First Round already knew founders and business leaders with valuable experience. Ricketts brought that knowledge to a wider audience, turning their lessons, mistakes, and methods into practical articles for founders.
The partners of First Round Capital knew founders, executives, and operators who had built important technology companies. The firm held more than 70 community events each year, while its portfolio leaders regularly exchanged advice on hiring, product development, fundraising, and management. The knowledge was already there. Much of it, however, remained inside meetings, private introductions, and conversations that ended when people left the room.
Camille Ricketts helped First Round bring that private advantage into public view.
She became the founding editor of First Round Review, the firm’s long-form editorial publication for founders and startup operators. Through the Review, Ricketts drew out the thinking of experienced operators and turned it into detailed company-building guidance. Over time, founders outside First Round’s portfolio could learn from the same kind of expertise circulating within its network, often before they had ever spoken with one of its investors.
First Round could say it had a strong founder community. The Review gave people a chance to see what that community actually knew.
Before First Round, she learned how to make expertise useful
Ricketts had wanted to become a journalist from an early age. She edited newspapers in school and college before beginning her professional career at The Wall Street Journal. Later, she returned to San Francisco and joined VentureBeat, where she covered climate and green technology.
Her reporting at VentureBeat frequently brought her into contact with Tesla. After roughly two years, Tesla’s head of marketing and communications approached her about joining the company. The move took her from reporting on companies to helping one explain itself.
At Tesla, Ricketts worked in communications during the company’s early years. She later moved into content strategy at the nonprofit Kiva. Together, those roles showed her that company-produced content did not have to sound like advertising. Reporting, research, and careful editing could still sit at the center of the work. A company could explain complicated ideas without reducing them to slogans or promotional claims.
By the time she arrived at First Round, Ricketts understood both sides of the editorial relationship. She knew how a journalist searched for a story, but she also understood why executives often became cautious once the questions began.
That background became useful almost immediately. First Round needed someone who could recognize valuable operating knowledge, ask enough questions to uncover it, and organize the answers without replacing the expert’s voice with the writer’s own.
The opportunity was larger than producing a steady stream of blog posts. First Round was surrounded by people who had already worked through difficult problems. The challenge was finding the parts of their experience that another founder could use.
First Round had the opportunity before it had the editorial system
First Round formally introduced First Round Review on June 28, 2013, after working on the project for four months. By then, more than 30 articles had already been published. The firm described its ambition as building something similar to a Harvard Business Review for startups.
The idea came from a gap First Round had noticed in startup media. Plenty of publications covered funding rounds, product launches, acquisitions, and industry news. Far fewer explained how companies hired teams, built products, changed direction, or handled difficult operating decisions.
A reader could usually find out that a company had succeeded. Learning how the people inside it reached that result was much harder.
First Round believed those explanations were sitting inside the minds of experienced practitioners. The firm already heard them at portfolio events and in conversations between founders. The Review offered a way to capture that knowledge before it disappeared.
Ricketts joined in the summer of 2013, initially as a freelancer. In the beginning, she handled the interviews, topic development, and writing herself. She later became First Round’s head of content and marketing.
As she took control of the editorial work, the publication began to develop a clearer identity.
Rather than asking First Round’s investors to comment on every market trend, the Review featured people who had carried out the work. An article about hiring could come from someone who had built a team. A piece on pricing could examine the decisions of an operator who had tested different approaches and lived with the consequences.
The subject did not have to work for a First Round portfolio company. What mattered was the quality of the person’s experience and whether it could be made useful to someone else. Ricketts described the larger goal as championing exceptional people and making their advice available, even when they had no direct connection to the firm.
That choice gave the Review a purpose beyond covering successful companies. It could examine the decisions, failed attempts, and working methods behind the visible result.
The editorial process brought out what conventional interviews missed
Much of the Review’s strength came from the work completed before an article was written.
Ricketts and her small editorial team worked with each subject to identify a precise topic. It had to connect what the person understood deeply, what they were prepared to discuss honestly, and what a startup founder could apply.
That early focus kept the interview from drifting into broad career advice. Instead of asking an executive to describe their leadership philosophy, the team could examine a particular hiring decision, product change, management problem, or period of rapid growth.
Questions were shared before the interview. The team then conducted a conversation of roughly an hour, transcribed it, and shaped the material into a structured article. With the central subject already defined, the editor could spend more time asking about the sequence of events, the trade-offs, the failed attempts, and the exact process that had been used.
Ricketts also treated the interviewee as a partner in the process. Subjects were allowed to review what would be published. She found that this made people more comfortable discussing weaknesses, personal mistakes, and difficult moments that might help another founder.
The practice differed from traditional journalism, where allowing a source to review an article can raise concerns about editorial independence. First Round Review was working toward a different outcome. It was not an investigative newsroom trying to hold its subjects to account. Its purpose was to document operating knowledge accurately and in enough detail to make it useful.
Because the subject understood that purpose, the conversation could sometimes move beyond the careful answers executives normally give in public. Collaboration helped the team reach details that a shorter, more controlled interview might have missed.
Another decision shaped the publication’s voice. Ricketts removed the writer’s byline from most pieces. At first, the reason was practical. She was writing nearly everything herself and did not want every article to make the Review look like her personal blog.
Eventually, the absence of a byline became part of the editorial style. Ricketts wanted readers to feel that they were hearing directly from the featured operator. The editor still chose the material, clarified the ideas, and created the structure. Yet the person who had lived through the experience remained at the center of the article.
The pieces were also unusually detailed. Ricketts said they commonly ran between 2,000 and 5,000 words. Still, length was never valuable on its own. The extra space gave the team room to include steps, examples, decisions, and mistakes that would otherwise have been cut.
Her standard was practical: readers should be able to use the advice that day or soon afterward.
As a result, the Review rarely felt like a collection of polished executive opinions. Its best articles showed how a person had thought through a problem and what another operator could learn from the process.
The Review made First Round valuable before the pitch
Ricketts understood that the Review could not earn trust if every article eventually turned into an advertisement for First Round.
For that reason, the publication regularly featured operators from outside the firm’s portfolio. It also avoided attaching an aggressive fundraising message or sales-oriented call to action to every article. Ricketts believed readers would be less willing to share something that felt like a promotional page disguised as useful advice.
First Round had to trust that consistently valuable work would shape how people saw the firm.
At the same time, the Review had a clear business purpose.
First Round wanted promising founders to become familiar with the firm and eventually consider it when raising capital. Ricketts acknowledged that a wider readership could introduce First Round to more entrepreneurs. The publication also showed those founders the quality of the firm’s knowledge and relationships.
In practice, the content became proof of what First Round could offer.
The firm did not need to repeatedly claim that its network could help founders. Readers could see the people it had access to and learn from them directly. With every strong interview, the community surrounding First Round became a little more visible.
Ricketts also worked to expand the publication beyond First Round’s website. Email was part of the distribution strategy from the beginning. Later, publications including Fast Company and Inc. approached the team about syndicating its articles. That early interest led Ricketts to pursue similar arrangements with Quartz and Business Insider. Shortened versions could appear on those sites and direct interested readers toward the complete article.
Meanwhile, the team remained active on social media and paid particular attention to influential readers who shared its work.
To help track that activity, the team built something called the Influencer Bot. When someone in its audience with more than 10,000 followers shared or discussed a Review article, the team received an alert. It could then engage with that person, amplify the mention, or share it internally with the First Round team.
As the archive grew, discoverability became another challenge. Ricketts and First Round platform leader Brett Berson reorganized the publication into nine digital magazines covering subjects such as management, fundraising, product, and company culture.
The team still published only about two new articles each week. The redesign did not create nine separate publishing operations. Instead, it made years of existing knowledge easier for readers with different interests to navigate.
Together, these choices helped the Review become more than a marketing channel. It began to function as a growing library of company-building knowledge.
What did her work achieve?
First Round Review showed encouraging results early. By June 2013, some articles were receiving more than 1,000 tweets, while the new content had contributed to a fivefold increase in visitors to First Round’s website. Its first article, about Etsy’s effort to increase the number of female engineers by almost 500% in one year, received tens of thousands of views and attracted coverage from several major publications.
The audience continued to grow. By 2015, the Review was averaging more than 250,000 unique visitors per month over a three-month period, with readers spending more than four minutes on the page. The publication was also contributing to First Round’s investment pipeline and had helped the firm close deals.
Around the same period, monthly page views reached approximately 480,000, while individual articles averaged about 2,000 social shares. The Review later grew to roughly half a million monthly readers and more than 100,000 email subscribers. Its email audience eventually passed 127,000.
What the figures show is that Ricketts helped build an editorial property that reached the people First Round most wanted to serve. More importantly, she gave the firm something competitors could not reproduce by simply publishing longer articles or increasing output.
The real advantage came from the combination of access, interviewing skills, editorial judgment, and trust. Ricketts created a standard that made experienced people willing to share what they knew and made founders willing to keep reading.
What can leaders learn from Camille Ricketts’ work at First Round?
The clearest lesson from her time at First Round is not that every company should launch a long-form publication.
First Round Review worked because its editorial model grew out of something the firm genuinely possessed: access to experienced operators with useful knowledge. Ricketts created a disciplined method for recognizing that knowledge, drawing it out, and turning it into material that founders could apply.
She also understood that the person with the most valuable story was not always the most famous executive. The operator who designed the hiring process, repaired the product strategy, or built the customer system might have more to teach than the person who regularly appeared on conference stages.
That insight expanded the publication’s range. It also made its advice more practical because the people being interviewed had often worked directly on the problem being discussed.
Most companies talk about their networks, expertise, and customer knowledge. Far fewer make those advantages visible in a form that people outside the organization can use.
Ricketts showed First Round how to do that.
Her work made the firm’s relationships visible, its knowledge reusable, and its support for founders believable. First Round’s network had always been valuable. Through the Review, people outside it could finally understand why.
The best content does more than show expertise. It turns experience into something another person can use.