First Round Capital

First Round Capital

Kopelman, a serial entrepreneur who sold Half.com to eBay, launched the San Francisco-based firm with an explicit bet that technology’s most valuable returns would accrue to investors willing to commit at idea-stage and seed. The firm operates from additional offices in New York and Philadelphia, and its partnership now includes former founders and operators Todd Jackson, Brett Berson, Hayley Barna, Liz Wessel, and Bill Trenchard. First Round targets initial round and Series A checks across enterprise, consumer, fintech, healthcare, and hardware. The firm’s portfolio history includes being first money into Roblox, where founder Dave Baszucki was on his eighty-seventh business-model iteration before raising, and Square, which Jack Dorsey tested against 140 reasons it would fail. Notion and Uber also appear in the firm’s disclosed track record. Investments span the United States with a concentration in technology hubs; the firm does not publicly disclose international deal activity. The team page lists over 40 professionals including dedicated recruiter, content, and go-to-market operations staff — a structural commitment unusual among early-stage venture managers. In May 2024, First Round promoted Hayley Barna and Liz Wessel to Partner, deepening its bench of operating partners who run founder-support functions alongside investment duties. The firm also maintains a venture platform that publishes proprietary frameworks for product-market fit and startup testing, turning internal operating knowledge into public IP. First Round’s structural differentiator is its platform-staffing ratio: more than a quarter of the named team works exclusively on post-investment support functions such as talent, editorial, marketing, and go-to-market enablement. This turns the firm into a hybrid of an early-stage fund and an in-house startup accelerator, designed to compress time-to-scale for pre-revenue portfolio companies without requiring formal accelerator cohorts.