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.

The job of a .001% Chief Product Officer: “Understand customers deeply, set direction/choose the few big bets that matter, and build a team that can execute without you in every detail.” That is how Diya Jolly thinks about the role. Diya is the CPO at @Xero, a $10B accounting software company serving nearly 5M customers. She joined me on Executive Function to unpack what world class product leadership looks like in a post ChatGPT world. We got into how the CPO role is changing, why the best product leaders are spending more time on fewer decisions, and what it takes to build products when customers themselves do not yet know what AI will make possible. Timestamps: 00:12 How an excellent CPO makes an impact on the business 02:01 How the CPO role shifts under founders vs hired CEOs 03:38 Influencing a founder without going deferential 07:37 How adding value to customers is always a net positive 08:45 Why roadmaps need more risk in the AI era 12:30 How to shelter innovation teams from the existing system 15:12 What's different about being a great CPO in 2026 17:34 How AI has changed the concept of an app 18:28 It’s essential for CPOs to fly at a low altitude 20:34 How misaligned incentives cause organizational politics 25:13 Being demanding without creating a fear-based culture 28:10 Why raising ambition is a CPO's number one job 31:39 The boss who taught Diya to keep raising the bar 32:43 The hardest part of being a CPO 35:28 The three buckets Diya uses to delegate 36:30 How Diya protects deep-work time on her calendar 42:45 Xero’s game-changing early bet on AI insights 44:58 How far into the future should CPOs plan for? 47:14 What it takes to be an excellent C-suite member 48:53 Why ambitious PMs should chase impact, not titles 50:28 The four bottlenecks that stall career growth

Read our full profile of Rachitsky: review.firstround.com/reluctantly-in…

Before every episode of @lennysan's podcast, he sends a list of questions to guests meant to spark ideas for their conversation. He's never shared them before. Here they are:

After leaving Twitter, @paraga had no shortage of options. He passed on all of them. Instead of jumping into his next thing, he spent months trying to find a problem worth committing a decade of his life to. He kept coming back to a question: what does the web look like when AIs become its primary users? It requires a completely different infrastructure layer, built from scratch, for a customer the web never had before. Today, @p0 announced a $100M Series B at a $2B valuation. The company is 18 months old, and more than 100,000 developers — including customers like Harvey, Notion, Opendoor and two of the US’s leading P&C insurers — are building on Parallel’s infrastructure. We’ve had the opportunity to watch the team execute since their seed round. Congrats to Parag and the entire Parallel team.

I’ve been watching @paraga build @p0 before most people knew it existed. @firstround invested in Parallel’s seed round, and I’ve personally known Parag for over a decade. He’s a singular technical mind, and one of the best company builders I’ve ever worked with. He has a unique ability to envision technology 2-3 years away that will have disproportionate value. When we invested in January 2024, Parag made a few bets that felt early at the time: agents would eventually use the web far more than humans, and the best way to build for that was to go deep on infrastructure and systems rather than chase the AI labs. He was right, and his bets are proving out faster than any of us expected. And it shows in the companies trusting Parallel to run their most critical workflows. Harvey, Notion, Clay, Profound, Opendoor, Modal, Baseten and over 100,000 developers — from AI-native startups to regulated enterprises — all building on Parallel. Today, Parallel announces its $100M Series B at a $2B valuation, led by @sequoia, more than doubling in five months from the Series A. Proud to have been there from day one. A lot more ahead. More details below:

Exclusive: high-growth AI startup unicorn Serval needs more top talent on its biggest accounts. So today it's launching Serval Start, a novel program to match 12 future founders with accelerated equity vesting in exchange for working tours of duty as forward deployed engineers.

Sales is the most expensive function at many companies. It was one of the first orgs many AI tools were built for, but it’s been the last place to see real change. Engineering, support, legal and more have all been transformed by AI — but sales reps still work mostly the same way they did in 2018. I’ve worked closely with @mgarimella and @agupta_108 since leading @useactively’ seed in early 2022 and what they’ve built over the past few years has been incredibly impressive. Their core insight is that GTM is exactly the place goal-directed agents are built for. It’s continuous, context-heavy and constantly changing. So they built a persistent AI agent for every account that operates 24/7, researching, identifying opportunities and moving deals forward without having to wait for a human to connect the dots. Samsara has Actively agents deployed across their 1,000+ person GTM team — account development, sales, rev ops and customer success. They’re seeing 2x conversion rates across Actively-driven outreach. And other customers like Ironclad, Abnormal AI and Ramp are also seeing 20% increases in productivity per rep. I’m thrilled to be continuing the journey alongside them with this $45M Series B. Congrats to the whole team. Lots more to come. More details below.

Putting better AI tools into the hands of firms still operating the same way, with the same incentive structure, isn’t the solution that many think it is. The billable hour has been the default for decades and decades. Lawyers spend roughly two-thirds of their day on admin and coordination rather than actual legal work, and billing rates keep climbing. @mishindan1 is a repeat founder and an immigrant, so he’s experienced the cost, opacity, delays, and intricacies of the legal system directly as he stressed over his own immigration status while building multiple venture-backed companies. Rather than arming existing firms with better software, his bet was to build a completely new kind of firm from the ground up: @ManifestLaw_, powered by @manifest_os — pairing AI-driven workflows with fixed-fee, outcomes-based pricing to make sure the incentives line up. They started in corporate immigration, where the status quo is especially painful, as Dan knows all too well, and now they’re expanding globally. Manifest has had over 3,000 client engagements ranging from startup founders to some of the largest technology companies in the world. Proud to be early backers of Dan and the Manifest team at @firstround as they celebrate their Series A today.

📣 We just raised our $45M Series B from @TCVTech and @firstharmonic, with participation from @BainCapVC, @firstround, and @AlkeonCapital. Sales is the most expensive function in most companies — and one of the hardest. Hundreds of accounts, different context, different stakeholders, different dynamics, and a different path to close. No one can do that perfectly. Critical things get missed. So we gave every account its own AI agent — working 24/7, maintaining full context, progressing it through the funnel, and guiding reps and leaders on what to do next. The greatest privilege has been building alongside companies like @Samsara @tryramp @ironclad_inc and @attentiveHQ — enterprises with thousands of sellers who are already living in the future. There are only two unbounded upside problems out there: building and selling. Every company sells. and @useactively is building the system they'll all run on. We’re excited to pull every revenue team into the future we know is inevitable.

Great story about @lennysan from @firstround review.firstround.com/reluctantly-in…

Watch our full tour of Notion’s SF HQ here: youtube.com/watch?v=4qkyxm…

What’s it like working at @NotionHQ? Kind of like a jazz band. High agency, low bureaucracy, and lots of “yes, and…”

“Blank check founders” are the ones I’d fund pre-idea, no matter what it is. Snir Kodesh is one of them. I’ve known him for 5+ years through our First Round community: Angel Track, Eng Leaders Forum, PMF Method. His first company was acquired by Lyft, and he later went on to lead engineering at Retool. When he was ready for his next thing, we invested before he even had a specific idea. He ended up in a domain most founders wouldn’t dare touch — enterprise audit — but one he knows extremely well. Snir is deeply technical and innately commercial, a heat-seeking missile when it comes to finding a big problem and imagining the right technology to solve it. Today, Petual is coming out of stealth with $20 Million in funding. They’re bringing agentic AI to SOX testing, autonomously generating auditor-ready work papers in minutes instead of hours. Early customers, including S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 companies across energy, SaaS and financial services, can see 68-80% efficiency gains on workflows that today eat hundreds of hours per quarter. $8 Billion goes to SOX compliance in the US every year, but that’s just the start. The broader audit opportunity is massive — and to tackle both, Snir built a team of folks from Stripe, Retool, Lyft and the Big Four who understand these problems from all angles.

Many AI conversations are philosophical. This one won’t be. If you’re shipping AI in production, join us and other top builders to discuss how to actually get this technology into the hands of real users at scale (not just build a flashy demo). Apply to join here: firstround.typeform.com/pizza-prod

Here’s @lennysan's advice to aspiring creators: spend more time in your day job. “You have to tap into the experience you had working a regular job for the rest of your life. You run out of advice or insights or lessons to share. Spend more time doing the work, to build more experience, so you don’t run out,” he says. Having been out of the product world for about six years, Rachitsky realizes that his time as a PM is a depreciating asset. He's always been able to lean on this work experience — whether it's his first-hand knowledge of a topic or pulling the best information out of a guest. And with so much changing, he's worried about his ability to keep up. Read the in-depth profile here: review.firstround.com/reluctantly-in…

Shachar Hirshberg and Dan Shiebler make offers to new hires within 48 hours of their first conversation. They’re building an AI-native security company, Artemis Security, that battles threats that move at machine speed (which, for AI-driven attacks, is often in seconds). So speed is naturally an important operating principle for them. They’ve assembled a team of 30 people in NYC in under seven months, which they’ve done by front-loading references, bringing candidates in for lunch with the full team, and managing most of the recruiting process directly themselves. Engineering velocity is often a hiring problem in this market, and these guys have figured out a system that lets their recruiting process move as fast as their product. Their engineers run multiple Claude Code instances simultaneously to ship features in parallel, nearly all of their code is AI-generated, and they’ve outrun their original product roadmap by seven months. But they still haven’t managed to find any candidates who use AI as heavily as the Artemis team does. That isn’t a dealbreaker for them, though — they’re only looking for people who want to learn, and they train everyone who joins to ship as fast as the founders do. Fresh off their $70M fundraise and launch out of stealth, I sat down with Shachar and Dan on In Depth to find out how they’re pulling all of this off. We also dig into: -Why they’re on a texting basis with every CISO they sign -Why AI is a death knell for legacy security platforms -How they maintain decision-making velocity in their relationship as co-founders

Terry Gross, Charlie Rose and… @seanseaevans? @lennysan asks LLMs to help him get ideas for guest questions on Lenny’s Podcast in the style of these legendary interviewers. But he says that questions in the style of Sean Evans, the host of @firstwefeast's "Hot Ones" are the most unexpected. We spent the day with Rachitsky to learn what motivates the person behind the screen. Read it here: review.firstround.com/reluctantly-in…

This is the level of detail that Christopher was operating at when he was President of DoorDash. The details matter at every level.

Christopher Payne was President of @DoorDash during the stretch that defined the company: hypergrowth, a pandemic, an IPO, and much that came after. He's done very few long-form interviews. This conversation is a rare exception. We explored what excellence looks like in this role. New episode of Executive Function.