David Hsu is the founder and CEO of Retool, a San Francisco-based developer tools company that lets engineers build internal software through a drag-and-drop interface. He founded Retool in 2017 at age 25 after pivoting from a failed fintech startup (Cashew/Oatpay) where he kept having to build internal tools from scratch. A Computer Science and Philosophy graduate from Oxford, Hsu grew Retool to $2M ARR before public launch, achieved a $3.2B valuation by 2022 with $140M in total funding from Sequoia Capital and notable angels including the Stripe founders, and now serves over 10,000 companies including Amazon, Netflix, OpenAI, and the US Army.
David George is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the firm's Growth investing practice - a $15 billion operation he built from scratch after joining in 2019. A former General Atlantic investor who backed Airbnb, Slack, CrowdStrike, and Uber at growth stage, George brings a ruthlessly analytical, 'business model snob' approach to late-stage venture. He has since backed Roblox, Databricks, SpaceX, Stripe, Figma, OpenAI, and Anduril, developing distinctive frameworks around 'what vs. how' innovations, push vs. pull market dynamics, and winner-take-all market structures. A Kentucky native with a wrestling background, a Notre Dame summa cum laude degree, and an MBA from Stanford GSB, George is known for his competitive intensity, deep intellectual frameworks, and a Post-it note on his computer that reads: 'Is the market demanding more of my product?'
Brian Balfour is the founder and former CEO of Reforge, the professional development platform for experienced product, growth, and marketing practitioners that grew to 100,000+ alumni before being acquired by Miro in March 2026. Now Chief Growth Officer at Miro, he is best known for the Four Fits Framework - the thesis that Product-Market Fit alone cannot drive $100M+ growth, and that market, product, channel, and model must all interlock. A former VP of Growth at HubSpot, serial entrepreneur, and Venture Partner at Long Journey Ventures, Balfour is one of the most influential thinkers in the product-led growth movement.
Rahul Vohra is a British-Indian entrepreneur and the founder of Superhuman, the cult-favorite AI email client acquired by Grammarly in July 2025. He pioneered the quantitative product-market fit framework that became the most-shared article in First Round Review history, and applied video game design principles to productivity software. Before Superhuman, he co-founded Rapportive (sold to LinkedIn in 2012) and coded RuneScape's legendary 'Monkey Madness I' quest as a 21-year-old intern. He also co-runs Todd & Rahul Capital, a $50M+ angel fund with 120+ portfolio companies.
Matt Lerner is the founder and CEO of SYSTM, a growth coaching and accelerator program for seed-stage startups. A former PayPal GM who helped grow the SMB business from $800M to $10B+, and ex-500 Startups partner who ran the Distro Dojo growth program in London, he now works personally with up to 80 founders per year helping them find their growth levers. He is the author of 'Growth Levers and How to Find Them,' an international bestseller advocating that 10% of what startups try drives 90% of their growth.
Dan Olsen is a Silicon Valley-based product management consultant, author, and speaker best known for writing The Lean Product Playbook (Wiley, 2015) - a practical, framework-driven guide to achieving product-market fit. His Product-Market Fit Pyramid and six-step Lean Product Process have become foundational tools used by product teams at Google, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, and hundreds of other companies worldwide. Through his consulting firm Olsen Solutions (founded 2005), he serves as an Interim VP of Product and strategic advisor. He also runs the Lean Product & Lean UX Meetup, which has hosted 181+ events with over 12,700 members in Mountain View, California.
Todd Jackson is a Partner at First Round Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most storied seed-stage venture funds, where he backs pre-seed and seed-stage founders building B2B SaaS, AI, and enterprise products. His path to the table was anything but conventional: he helped build Gmail from beta to 200M users at Google, rewired Facebook's News Feed under Zuckerberg, built and sold a 2M-user Android app (Cover) to Twitter, and led Dropbox through its 2018 IPO as its first VP of Product and Design. He created First Round's widely cited Product-Market Fit Method, a rigorous four-level framework that has guided 75+ early-stage founders. Rare among VCs, Jackson holds all three operator lenses - big-tech product leader, startup founder, and public-company exec - and deploys them in service of the founders he backs.