Founding Business Development Representative

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.

ABOUT THE ROLE

One of the most important jobs our team does is to help founders generate and execute their first few dozen sales conversations and pave the path for founders to get to their first million in ARR. That’s what our Founding BDR does.

This role is First Round's embedded, interim "founding GTM" for our portfolio. You'll work across 3–5 portfolio companies at a time, dropping into each one as if you were their first outbound hire — clarify ICP, figure out the right outbound strategy, build a target list, run and iterate on campaigns to book meetings for the founder to take from there. You might cold call 50 prospects on a Monday, build outbound sequences on Tuesday, and hand-deliver gifts to top prospect accounts on a Wednesday.

Why this opportunity is unique: If you're a future founder or Sales Leader, this is one of the best apprenticeships you'll find. You’ll work with the top founders in SF and NYC, learn from our VP of GTM/Founder Success — a GTM veteran with 20+ years of tech sales leadership experience — and have first dips on founding GTM roles at First Round companies after 18 months in the role.

WHAT YOU'LL DO:

• Serve as the embedded founding BDR for 3–5 portfolio companies simultaneously, each at a different stage of building out their own outbound motion.

• For each company, define the ICP with the founder, build and continuously refine and enrich target account/contact lists and launch multi-channel outbound (email, LinkedIn, phone) under that company's brand and voice. You’ll have the freedom and budget to try lots of tactics to get meetings.

• Write and iterate outbound messaging and sequences per company. Each engagement gets its own ICP-specific copy and cadence, no AI slop. Treat messaging as a live experiment: test hooks, subject lines, and CTAs against reply and booked-meeting rate, and kill what's underperforming within days, not weeks.

• Keep CRM/tracker hygiene tight across every engagement and report weekly meeting volume, pipeline, and conversion against goals for each company.

• Manage the split across 3–5 concurrent engagements — triage your hours weekly toward whichever company's pipeline needs it most, without letting any one go quiet.

• Hand off cleanly: when a company hires its own BDR or AE, transfer the playbook, lists, and messaging that worked, then roll onto the next portfolio company.

• This is a hybrid role based in either our San Francisco or New York office, with 3 days per week on-site.

YOU COULD BE GREAT IN THIS ROLE IF YOU:

• Have 1–3 years in a high performance environment successfully doing outbound/BDR motions at a startup — ideally as a founding or early BDR who built the pipeline engine, not someone who worked inside one someone else built.

• Are very comfortable with ambiguity, continuous iteration and imperfection. You don’t need a playbook to follow to get the job done.

• Know how to combine the right channel, prospect, messaging hook to get the conversion

• Exceptional urgency and extreme autonomy. You can go from defining ICP → identifying signals → list building → message writing / personalization → campaign launch in a few hours, with no hand holding.

• Deep fluency in AI-native prospecting — signal/intent-based targeting, enrichment waterfalls, and using LLMs to research an account or persona in minutes, not hours.

• Fluency in all modern outreach tools and approaches including Claude, Clay, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Instantly/Lemlist/Apollo, Ploy.ai http://Ploy.ai, HubSpot/Salesforce or similar CRM).

• Very strong written communication skills — comfortable being the outbound voice for several different companies and ICPs in the same week. A sharp editorial eye for AI output: you can spot "AI slop" instantly and edit it out.

• Extreme organization — able to run 3–5 concurrent outbound engagements without dropping details.

• Genuine excitement to work on the front lines of early stage startups. Comfortable with ambiguity and fast context-switching between very different products, ICPs, and founders week to week.

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.