It is a busy day today. In addition to announcing
Bill Trenchard’s arrival at First Round Capital, we're also excited to
share a new firstround.com website experience
with the world.
Coming into this
redesign we knew we wanted to do a few things differently. Almost all websites
for venture funds focus on partner bios and logos of their portfolio. For
us, we had a few unconventional goals in mind - we wanted to:
- Create an
experience that goes beyond learning about partners and companies - we wanted
to share the knowledge our Community and collaborators produce to help people
build better products and companies
- Help tell
the stories of the people and companies we've been fortunate enough to partner
with over the past 7 years
- Tell the
First Round Capital story and how we help our 150+ companies win
- Open up our
previously closed Community (just a bit)
Keeping these
objectives in mind - and utilizing an entirely new visual design – we built out
a few areas of the experience that we think are different:
Homepage: the new First Round homepage is a dynamic collage
of our companies, entrepreneurs and content we produce. It’s up to date
and will change multiple times a day - always showing what's new and important.
Coming to the homepage, you might find breaking news about First Round
companies, a recap of a recent workshop we held or
a new article from our Library that’s authored by a First Round Founder.
Library: every year we put together over 40 different
events for the First Round Capital Community. We bring in dozens and
dozens of speakers that range from CEOs of the largest technology companies in
the world - to marketing and
engineering practitioners; all with the goal to help our companies and
entrepreneurs win. We’re excited to begin to share some of this content
with the world - that was previously only accessible to our entrepreneurs – and
think it will help make the whole startup community better. We hope this becomes an area not just to
learn about First Round, but to also learn about the latest in
engineering, marketing, management and entrepreneurship.
Company Profiles: We
rethought what a company profile page could be in an effort to better tell the stories
of our companies. When you go to a profile page, you'll be able to learn
more about what each company does, learn about the founding team, see relevant
videos, milestones and key press about their progress. It really is the history
of the company in one page.
About: We do a lot of things differently at First Round -
and the way we support our companies through our partnership and platform is a
core part of what makes us unique.
As a part of the site redesign, we wanted to begin to better tell
our story and how we work with our 150+ companies. You'll have a chance
to learn about how we help our companies recruit world-class talent, learn from
one another, leverage pooled data through our research team and connect with
each other through Network. You'll also get to see a bit more about how
our investment team engages with our companies and the stage we invest.
We hope you like what we've built, but this is by
no means a finished product. Just like the companies we work with, we'll
be iterating and changing parts of the product in the coming months - so do let
us know what you like, but most definitely what we can do to make this
experience even better.
espite being coastally challenged (currently living in Philadelphia), Josh has been an active entrepreneur and investor in the Internet industry since its commercialization. In 1992, while he was a student at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Josh co-founded Infonautics Corporation – an Internet information company. In 1996, Infonautics went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
