Marketing Specialist, Startups (Part-Time Contract)

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 First Round's Founder Success Team:

At First Round, we invest in founders who possess not just strengths, but areas of true genius, whether it’s technical skill, product judgement, industry expertise, or a deep understanding of their customer’s pain point. But on the other side of every spike in talent are a few areas that are still underdeveloped, parts of the business where a founder doesn't have the skills and expertise — yet.

Simply put, there are many gaps that have yet to be closed when you’re only a 3-person startup. On the path to building a company of consequence, the very best founders are able to level up, both in terms of their own capabilities (by developing new muscles) and in the team around the table (by bringing in complementary talent).

That’s where our Founder Success team comes in, during the pivotal early years of company building. We fill in where we can until there's genius up and down the org chart, closing gaps around existing strengths while helping in the key growth areas on the transition from founder to founder & CEO. This might involve teaching a technical founder how to sell and take their product to market, or guiding them through making their first key hires.

About the Role:

This is a hands-on, founder-facing role to support our early stage portfolio companies with their marketing experiments, with a particular focus on conferences and events. The role will require 20-30 hours of remote work per week, but you must be U.S.-based. This will be a temporary (4 month contract from February to May) role to start, and the potential to continue after the end of the contract.

Your core responsibilities will include:

Project Manage & Strategize Marketing Experiments. Our founders are testing out marketing channels like conferences and client dinners. They need guidance to make sure that not only are the logistics of the events flawless, but that they’re also being thoughtfully strategic about the goals, tracking, positioning, budgets, and tradeoffs of these high stakes events as part of their overall GTM plans.

Teach & Train Founders on All Thing Marketing. We take the “I do, we do, you do” approach with our founder services. You’ll be able to meet founders where they are and provide advice, templates, and/or hands-on help with their marketing projects across a variety of channels, industries, and team sizes.

You could be a great Marketing Specialist at First Round if:

You have a minimum of 5 years of experience supporting early stage (<$10M in ARR) B2B companies. You’ve done the zero to one thing, working super closely with pre seed or seed stage companies on early demand gen strategies across industries, buyer personas, ACVs and GTM motions. You have a lot of empathy for and experience with working with early stage founding teams.

You have a services mindset. Whether you were at an agency or had your own freelance/advisory gigs, you know how to engage, manage, and transition multiple clients at a time. You love to wow your clients by anticipating their needs and going above and beyond with creative ways to support their goals. You’re amazing at calendar juggling and code switching between wildly different contexts.

You’re prescriptive. You understand demand gen isn’t a one-size-fits-all function. You’ve seen enough variety in your career to be able to deeply digest a company’s ICP/persona/motion and recommend demand tactics that deliver results. In essence, you know how to be prescriptive (not just copy an old playbook).

You’re experimental. You love to create hypotheses and quickly test their validity. You’re amazing at tracking what you’re doing and understanding what’s working / not and iterating along the way. You know how to analyze Google Analytics, LinkedIn ad performance, cold outreach campaign metrics and all the other marketing tactics in between.

You’re scrappy and fast. You always manage to just figure stuff out, even with limited support or budget. You’re extremely hands on and excited to dig in with founders. And nothing is too small for you to do. You love the idea of taking a problem or goal and coming up with new ways to tackle that problem or achieve that goal.

You embody extreme ownership. You own your function through and through. No one has to tell you the next step to take or the next email to write. You’re extremely autonomous and are a driver, pushing things forward and proactively unblocking barriers on the way to the goal. You are obsessed with details and process. You’ll likely be supporting a handful of companies at one time. This requires an exceptional level of organization and detail orientation. This looks like you having detailed notes on every engagement, using Notion like a pro, having amazing CRM hygiene. You remember the little things and never let a ball drop.

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. 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!