I am a Partner at First Round Capital and am fascinated by design+technology+startups. Before joining First Round, I worked at AND 1 from “day 2″ and founded a fitness video game company.
After college I spent six years helping to scale AND 1 Basketball from $15 million to over $225 million in revenue. As the Creative Director for Footwear, I led product direction, managed relationships with national retail accounts and created the initial concept for the signature AND 1 marketing property—the AND 1 Mix Tape.
In 2003, I wanted to build fitness technology and founded an independent videogame company to do it. We developed and published Yourself!Fitness, the first fitness game for Xbox and PlayStation2. I was responsible for managing the marketing and distribution and secured retail partnerships with Nordstrom and Best Buy as well as promotional partnerships with Proctor & Gamble and McDonald’s.
After consulting for MTV on product and marketing, I decided to pursue an MBA at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. I earned my MBA in 2009 with honors and a double major in Operations and Information Management and Finance. A college basketball player at Haverford College, I have maintained my addiction to sneakers and a decent trashtalk vocabulary. I live in Brooklyn with my wife, Carrie, and daughter, Etta.
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@PC_Endurance go Adrienne - that is where my money is...
Articles
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Sarah Harrison, a user experience design veteran at the custom fit online lingerie store True&Co, has developed a methodology for continuously optimizing designs that mixes subjective decision-making with empirical testing.
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In 2009, Airbnb was close to going bust. Like so many startups, they had launched but barely anyone noticed. The company’s revenue was flatlined at $200 per week. Split between three young founders living in San Francisco, this meant near indefinite losses on zero growth. As everyone knows, venture investors look for companies that show hockey stick graphs, and according to co-founder Joe Gebbia, his company had a horizontal drumstick graph. The team was forced to max out their credit cards.
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Jason Putorti has made the boring beautiful and helped expand the role of software in the lives of ordinary people. As one of the founding members of the Mint team and as co-founder of the recently acquired Votizen, he’s worked on creating interfaces that inspire trust in users from the moment they lay eyes on them. Putorti also occupied the first-ever designer in residence role at any venture firm with Bessemer Ventures. He’s currently Creative Director at Causes.
