Todd Jackson

Big @firstround news today! We’re launching Product-Market Fit Method (a free intensive 14-week experience for early founders building epic B2B SaaS companies) and publishing the first session on our internal framework for all to read (with benchmarks, Looker's real data, and tactical advice from iconic enterprise founders). Even though finding product-market fit is the single most important thing for a startup, it’s still underexplored and seen as more art than science. We wanted to change that. I’ve personally talked to hundreds of founders about this topic, digging into what they did in the first 6-9 months of company building. (We’ve published dozens of those interviews on The Review in our “Paths to PMF” series.) This video previews some of what we learned — thanks to @christinacaci, @zachperret, @lloydtabb, @jboehmig, & @jaltma for sharing their lessons! In addition to that research, we’ve also drawn from our own 20 years of data and 500+ pre-PMF investments. What emerged was a very consistent set of patterns for sales-led B2B companies — the basis for our new framework and PMF Method’s 8 tactical sessions. In the program, we help early founders discover what customers really want, build the right v1 product, and close their first enterprise sales. We ran a beta version late last year with a tight-knit group of founders (ex Stripe, Plaid, Airbnb, Twitter, Greenhouse, Grammarly) and the feedback was great — my personal favorite was: "I feel like I shaved 12 months off the time it would take us to get to PMF.” Here are a few key dates and details: - The Summer 2024 session of PMF Method runs 5/29 - 8/28. - Application deadline is 11:59 PDT May 7th. - Any early founder working on a new B2B SaaS company is welcome to apply. Bonus points if you’re technical, have a clear product idea but haven’t raised yet and are <12 months into working full time on your idea. - PMF Method is 100% free. It costs you $0 and we own 0% of your company. Like with The First Round Review and Angel Track, our mindset is to openly share knowledge that we’ve put hundreds of hours of work into curating with the broader startup community, and give it away for free. That’s why we’ve also published our framework, so every builder can use this resource, even if they don’t do the program (it’s linked in the next post). Check out the links below for more details. Can’t wait to read applications!

@noah_weiss @paraga @p0 @firstround 🙏

@tjack @paraga @p0 @firstround congrats todd & the whole team! We are happy customers, and feel fortunate Parallel exists :)

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:

@aditabrm @lizwessel 💪

We had a number for biggest new contract in company history We’ve beaten that number twice in the last 48h

@travers00 Hopper!

Imagine learning two of your best friends @p0 @useactively have been hanging out behind your back through a case study

Customer diligence now includes asking what the agents think

there's a lot of chart crime and eval hacking done in AI these days, which is why my favorite tests are when we win on a customer's production traffic benchmark we've never seen the most sophisticated companies like @NotionHQ understand how to measure quality

When we evaluated agentic web search providers, it was clear that the best solution wasn't just the fastest, or the cheapest. It's a balance of token use, total trajectory latency, and net new information that language models don't already know. Congrats to @p0 on a solid product and some awesome technology.

@paraga @brettberson @p0 So fun!! And a privilege to work with you again Parag 🙏

@tjack @brettberson @p0 thanks so much for your belief, @tjack - it’s been so fun to build @p0 with you from the very first day

This is what @tjack wrote in his memo about @paraga when we were contemplating the first round of @p0. As much as I enjoy giving Todd a hard time, he nailed it.

Excited to build for the next era of the web. We’re just getting started. See who are already working with at pioneers.parallel.ai

we raised a Series B, led @sequoia the web's second user is coming online

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.

@travers00 @joshk @paraga 🙌🙌🙌

@joshk @paraga couldn't ask for better partners that had the early conviction in our team than @joshk and @tjack - lucky to be on the journey with you and bring this new web online

We raised a Series B led by @sequoia at a $2 billion valuation and I’m excited to welcome @andrew__reed to our board. All our existing investors doubled down: @kleinerperkins, @IndexVentures, @khoslaventures, @firstround, @sparkcapital, @AbstractVC, and @terraincap.

The web’s second user is coming online. Our customers are building at the frontier - shaping every corner of the economy. pioneers.parallel.ai

And the official press release ;-)

Read about the funding in The Wall Street Journal: wsj.com/cio-journal/ex… Watch Parag join TBPN at 1:30pm PT Learn more about Parallel (they’re hiring!): parallel.ai