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The mechanics of sales may be automated away, but that was never the hard part.
We want to find and train the next generation of sellers who excel at the uniquely human craft of sales (and aggressively use AI for all the rest), so we’re launching Sales Combine.
Spend two days in SF for FREE training with extremely experienced sales leaders, and then we’ll introduce you directly to companies like @NotionHQ, @fal, @togethercompute, @p0, @reductoai, @Gumloop, @clay, & many others that are hiring new sellers.
Apply by 10/3: firstround.com/sales-combine
First Round retweeted
Wow...@endurancegeo put a power plant on an undersea volcano nearly a mile below the Pacific and generated net-positive electricity.
It’s the first end-to-end demo of subsea geothermal power.
Andrew Redd has built a killer team with enormous ambition, and they’re backing it up with real (and incredibly fast) technical progress.
We’ve been lucky @firstround to partner with this team since the pre-seed and less than 2 years later, they’re generating power on the ocean floor. This awesome video gives you a sense of the work it took to get here.
Endurance is on a historic run. During our mission to the Axial Seamount, we successfully drilled the world’s first subsea geothermal well and generated net-positive power a mile beneath the Pacific. This mission was the first end-to-end test of subsea geothermal, and our fifth deep-sea deployment in just over a year. For three weeks, we worked around the clock over an active underwater volcano, running the drill and generator and handling every deployment and recovery. Along the way, we:
- Landed our drill within feet of target, drilled two holes, and cased and completed the second as a geothermal well, flowing at 260°C.
- Landed Adélie, our 3-ton test plant, and ran it in real time from Seattle over subsea fiber.
- Drilled with filtered seawater, not drilling mud, and monitored the site on every dive.
- Recovered, serviced, and redeployed Adélie in about 16 hours.
- And on Sept. 27, connected to a 281°C natural vent, spun the turbine up to 26,000 rpm and ran the plant net positive for 8.7 seconds, peaking at 16.5 kW.
Net power is the threshold every new energy source has to cross. For Endurance, it proves subsea geothermal is real, and gives us the confidence to keep sprinting towards commercial scale.
With a test like this, success comes from what we learn: a battery protection trip ended the run, a pump cable failed on restart, and the new well was too restrictive to run the plant. Those lessons go straight into Gentoo, our next test plant, this winter and Leopard, our 2 MW commercial generator.
We’re incredibly proud of what we accomplished together. It took creativity, precision, an uncompromising focus on safety from everyone on board, and it’s only the beginning of what we’re capable of. We couldn’t have done it without Stabbert Maritime and the crew of the Ocean Guardian, the ROPOS team, the University of Washington, WASSOC, and the National Science Foundation.
First Round retweeted
I first got access to the alpha version of @TownAI at the start of the year, and it’s almost hard to count all of the new AI assistants that have launched since then. Most of them are free and built for your personal life. Town is intentionally built for work.
The team isn’t focused on helping you plan a trip or book a restaurant reservation (although you can definitely do those things with Town). Instead they’re obsessed with the everyday work that truly makes you and your team faster.
Several interesting product decisions have flowed from that:
- You need multiplayer mode to truly be effective. AI has made each of us faster on our own, but the work we do together hasn’t kept up. Town is doing some of the most interesting work on multi-player collaboration (with humans as well as other agents) IMO. You can CC your Townie on an email or add them to a group text to let other people work with it directly. Your Townie can also reach out to your teammates’ Townie to help get you unblocked.
- You are not the product. Town has been a paid product from Day 1, and none of your context is used to train a model. The team believes your business’ own data is your asset, not something for a 3rd party to monetize.
- Your life is easier when AI figures you out, not the other way around. You don’t need to hack anything together or figure out what to ask Town. In addition to making proactive suggestions and picking up on your style, projects, etc., Town also picks the right model for each job behind the scenes, so you’re never locked into one provider.
And the team keeps shipping. You can now talk to your Townie live, have it build decks, and make purchases and manage passwords through new partnerships with Stripe Link and 1Password, with tons more to come.
I’m a bit biased after working with @jgreze and @tonydevincenzi at Dropbox and backing them from the very beginning, but I love their relentless focus on making you more effective at work, and I’m excited to see them put their $108M Series B (led by @ForerunnerVC and @MenloVentures) to work as the agent wars continue to heat up.
More from the Town team here: town.com/operate-at-the-spee…
An unfiltered look inside the Thiel Fellowship with @DStrachman: review.firstround.com/inside…
Sixteen years ago, when @William_Blake and I were on the founding team of the Thiel Fellowship, we called it an older young person’s homeschool program.
In a very Thiel-ian way, we built something that fostered independent thinking by giving young people permission to explore what interested them in an environment that trusted them to make decisions and execute on their work.
@firstround’s editorial team wrote a really thoughtful piece about those first years of the fellowship. It also covers my journey — going from school founder to handing out $100K grants to teenagers.
So wonderful to chronicle that very special time that has become the genesis of 1517 💗 (Link in comments)
How’d staff in the early years of the Thiel Fellowship identify the people who’d go on to found Ethereum, Figma, Anthropic and more?
Danielle Strachman — founding member and former program director of the Thiel Fellowship — told us what they were looking for:
Sixteen years ago, when @William_Blake and I were on the founding team of the Thiel Fellowship, we called it an older young person’s homeschool program.
In a very Thiel-ian way, we built something that fostered independent thinking by giving young people permission to explore what interested them in an environment that trusted them to make decisions and execute on their work.
@firstround’s editorial team wrote a really thoughtful piece about those first years of the fellowship. It also covers my journey — going from school founder to handing out $100K grants to teenagers.
So wonderful to chronicle that very special time that has become the genesis of 1517 💗 (Link in comments)
First Round retweeted
What happens when you pay ambitious young people to skip college and build?
Thiel Fellows have gone on to found @AnthropicAI, @figma, @ethereum and so much more.
But how did the fellowship actually work—and what did it feel like from the inside in the early days?
We spoke with @DStrachman and fellows like @zoink and @tarstarr to tell that story.
Read the essay: review.firstround.com/inside…
“We were very much building the airplane on the way. Up or down. Whichever way we were going.”
Our editorial team took an in-depth look at the Thiel Fellowship's early years:
Sixteen years ago, when @William_Blake and I were on the founding team of the Thiel Fellowship, we called it an older young person’s homeschool program.
In a very Thiel-ian way, we built something that fostered independent thinking by giving young people permission to explore what interested them in an environment that trusted them to make decisions and execute on their work.
@firstround’s editorial team wrote a really thoughtful piece about those first years of the fellowship. It also covers my journey — going from school founder to handing out $100K grants to teenagers.
So wonderful to chronicle that very special time that has become the genesis of 1517 💗 (Link in comments)
First Round retweeted
I’ve found this is one of the simplest and most revealing questions to ask during a reference call: “In as much detail as possible, describe the difference [candidate] made in your business. Said differently, if [candidate] had never worked at your company, what would be different?”
"Our WiFi password used to be 'vacuum2020.' We were gonna ship robots in 2020, and it didn't happen."
Inside the nine years of hard work and failed prototypes that went into making @maticrobots:
First Round retweeted
I often find myself pushing hiring managers to do more reference calls and to do them better. Lots of great advice on doing it right from @brettberson
> At the end of every single reference call, I ask the reference for the names of other people who would have a perspective on the candidate and use that to expand my list of potential people to call.
First Round retweeted
@btrenchard at @firstround was our first backer.
We had no customers, revenue or proof that anyone could build an agentic ERP from scratch.
He saw the vision early, backed a hard build, pushed us where needed and supported us when things didn’t go well.
Thank you Bill. Couldn’t have done it without you.
What it's like working at @maticrobots: Build your own desk, then start making robots.
First Round retweeted
No one is as good at reference check calls as @brettberson. Period. And now he’s kind enough to share his wisdom with us all 🙌
First Round retweeted
Finally, a post about references worth resharing. References are only as good as the quality of questions you ask - front door or back door - and how they determine the match with you and what you want to build.
First Round retweeted
great post. i agree that references has much higher signal than interviews.
in this highly agentic world where the capability to output a work is easier (claude this codex that)
the decision making process a person makes daily and their team fit is much more important.