Writer

10 years. 600 articles. Millions of page views. 100+ podcast episodes. Hundreds of thousands of email subscribers. And there’s still so much more to do.

If you’re excited to write for a publication with this surface area and expand it even further, then this is the role for you. You’ll get the chance to inspire the next decade of company builders, collaborate with some of the most exciting leaders in tech today, and focus on honing your writing craft.

The TL;DR is that we’re growing The First Round Review team and looking for a strategic content marketer who has stellar writing skills and demand-gen chops to match (or is at least hungry to experiment and figure things out). But if you’re a fit for this role, then you won’t be satisfied with that synopsis — depth is captured in the details, after all.

Because this isn’t a typical role, this isn’t a typical JD. Read on for more about what you’d work on, the impact you’d get to make, what your week might look like, and what we’re looking for in the newest addition to First Round’s editorial team.

About First Round & The Review:

First Round is an early-stage venture capital firm that helps startups like Notion, Roblox, Uber, Square, Verkada, and Together tackle company building firsts. Whether it’s pre-seed, seed or Series A, we’re building the world’s best product for founders who are just getting started.

But if you’re a reader of our long-form publication, the First Round Review, you might not even know that. That’s because we made an intentional choice when we first got started back in 2013 that we weren’t going to be another VC blog.

We vowed not to chase trends or share First Round’s perspective on market shifts. Instead, we decided to show, not tell, by handing over the proverbial mic to the builders who were on the ground making it happen.

Here’s why: We believe that there is powerful, untapped knowledge out there that can transform the way people build technology companies. There’s just one problem: It’s trapped in other people’s heads — people who are at the top of their fields, who rarely have time to share what they’ve learned (even when they want to). The Review is about liberating this knowledge to inspire and accelerate action through compelling storytelling. We think of it as The Harvard Business Review meets The New Yorker.

We’re all about rich, detailed, long-form writing with heart and craftsmanship. This isn’t about churning out listicles or pushing First Round companies (in fact, most of the leaders we feature aren’t from startups we’ve invested in). Our entire orientation is around quality. (For an example, check out our recently published compilation on some of the best advice we heard in the last decade.)

Our bread and butter is original interviews on evergreen topics. We share deep dives into the brass tacks of building a startup, whether it’s running better reference calls, hiring a VP of Eng, getting practical advice for managing up, structuring growth sprints, or improving your internal documentation. Every article must serve up tactics that our readers can use today to change their companies and their careers.

The impact of our work:

This role presents a unique opportunity to dive into a mature publication, with an incredibly engaged audience and community of frequent collaborators that’s been carefully cultivated over the last 10 years.

Simply put, if you write for The Review, your words have the chance to make a true impact on the startup ecosystem. Now-widespread concepts like Kim Scott’s Radical Candor approach to feedback or Superhuman’s framework for product-market fit got their start on our digital pages. Multiple subjects we’ve featured have gone on to ink book deals, while memorable turns-of-phrases have become embedded into startup vernacular, like Molly Graham’s rallying cry to “give away your Legos,” or Dave Girouard’s charge to make speed a habit.

We like to think that The Review has played a small part in making the company building journey a bit easier for our readers and elevating the incredible subjects who generously share their lessons learned, but it’s always better to hear straight from the source:

Hear from some of the incredible leaders we’ve gotten to work with over the past decade:

• “First Round Review is peerless for delivering a wealth of helpful frameworks and advice for founders. I'm proud to have contributed.” - Dave Girouard, Upstart Founder & CEO (read his Review article on making speed a habit)
• “First Round Review has some of the best and most actionable content out there, period.” - Gokul Rajaram, exec at DoorDash (read his Review article on defanging difficult decisions)
• “For 10 years, the First Round Review has been consistently putting out some of the best actionable/tactical/useful content on the internet. My first First Round Review post changed the course of my life. It drove the very first few hundred subscribers to my newsletter and convinced me to keep going down this weird life path.” - Lenny Rachitsky, author of Lenny’s Newsletter (read his Review article on how to approach performance reviews)
• “My FRR article is what got me my book deal. Eternally grateful to you and your team.” - David Spinks, community expert and co-founder of CMX (read his Review article on running virtual events)
  
  

Hear from The Review readers you’d be writing for:

• “I love First Round’s content on their blog and podcasts.They're always so oddly specific—yet perfectly helpful because of that.” (original post)
• “s/o to @firstround review for unfailingly putting out some of the most actionable, well-written content out there.” (original post)
• “For 10 years, First Round Review has been my silent mentor. I first found them with 2013's 'How to Make Your Board Meetings Suck Less.' That was just the beginning of many bits of real-life wisdom they taught me.I read each article as it comes out and then I scour the archive when I have questions or need advice.” (original post)
  
  

Hear more from the First Round team about The Review:

• Josh Kopelman, Partner and Co-Founder of First Round: “Back in 2006, I published my first post on Redeye VC. Looking back, two lines resonate: ‘I really believe in the power of an elegant, simple idea... Sometimes the most 'obvious' (after the fact) ideas are the most powerful.’ But ideas from one person — no matter how productive or prolific — won't cover the range of know-how that today's founders and teams need to build each facet of their companies. We launched First Round Review to get tactical knowledge out of the heads of remarkable tech operators and onto the web where it could benefit the whole startup community.”
• Brett Berson, Partner at First Round and originator of The Review: “I’m always struck by the fact that, like many of our initiatives at First Round, The Review started as an experiment. We had a hunch that there was a hunger for more stories not just on ‘what’ startups are doing but on ‘how’ they're doing it, so we started interviewing founders and publishing long-form essays. By putting builders front and center, week after week, for over a decade now, we’ve ended up in a pretty special place. I think what’s most energizing is that there’s still so much more for our team to do here — we can’t wait to double down and explore all the ways we can make this publication even better.”
• Jessi Craige Shikman, longtime Editor of The Review: “Over the last 5 years, I’ve had the privilege of working with some incredible leaders. Whether it’s interviewing Esther Perel on founder psychology, or collaborating with Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra on a viral framework for finding product-market fit, the storytelling opportunities I’ve had in this role are second to none. Best of all? I’ve never once been bored.”
  
  

Where you come in:

You won’t be starting from scratch, but this role has a lot in common with a startup’s first marketing hire. We’ve got a small team, a scrappy mindset, and there’s plenty of room to leave your mark.

In this role, you will own and create stories for the First Round Review and episodes for our podcast from end to end. This includes interviewing some of the highest-caliber people working in tech today, from founders and CEOs to the very best in design, product management, engineering, sales, and more. It also includes telling bold, creative stories that will help readers learn and build new things.

On top of that, you’ll work with the Editor of First Round Review to tackle distribution and operational opportunities and challenges around the Review. How can we maximize our influence on social media? Experiment with our podcast format? Make our newsletter sing? Test new formats and types of content? Or dream up entirely new data projects?

To give you a better sense, here’s what a typical week might look like:

• Focused, heads-down writing time, aiming for ~1 new long-form draft a week.
• Interview a senior tech executive for an upcoming new piece on product strategy (see this recent example with Slack CPO Noah Weiss).
• Prep for and sit in on a podcast recording with a founder on their journey to product-market fit (see this recent example with Replit’s Amjad Masad).
• Craft social posts to promote new content, re-distribute resources from our archives, and boost engagement with our audiences.
• Work with freelancers to create standout graphics and videos, jumping into Figma and CapCut yourself where needed.
• Develop and run experiments to grow our email list and broaden our brand’s reach.
• Dig into a decade’s worth of data to brainstorm new topics for our readers and sharpen our content strategy.
  
  

Interested? Here’s what we’re looking for:

• You call yourself a writer first and foremost when you first meet someone or you’re asked at a party. Maybe you run content for a startup, ghostwrite for an executive or write copy for a tech giant. Maybe you’ve been in journalism forever and are ready for something new. If you’ve had the written word at the center of your career for the last two to six years, you’re on the right track. We love good writing here. And we do a lot of it.
• You’re curious about people. You like asking them questions and learning what makes them tick. Either you regularly interview people as a part of your job, or conduct user testing, or teach people to do something. Asking people about themselves, how they think and work is inherently interesting to you. We want someone who can eventually walk into Figma and feel confident interviewing the VP of Engineering, while feeling equally comfortable searching for an up-and-coming Director of Product we should have on our radar.
• You’re super organized. You’re a task management junkie who’s always looking for ways to become even more productive and effective. We’re working on 20 stories at any given time and aspiring to do more.
• Tech fascinates you. You don’t necessarily need deep knowledge of venture capital, but you should be willing to learn it fast. There’s a lot of jargon and terminology that gets thrown around in this business, and we want to work with someone who can hit the ground running in this respect. If you’ve written about technology before, that’s a plus.
• Steep learning curves thrill you. You already have experience and good instincts when it comes to social media, email marketing, and running experiments to build brands. Great. But we’re always trying to push the envelope — keeping our eyes fixed on new tactics, findings and recommendations.
• Just the word ‘autonomy’ makes you happy. While the Writer role will report to the Editor of the Review, we’re really looking for a self-starter who can handle projects from start to finish on their own and contribute fresh ideas to strengthen not just First Round Review but the whole team. Everyone here is in it together when it comes to building a company we’re excited to work at. You’d be a major player.
  
  

Curious about what the interview process looks like?

• Fill out this application and include a few written pieces you’re proud of. It could be a thoughtful blog post, a sharp social media thread, a well-crafted newsletter — whatever showcases your way with words.
• Get to know the editorial team through 1-2 conversations about First Round, your experience, and the role.
• A (paid) writing exercise where you’ll get to try on our style and we’ll, of course, get to see your content chops in action.
• A final onsite interview in our San Francisco office where you’ll get to meet more of the team in person and hear more about how we work.
  
  

Compensation Range: $90K - $135K