venture capital. We connect entrepreneurs with the knowledge, people and companies they need for maximum impact. Square, Uber, Roblox and Warby Parker are some of the companies we’ve been fortunate to partner with — and we’re just getting started.
To make it all happen, we design and build our own unique products that our core and extended community of founders, CEOs, and their teams use every day.

That’s where you come in. When you join our team, you’ll plug into our community of entrepreneurs. You’ll have a front row seat to company creation from day one, with unparalleled access to technology founders. Your software will help this next generation of founders and teams go farther, faster. And there’s this: We’re a small, lean team, so you’ll drive product strategy and implement your vision as you best see fit.

First Round engineers have gone on to join fast growing startups in our community and have founded their own startups.

More about First Round:
https://firstround.com/

If you're interested please apply here:

https://jobs.lever.co/firstround/acd7ca1e-09db-4702-8e1d-629558e03d5f

Interesting data, BUT... "Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team." - this is gender discrimination and it is illegal.

How about actually making the workplace attractive to woman applicants? Things like ridding your careers page of implicit biases and bro culture, putting extra emphasis on personal as well as professional growth, attending/hosting various women-oriented events/meetups/conferences, involving your leadership with mentoring at and recruiting from places like the Hackbright Academy, etc. etc.

It costs money, it costs time, hell, it takes a long time to produce results, but you know what - it's worth it! They are an outlier, but I do like Etsy's approach (and results) to gender diversity - http://firstround.com/review/How-Etsy-Grew-their-Number-of-Female-Engineers-by-500-in-One-Year.

This is a great post and founders/hiring managers/junior recruiters are advised to listen to them. After a continual refinement of our own process over many years we've landed on almost this exact process near completely independently. This is a standard for a reason. You will save yourself A LOT of headaches if you incorporate this feedback into your own hiring processes.

I also highly recommend Marco Rodgers' advice http://firstround.com/review/my-lessons-from-interviewing-400-engineers-over-three-startups/

For people that are "too good for this process" - well, in my experience those are the ones that aren't a good fit for most organizations. You're self selecting out and limiting your own options. For some people that's totally fine, but for most I don't think that's good advice.

I'm on the editorial team at First Round Review, and we actually just launched a new series aiming to share more stories about how different founders went about finding PMF. Check it out here: https://review.firstround.com/airtables-path-to-product-market-fit-lessons-for-building-horizontal-products

In terms of measuring vs. optimizing, I liked this advice from Sprig founder Ryan Glasgow: https://review.firstround.com/8-product-hurdles-every-founder-must-clear-this-pm-turned-founder-shares-his-playbooks#hurdle-6-i-havent-hit-product-marketfit-yet-what-am-i-getting-wrong

He makes a distinction between validating whether you have PMF, but recommends using a different framework, specifically the Outcome-Driven Innovation method, for discovering or finding PMF in the first place.

My sympathy for the guy, stuff like this sucks deep on a personal level and he should have gravitated towards a higher level team that values his contributions more.

That being said, I've worked with my share of brilliant jerks and couldn't say it any better than this Firstround article:

http://firstround.com/review/why-firing-brilliant-assholes-is-required-to-build-a-great-engineering-culture/

I'm tolerating exactly one brilliant jerk in my team right now, but it's just because he's the rare "selfless brilliant jerk type" ( http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-13/brilliant-jerks.html ) and he's just so damn productive and such a nice guy from the inside...

I read a quote of Drew's a while back that stuck with me. Just googled and found it:

"When Dropbox was getting off the ground in 2007, there were hundreds of small storage companies. It was almost a cliche, the way that many people believe mobile photo sharing is a cliche now, he says. “The important thing was, I would keep asking people if they used any one of these hundred options, and they all said no. These are my favorite problems to solve. You can’t focus on what everyone else is doing — it has to be about what’s really broken and what you can do to fix it.”"

http://firstround.com/review/How-to-Win-as-a-First-Time-Founder-a-Drew-Houston-Manifesto/