Executive Assistant

ABOUT FIRST ROUND

First Round https://firstround.com/ 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.

YOUR CORE ROLE AS AN EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT WILL INCLUDE:

• Managing and prioritizing complex calendars, scheduling meetings, resolving conflicts and ensuring the executive’s time aligns with strategic priorities.

• Preparing partner’s meeting materials, daily agenda briefing and any other administrative tasks that support daily operations.

• Booking travel, including flights, accommodations, transportation, itineraries and all related logistics.

• Planning and executing in-person meetings and events, including dinners, offsites and other executive driven gatherings.

• Working closely with the Chief of Staff to support the executive’s priorities and ensuring smooth day to day operations.

• Preparing and submitting expense reports accurately and on-time.

• Curating, purchasing, and sending thoughtful gifts for partner contacts.

YOU COULD BE A GREAT EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT AT FIRST ROUND IF:

• You sweat the details. You triple-check names, times, logistics — nothing slips through the cracks. A typo or grammar error irks you.

• You work when the work needs to get done. You understand what it means to build a true partnership with your executive—it demands flexibility, responsiveness, and a willingness to put in time when needed, including nights and weekends.

• You’re an execution machine. Tasks get done thoughtfully and proactively with minimal oversight. Creating order out of chaos is one of your superpowers.

• You’re service-oriented. You take pride in creating seamless experiences — whether for your team or our external stakeholders. If your partner is in a meeting when one of their founders walks in, it would be second nature to you to go say hello and spend time with them.

• You’re hyper organized. You’re the kind of person who color codes calendars and makes spreadsheets for trip agendas.

• You can navigate ambiguity. You’re resourceful when priorities shift and can pivot without missing a beat. You anticipate what matters before it becomes urgent.

• You work well around high performers. You keep professionalism and diplomacy top of mind, especially in high-stakes founder contexts. How you represent the firm is always top of mind.

• You’re discreet and dependable. You’ll be handling sensitive information with poise and confidentiality. Creating trust within your partnership is incredibly important to you.

• You’re highly responsive and move fast. You’re comfortable with urgency, and your team knows they can rely on you to keep things moving at pace. You typically respond to texts, slacks and emails within seconds or minutes, not hours.

• No task is too small for you. Whether it be picking up lunch for a busy executive or manually filling out a spreadsheet, mundane tasks don’t bother you.

This role is based in San Francisco, and you will be required to work in our Jackson Square office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

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. We go to the ends of the earth for our founders. You might think our role as venture capitalists is to simply maximize returns. But at First Round, we believe when we put founders first, everything will follow — epic returns included. We fill in the gaps on a founder's team before they even have one and get to work on the unglamorous tasks that actually move companies forward. We'll know we've done our job when they're left feeling startled that an investor would go to these lengths for them.

• Take the wheel. Welcome to First Round. Everything is now your responsibility. Cartographers, not navigators, are the ones who tend to do well here. There are no career ladders to climb or boxes to check at First Round. If you find ways to do more for the business and our customers, your role will naturally expand alongside it. First Round is a haven for people who see themselves as architects of their reality, not casualties of circumstance. We know we have agency over our agency, and we make the conscious choice to exercise it every day.

• Treat the little things like big things. “Magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” 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. This is decidedly not a "LGTM" culture. It is a culture where the little things are the big things.

• Give your unvarnished opinions and unwavering support. We strive to be kind, not nice. Being nice and being kind are not one and the same. In our view, kindness means being generous, helpful, and compassionate. Nice can be used as a convenient shortcut; kindness cultivates long-term excellence. 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. So while we strive to be a founder’s coach in the corner, part of that responsibility requires being the kick in the ass when they need it most. We try to be as honest as possible in every encounter, whether that’s bluntly telling a founder how they can step up their game, or delivering radical candor in our feedback for teammates.

• Invent and wander. “Action produces information." We’re fans of starting small, shipping fast, and obsessively improving. The idea for the First Round Review wasn’t the product of a six-month strategy session — we wrote up a few blog posts and just shipped them. That’s because reality has a surprising amount of detail and edges that are difficult to anticipate. Each step — even the wrong one — reveals new information that improves your next move. We prefer to make the gap between having an idea and knowing if it works as small as possible.