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 the Events Coordinator Role

Your core role as Events Coordinator will include:

• Driving cross functional event teams (event sponsor, event hosts, etc) to ensure all tasks are on track and events are setup for success.

• Managing the end to end event design, planning, budgeting, logistics and on-site coordination of experiences at our SF office and occasional offsite events.

• Attending on average 2-3 First Round events and dinners weekly, and guaranteeing each event is executed to our standards.

• Communicating seamlessly with external event attendees and external vendors to ensure that events run smoothly.

Experience Requirements:

• 1-3 years of progressive event coordination experience.

• Experience successfully managing at least 4-5 events (or the equivalent) at any given time.

Nice to Haves:

• A short-list of vendors of all kinds in the Bay area.

• Experience doing events and programs in the startup ecosystem.

This role is based in San Francisco with a minimum of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday required in office.

You could be a great Events Coordinator at First Round if:

• You’re obsessed with the little things. We’re looking for someone who would immediately notice if a tablecloth is uneven or the fonts on a menu printout don’t match. You care about getting the little things right and believe it’s the small details that make or break an event. You’re someone who leaves no stone unturned and is constantly thinking one step ahead of any event planning or execution moment.

• You have extreme ownership and work with an unusual sense of urgency and autonomy. People have told you that you’re amazing at getting sh*t done, and you work with a ton of urgency. You don’t have to be told what to do, you always just figure it out.

• You are the most organized person you know. Sometimes, we have five events going on in one week. We’re looking for someone who is able to understand the needs of each stakeholder and attendee, as well as project manage what needs to be done for each event – from booking venues and chefs, to collecting the dietary restrictions of each guest, to managing event invites and follow-up reminders. You are great at context switching between different types of events or modes of work (planning vs execution). This doesn’t drain you, but rather you find it motivating and exciting.

• You’re great at cross-functional leadership and can work across a spectrum of stakeholders. You won’t manage anyone in this role, but you will be bringing together multiple stakeholders to ensure event tasks are on track. You know how to adapt your style depending on the audience, and have a presence and the ability to earn respect from each of your collaborators. When tasks are overdue or decisions haven’t been made, you’re proactive and are comfortable pushing where you need to push and holding people accountable who don’t report to you.

• You’re service-oriented and flexible. You’re the right fit for this role if you are service-oriented and are motivated to jump in and help, even in moments when you aren’t asked to. That could be filling up waters, helping servers bring food to guests, or re-printing a name tag for a guest who forgot to RSVP.

• You’re incredibly creative and not afraid to push the boundaries. Part of this role is to help bring new ideas and energy to the events that we host! We want you to be creative and think outside the box to help us innovate and execute on our strategy.

• You’re a people person and love bringing communities together. Planning events and getting people together is a passion of yours. In your free time, you might be the person who’s pulling friends together for a party or intimate gathering, or the one folks consult about their weddings or birthday parties. You may even be a Partiful super user! We would love if you brought the same energy to our team.

Please note this role is based in San Francisco and requires at least 3 days per week in-office.

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. We go to the ends of the earth for our founders. You might think our role as venture capitalists is to simply maximize returns. But at First Round, we believe when we put founders first, everything will follow — epic returns included. We fill in the gaps on a founder's team before they even have one and get to work on the unglamorous tasks that actually move companies forward. We'll know we've done our job when they're left feeling startled that an investor would go to these lengths for them.

• Take the wheel. Welcome to First Round. Everything is now your responsibility. Cartographers, not navigators, are the ones who tend to do well here. There are no career ladders to climb or boxes to check at First Round. If you find ways to do more for the business and our customers, your role will naturally expand alongside it. First Round is a haven for people who see themselves as architects of their reality, not casualties of circumstance. We know we have agency over our agency, and we make the conscious choice to exercise it every day.

• Treat the little things like big things. “Magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” 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. This is decidedly not a "LGTM" culture. It is a culture where the little things are the big things.

• Give your unvarnished opinions and unwavering support. We strive to be kind, not nice. Being nice and being kind are not one and the same. In our view, kindness means being generous, helpful, and compassionate. Nice can be used as a convenient shortcut; kindness cultivates long-term excellence. 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. So while we strive to be a founder’s coach in the corner, part of that responsibility requires being the kick in the ass when they need it most. We try to be as honest as possible in every encounter, whether that’s bluntly telling a founder how they can step up their game, or delivering radical candor in our feedback for teammates.

• Invent and wander. “Action produces information." We’re fans of starting small, shipping fast, and obsessively improving. The idea for the First Round Review wasn’t the product of a six-month strategy session — we wrote up a few blog posts and just shipped them. That’s because reality has a surprising amount of detail and edges that are difficult to anticipate. Each step — even the wrong one — reveals new information that improves your next move. We prefer to make the gap between having an idea and knowing if it works as small as possible.