US Company is hiring: Writer in San Francisco
US Company, San Francisco, CA, United States, 94199
About First Round
First Round is a venture capital firm that works with founders exclusively at the earliest stages of company building, often when all they have is an “imagine if.” We fill in where we can until the team is filled out, tackling crucial early hiring and equipping those who are great at building product with the skills to sell it, too. By getting the foundational firsts right, we increase the odds of finding extreme product-market fit. Our founders’ “imagine ifs” have turned into companies like Notion, Roblox, Uber, and Square.
About the Reach Team
We’re looking to add a Writer to our Reach team.
Our goal on the First Round Reach team is to scalably reach startup founders & operators by establishing First Round and our Partnership as the trusted resource for tactical best practices on founding, operating and scaling a startup. We believe there is powerful, untapped knowledge that can transform the way people build technology — and we share it by consistently producing content on the First Round Review and In-Depth podcast.
About the Writer Role
Your core role as Writer will include:
Write 2-5k word pieces on The Review. To create these pieces, you’ll use transcripts from interviews, our archive of articles and conduct original research — then work with a combination of our editor and the subject / subject’s comms team to refine and approve the piece.
Own publishing and promotion of your work end-to-end. Publishing includes working with a graphic designer to create images, uploading to our CMS, cross-publishing across relevant platforms and more. Promotion includes writing multi-platform social copy, email newsletters and testing and optimizing the distribution of your work.
Participate in — and eventually own specific episodes — of our podcast. You’ll sit in on tapings, work with our agency to edit episodes and handle promotion and distribution (including guiding the agency to create thumb-stopping clips for social). When you own specific episodes, you’ll research and create detailed prep documents and questions to ensure a guided and impactful conversation.
Be an integral member in the growth of First Round’s content. This includes: sourcing stories and editing drafts from freelancers, creating newsletters and writing lifecycle emails, and testing and learning the best ways to reach the right audience with the right content at the right time.
You could be a great Writer at First Round if:
You’re a writer, through and through. Words have been central to your career and you know how to wield them to create impact across different formats. While you might spike in long-form narrative, you’ve written conversion-oriented email copy and pithy social posts — demonstrating a command of the story you’re telling and an understanding of how to use language to tell it, no matter what you’re writing or its platform.
You learn by testing and iterating quickly. Once your work is out in the world, the journey is just beginning. You want to see performance data, identify patterns, and evolve your work based on learnings.
You bring a no-job-is-too-small mindset to your work. Excellent marketing work is just the part of the iceberg that people see; you are invigorated by all the parts people don’t see. You have an owner’s mentality, guiding a project end-to-end from conception to project management to launch to post-launch analysis.
You have an artist’s eye for images and video. While you won’t be creating visuals yourself, you’ll be working with designers and videographers to bring them to life. You know how to complement your written work with striking images and video, using them to entice readers, convey specific messages, and more.
You know — or can learn — what’s interesting to startup founders and operators. Or maybe you’ve been one of these people yourself! You know how to sniff out and create the stories that will resonate with this audience (and all its sub-audiences) and tell them in compelling, actionable ways.
Please note this role is based in San Francisco and requires at least 3 days per week in-office.
Our Values
At First Round, we value resourcefulness, team-play, excellence and hustle. To give you a sense of what our team is all about, check out our values that guide our work:
Try harder for founders. They’re our customers — LPs are our shareholders.Going above and beyond for our founders is what we do. We strive to be a founder's most valuable investor. That’s why we don't pull term sheets, and we're always in for theirsecond round. We respond to their emails in hours, not days. We build candidate pipelines, unprompted. We arrange meal deliveries when they become a new parent. Simply put, we go above and beyond to earn that right to be their first call every time there’s a bump in the road.
Give your unvarnished opinions and unwavering support.We strive to be kind, not nice. One of the most (counterintuitively) compassionate things you can do is to offer your unvarnished opinion — along with your unwavering support. That willingness to risk a fleeting moment of discomfort in exchange for someone else’s growth is long-term kindness.
Treat the little things like big things.Everything can always be made better. We’re all about the carefully crafted, the nitty-gritty, and the bespoke. Whether it’s hand cutting each nameplate, or debating the optimal shape of the dinner table, no detail is too small to sweat.
Make speed a habit.Whatever you’re building, remember that now is better than two weeks from now. We’re fans of starting small and iterating quickly. No matter what we’re launching, you’ll likely hear this question in a meeting: “How soon can we get something out there?”
Invent and wander.Never stop experimenting. The best ideas are born out of experimentation. Our flagship programs have always come from our penchant for going out on a limb and approaching problems with a different perspective.
Build wider doorways and longer tables. We're in the business of backing people and betting on their ideas — no matter where they come from. While talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is not. First Round is dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive workspace and we encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply!