First Round

After @tobi published his now-famous AI memo, you probably saw similar posts from other founders and CEOs flood this platform. But most companies are still in the “memos and demos” phase — ambitious plans and mandates, “AI-first” roadmaps on board decks, flashy features and demoware. Yet scalable implementations and real results remain murky. So today, we’re launching a brand new publication to close the gap: Applied Intelligence. It aims to share how builders are using AI at their companies and the meaningful impact they’re seeing. Our inaugural essay is with none other than Shopify, following up on Tobi Lütke’s memo. We learn from VP & Head of Engineering @fnthawar about the non-obvious insights, tactics and workflows Shopify used to bring an ambitious memo to life. Read the essay below.

I met @jasonyuan in 2024 while he was building Dot at @newcomputer. I was struck by his thoughtfulness, authenticity, and deep passion for what he was building, and as I looked at what he’s created over time, it became clear that he’s a special person whose intuition allows him to see the future before it’s obvious. In 2019, Jason created Mercury OS. He told us the story of how it came together: at the time, he felt, “This computer doesn’t adapt to my brain. I have all these files. There’s so much value from emails. It has Siri. Why am I opening all these apps to do things, to respond to emails, to coordinate?” This led him to envision a computer that understood context and could generate interfaces on the fly – which seven years later, we now refer to as generative UI. In 2023, he teamed up with @sjwhitmore to build Dot, an AI with deep, personal memory designed to help you better understand yourself. It was an early bet on memory and proactivity before either became central to consumer AI, and I felt it was a beautiful product, both visually and how it felt to interact with. @hivemind is the culmination of a lifetime of Jason’s insights and intuition and years of experimentation at the intersection of AI and social. And I believe that, once again, he’s seeing something the rest of us haven’t – a new kind of social network (check out the video!). It’s a privilege to have had the opportunity to back Jason when he had nothing but an idea, and to have since seen firsthand so many magical moments in the Hive. The team is hiring – please reach out to me or Jason if you want to learn more!

Introducing HIVEMIND: the Social Intelligence. Watch the film, based entirely on true stories from @jasonyuan, @biz, @supercgeek, @Reshusaur, and more...

Back in 2013, when I was starting Cover, I was introduced to @bryantchou. I was so impressed by his technical chops and raw intensity that I tried to hire him as our founding engineer. He politely declined to start his own new company instead, called Webflow. But we stayed in touch. I followed his journey at Webflow for the next 12 years, watching him flourish as co-founder and CTO — but also the person who ran sales and marketing during the company’s fastest period of growth. He’s one of those rare engineers who understands the product, the customer and business equally. Today, Bryant is launching Ploy (@ployai), and @firstround is proud to be backing it alongside Y Combinator. Most marketing teams spend more time on operations than creative execution. Bryant felt this pain acutely at Webflow, which some marketers call “measureship” — stitching tools together, building dashboards, chasing attribution. So much of the craft of marketing gets buried in this overhead. Ploy is a marketing platform that treats your website as the hub and all your growth channels as spokes. Agents handle the work end-to-end: designing pages, writing copy and running campaigns. It creates a loop that brings your static website to life, learning from traffic and acting on signals in real time. As agents browse on behalf of users and LLMs summarize your content, your website is the source of truth they pull from. It matters more in the AI era, not less. Hex is already using Ploy for account-based marketing, scaling the creation of personalized landing pages without waiting on engineering. Clay uses Ploy to run programmatic SEO, turning one-off builds into a content engine. Congrats to Bryant and the whole Ploy team. Insanely excited to see where this goes.

AI is making marketers lazy. So we made the website do the work instead. Today, we're launching @ployai: the all-in-one marketing platform that turns your website into your hardest working employee. And we're coming out of stealth today with a $27M seed led by @ycombinator and @firstround. I spent 12 years at Webflow as the founding CTO where I built the product, but also started our marketing and sales teams that drove our fastest periods of growth. That experience made one thing obvious: the website is the center of your business. And it's only more important in the age of AI. Foundation model apps can generate assets. Point solutions can optimize pieces of the funnel. But nothing runs the whole growth system: your site, brand, CMS, CRM, campaigns, analytics, SEO, AEO, and customer data all working together. Until now. Teams at @hex_tech and @clay_run, and growth agencies like Tonik and TNT Growth, are already powering sites on Ploy. Hex is generating on-brand ABM pages at scale, Clay is using its data to power a programmatic SEO engine, and TNT Growth is spinning up a landing page for each of their clients’ ads. Wake up every morning with a report from Ploy - with what it did, and what it wants to do next. Approve it. Ship it. Or be lazy and just watch it cook.

“People [at Notion] are really only concerned about one thing which is making the product good and our customers happy. So Sesame characters are in every single conference room to remind us that it's not our own internal thumbs up that we're looking for. We're really looking to build these things for our customers and it's their approval that we're looking for.” - David Tibbitts, Product Marketer

The demand for clean, always-on power is exploding, and the grid can't keep up. The team at Endurance Energy is going after one of the biggest untapped sources on the planet: geothermal heat beneath the seafloor. They're building systems to deliver gigawatts of zero-emission power faster and cheaper than conventional sources. Today, they're announcing $54M Series A funding. At @firstround, we're excited to have backed Andrew Redd and the team since the pre-seed. Huge congrats!

@AppliedInt Full essay here: review.firstround.com/firsthand-appl…

There’s no single archetype of someone who works at @AppliedInt. But most fall into one of three buckets: The domain specialists (like AV simulation PhDs), new talent (there’s always a big cohort of recent grads) and ex-founder or CTO types (they infuse the “startup” energy, even in a company of 1,300+ people). One of Applied's earliest employees, @malharhar — who was a new grad when he joined in 2019 — shares a firsthand account of what makes the company culture so distinctive.

I think this point from @malharhar, who is one of the earliest employees @AppliedInt is so right.

There are few people in the world I've met who are as dedicated, intense, and ambitious as @SurbhiSarnaSF. I had the honor of first getting to know Surbhi when we were both working at YC, and it was so obvious from my very first interaction that she was someone who would leave a massively impactful mark on the world. Then you have @nateps -- one of the smartest, kindest, and most genuine people out there -- who also happens to be an EPIC builder. Put them together, and you get an unstoppable team. I am so thrilled for the entire Collate crew on this huge financing milestone. I know Collate customers have been loving the platform, and I can't wait for so many more people to experience it soon. forbes.com/sites/innovati…

"The only team that sits at the intersection of product, revenue, users, perception, and community is marketing." Sheila Joglekar Vashee's definition of great marketing isn't storytelling. It's creating coherence. Excited to share our next episode of Executive Function with the CMO of @figma. Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 00:07 What excellent marketing actually is in 2026 01:36 Why giving teams different goals creates dysfunction 02:36 The most important decision Sheila made as CMO last year 04:26 The real difference between an SVP and a CMO 06:05 Marketing is one engine - not separate pieces 07:15 The tension between brand and growth 09:25 The decisions a CMO should never be making 09:55 Running marketing like a portfolio of moonshots 12:46 "Ubiquity is the opposite of cool" 15:11 Why a few companies get a flywheel of momentum 16:44 The Silicon Valley clock and irrational perception cycles 19:25 How to actually scale taste across an org 21:09 What changes for a CMO in a post-LLM world 23:15 Why the artistic side of marketing never really left 26:05 Whether taste can ever be encoded in software 27:15 Telling an optimistic, yet realistic story about AI 30:50 You need to make people care 32:11 What surprised Sheila about being a public-company CMO 33:46 Why Figma won enterprise where Dropbox couldn't 35:25 Sheila's favorite campaign ever 37:10 Why announcement videos full of humans lack humanity 38:55 Playbooks are obsolete, but the fundamentals are not 40:25 Why marketing in 2026 demands disruptive energy 41:54 How Sheila architects her week 48:55 Where corporate politics actually come from 53:55 "Sheila, are you going to change the world in this job?" 58:09 What's unique about the CMO and CEO relationship

I remember first meeting @jakebolling & being 'wowd' by his desire to transform an otherwise overlooked industry. We knew we had to invest. 12 months later, Scotch launched. 3 months after that, pre-empted for their A. Now, Scotch has passed a $1B GPV run-rate. Scotch is quickly becoming the defacto operating system for liquor stores nationwide. Kudos to the entire Scotch team, and a big 🍻 to Jake — one of the best operators out there.

@qasar Read here: review.firstround.com/firsthand-appl…

Applied Intuition has a practice called the culture table. Co-founders @qasar and Peter Ludwig, plus a few other leads (specifically, not managers) meet regularly to make sure manager bloat isn’t creeping in as the headcount has scaled past 1,000. Every six months, ICs score their managers by answering 50 questions about how they’re doing. The culture table will then discuss the results to see whether a team is both meshing well and operating effectively. This system reveals the well-liked manager who doesn’t drive results, and the effective manager who makes everyone miserable. One of @AppliedInt's early employees, @malharhar, took us inside HQ to share what makes the company culture so distinctly "Applied."

When I joined @AppliedInt, back in early 2019, it was just a handful of engineers working above a bar in Sunnyvale. The website didn’t really tell you what we were. We just wanted to build amazing products for the real world, from fighter jets to hundred ton trucks to autonomous vehicles. But we’ve always been really paranoid about losing the special culture we built in the early days to the monotony of corporate scale. Somehow, even as we’ve grown into a thousand+ person company, a lot has stayed the same since (like being in the Manhattan of the Bay, Sunnyvale). And of course, we’re still building amazing products. Continuing from my prior video, we captured the culture that pulled me in all those years ago and how we’ve protected it as we’ve grown in this @firstround Review. These are all questions I’ve been asked about in the last few years from founders of all company sizes so might as well put it in one place. P.S. At the minimum, there’s some awesome photos inside so take a look :)

It’s rare to find a former CTO who’s both technically world-class and a commercial savant. @jgreze is one of the few I’ve worked with who’s both. He’s putting that combo to work building @TownAI with @tonydevincenzi, an insanely talented product thinker and designer. I've known these guys for over a decade, since we all worked together at Dropbox. I met them both my first week. I remember being introduced by @adityaag to a room full of eng directors, including JDG, who immediately asked what made me qualified to be the VP of Product and interrogated my ideas for the product roadmap. From that very first exchange, I could tell he was hyper-intelligent, competitive, and gave zero fucks about offending anyone (founder DNA!!). I liked him immediately. Tony was running the design team at the time, after Dropbox had acquired his startup. Not only was he much better dressed than Jean-Denis, but every product Tony touched across the company was incredibly elegant — combining a designer’s taste with a product-builder’s practicality. Jean-Denis went on to spend seven years as Plaid's CTO. We kept in touch and he eventually joined @firstround's 2024 PMF Method cohort. Meanwhile I'd admire Tony's work from afar — watching him found a product studio that Google acquired and later as he took the stage for the main Google I/O keynote in 2024. Backing them from the very beginning and getting to be an early user of Town has been such a fun, full-circle moment for me. Huge, huge congrats to Jean-Denis, Tony and the whole team on their $55M Series A and more importantly on building a product I now can’t imagine living without.

Back 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, we’re launching @TownAI: the AI assistant that learns you. We’re coming out of beta with a $55M Series A led by @ARampell at @a16z, with participation from @KirstenGreen at @forerunnervc and continued support from @firstround, @altcap, and @conviction. Right now, getting real value from AI means prompting, configuring, building workflows, managing agents. We think that’s backwards. The future of AI is a companion that already knows you and how you work. Town connects across your inbox, calendar, Slack, docs, messages, and workflows to understand what you need, then starts doing the work with you. Drafting. Scheduling. Project tracking. Follow-ups. Context gathering. Multi-step tasks. And it only acts when you say so. All adapting to your voice, priorities, routines, and relationships over time. Your Townie is the AI assistant you actually need.

When I first unboxed my @Boardisfun at home last fall, it felt both futuristic and nostalgic to watch my kids mesmerized by a beautifully designed tabletop console. We dove in, playing Bloogs, a game that reminded me of old-school Lemmings. Since then it’s become a fixture at playdates and multi-generational game nights and reliably produces squeals of delight from players of all ages. So thrilled for @brynnputnam and the Board team to announce their $20M Series A today, led by @mignano and @usv. I’m excited for Board Studio coming later this year, which will allow anyone to make their own games and experiences for Board using AI. Can only imagine what kinds of wild games my kids will dream up for us to play together.