Apply to First Round’s First Ever Co-Founder Forum

An epic founding team is the common thread that underpins nearly all of the world’s most successful companies. Yet later, in the glow of success, the founding stories get polished and the spotlight tends to shine mostly on the CEO or CTO, the two starring roles that are so often credited with getting a wild idea off the ground.

In reality, there are often one to three other co-founders who are instrumental in the company’s success — spearheading expansion opportunities, growing teams, nailing down the business model, helping to solve a startup’s biggest problems — all while serving as the cultural heartbeat of the organization.

We’ve invested heavily in programs built from the ground up to support co-founders in our community who are the CEO or CTO. But we haven’t yet created a community specific to the needs of the non-CEO or non-CTO founder archetype ― until now.

Co-Founder Forum is an entirely new program we’re beta testing in late April, with the goal of helping co-founders (in roles other than the CEO and CTO) grow their skill-set and increase their impact as the company scales.

Apply by going here, now.

It will consist of curated evening experiences where 14 members of our community come together to share tactics and learn together in an off-the-record environment, building deeper relationships with other co-founders in their same, unique position. Each session, we’ll bring in an impactful veteran co-founder to impart the hard-won insights and lessons that have helped them successfully navigate their own company building journeys.

We’re grateful for our group of veteran Co-Founders who will each be joining us to lead an evening throughout the program.

Join us and together we’ll go deep on a wide range of topics, like how to:

• Invest in yourself and become the best version of you so your company can thrive.
• Build even stronger relationships with your co-founders.
• Explore and master new functional areas to scale gracefully alongside your company.
• Enable your colleagues and direct reports to get the most leverage out of you — as a thought partner, org builder, and everything in between.

Community drives our entire approach at First Round. We believe bringing the right people together at the right time can result in amazing outcomes — and we hope this program can play a small part in helping founders build better companies, together. We also believe the strongest communities represent diverse perspectives and backgrounds, and that programs like this in our industry need to set a new standard to make this a reality.

With that, we’re excited to announce a public call for applications to Co-Founder Forum here today. If you are a non-CEO and non-CTO founder of a Seed/Series A company outside of the First Round portfolio, we’d love to hear from you. If you’re interested in participating, please tell us about yourself or nominate someone you think should be a part of the group by going here.