Todd Jackson
Todd Jackson is a Partner at First Round Capital. Before moving into venture capital, he played a crucial role as VP of Product and Design at Dropbox, guiding the company until its IPO in 2018. Prior to Dropbox, Todd led product management for Twitter’s Content and Discovery teams after selling his startup, Cover, to Twitter in 2014. Before Cover, Todd oversaw product development for Facebook’s Newsfeed, Photos, and Groups. He kickstarted his career at Google as an associate product manager and eventually led product for Gmail, witnessing its growth from beta to 200 million users.
Strategy & Positioning Skills
A systematic pivot requires evaluating and potentially transforming four key levers: the persona, the problem, the promise, and the product.
"You've got the persona, the problem, the promise, and the product. Lattice kept the first one but changed the others. Vanta changed all four."
Finding product-market fit is a sequential journey of optimizing demand, satisfaction, and efficiency through four distinct levels of intensity.
"We've published dozens of articles on the First Round Review, and we have found a very consistent set of patterns, demand satisfaction, and efficiency. But the interesting thing is that you don't go f..."
Achieving 'extreme' product-market fit creates a powerful market pull that simplifies decision-making, attracts talent, and provides massive scaling momentum.
"Because if you find extreme product-market fit, the momentum just carries you, and the market pulls you along. And it's easy to know what to build because you're building the thing that your customers..."