Rob has led investments in companies such as Mint.com (acquired by Intuit), HomeRun (acquired by Rearden Commerce), Uber, TaskRabbit, Square, Get Satisfaction, and DNAnexus.
Prior to joining First Round Capital, Rob was at Omidyar Network where he was their first venture investor. He led most of their initial venture capital deals and later built and ran the technology investing group.
Before that, Rob was at Palm where he started up their corporate venture fund. While in that role he also managed the strategy effort around Palm OS that led to the spinout of PalmSource. Rob started at Palm as product manager for Palm OS. During this time, Rob was responsible for the versions of Palm OS on dozens of devices including the initial Treo products.
Rob previously spearheaded complex, system-level product development efforts atcompanies such as Geoworks and Go Corp where he focused on building products for the Japanese market. He began his career with the Japan External Trade Organization, studying international trade issues and building relationships between US and Japanese businesses, at a time when trade friction between the two countries was at its peak.
Rob has an MBA from Columbia University and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.
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@PC_Endurance go Adrienne - that is where my money is...
Articles
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Michael Lopp (aka Rands) is a director at Palantir, an author of a number of books on software engineering and management best practices, as well as an ex-manager of the Mac OSX engineering team. He also hates meetings. At the First Round CTO Summit Talk, Lopp explains how meetings can drain the time of engineers eager to solve the world’s biggest problems. Nevertheless, they are essential to aligning large teams together. Lopp shares the strategies he uses to run effective meetings for teams of all sizes. Read on to get his detailed opinion on meetings, including a rubric to help you evaluate your own company meetings.
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Keith Rabois has helped build some of the most important companies in Silicon Valley including PayPal, LinkedIn and Square. In this session from First Round Capital CEO Summit 2013, Rabois shares what he believes the role of a COO is, how to find the best talent and convince them to join your company and why radical transparency matters. The article below is not a transcript of Rabois’ talk, but rather an interpretation. To hear his talk in full, watch the video at the bottom of the page.
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If there’s a company out there who knows “software development”, it’s Pivotal Labs. Edward Hieatt and his colleagues at Pivotal come from the agile school of development, and in their client work have noticed many startups begin to experience an erosion of their development culture as they grow in size. Most of the over 100 companies Pivotal works with every year come to them because they think they just need more development support to ship faster or manage their growth, but more often than not, Hieatt believes the problem is actually related to the broader issue of development culture. In particular, for early-stage VC-backed founders, the growing pains affect the culture of software development to the point where shipping schedules and innovation are materially impacted – almost bringing companies to a halt.
The solution, which Hieatt puts forward at First Round Capital CTO Summit, is bold: a culture built completely around pair programming. Normally when engineers talk about the benefits of pairing, they typically think of writing code faster or better, but Hieatt actually believes it's one of the keys to great culture. Additionally, the concept of pairing evokes a range of emotions and challenges conventional wisdom about how teams form and work today. For instance, today’s culture in early-stage teams often allows developers to work in autonomous silos, or to work on sprints, to make their own hours, and a host of other norms, which stifles software development culture. In addition, engineering leaders are worried that pairing will actually slow the team and reduce developer output or at the very least, bother their engineers who are used to sitting alone and coding by themselves all day.
