Beginnings Matter

We go to unreasonable lengths for founders, often when all they have is an "imagine if."

Beginnings start with a better question.

Imagine if companies could automate their IT help desks.

Serval

After five years helping build Verkada, Jake Stauch set out to build his own company. He began talking to IT leaders and asking the standard customer discovery questions. What are your biggest pain points? What keeps you up at night? The answers were unremarkable. Most already had tools for the problems they knew they had. Then Jake tried a different question: If you could hire someone to sit next to you and do part of your job, what would you have them do? Suddenly, the conversations changed. IT leaders didn't want a better ticketing system, workflow builder, or IT platform. They wanted someone to handle repetitive help desk requests and manual work. Jake realized the opportunity wasn't to build another tool for IT teams. It was to build an AI teammate. That insight became Serval, now a $1B company used by Notion and Vercel.

How lessons from Verkada shaped this AI-native IT platform, Serval. Watch the full story of how Jake went hard early here.

Beginnings come from letting go.

Imagine if generative media had an infrastructure partner capable of supporting exponential growth.

Fal

We first partnered with Burkay Gur and Gorkem Yurtseven when they were building a tool for data scientists that essentially allowed Python to run inside dbt. The product showed promising signs, but the market pull wasn't overwhelming. Around the same time, Stable Diffusion launched, and they spotted a much larger opportunity: the infrastructure needed to run inference for a new wave of generative media applications. They had the conviction to walk away from something that was merely working and pursue something that showed the potential to truly break out. And it did — fal has an $8B valuation and is used by 1.5M developers from companies like Shopify and Canva.

They pivoted away from paying customers to bet on a demo nobody understood yet. Eighteen months later: $100M ARR. Watch the full story of fal's pivot.

Beginnings take years of narrowing.

Imagine if go-to-market tools were as malleable as clay.

Clay

The idea behind Clay started with an ambitious goal: make the power of programming accessible to more people. Kareem Amin's first attempt, a reimagined terminal, never quite clicked. His second, a spreadsheet that filled itself, felt magical, but it was so horizontal that customers struggled to understand what to do with it. After six years of building, learning and refining, the team focused that same product on a single use case: go to market teams. Once they narrowed the aperture, everything accelerated. Clay became one of the fastest growing software companies of its generation — now with a $5B valuation and customers like Anthropic, Cursor and Stripe.

A product-market-fit masterclass with Kareem Amin from Clay. Watch the deep dive.

Beginnings take five years to get right.

Imagine if documents worked more like software.

Notion

Our partnership with Notion started before a single line of code was written. Ivan, Simon, and Akshay rebuilt Notion from the ground up four times, often working grueling 18-hour days to nail the experience. Most startups would have died along the way. Ivan and Simon were relentless and patient, with a rare mix of design taste and technical brilliance.

Beginnings look too small to matter.

Imagine if any phone could accept credit cards anywhere.

Square

When we first got to know Jack Dorsey, he was chasing a deceptively simple idea: anyone should be able to accept a credit card payment. At the time, payments were slow, expensive, and reserved for established businesses. Many of the smartest people in financial services thought it would never work. The economics seemed broken, and even if it succeeded, helping a vendor at a farmers market accept credit cards felt too small to matter. Jack saw it differently. Through extraordinary product taste, he turned a smartphone into a point of sale, opening commerce to millions of sellers. What began as a small white card reader became a platform that powers businesses around the world.

Beginnings are hands-on.

Imagine if buildings protected the people inside using consumer technology.

Verkada

Our story with Verkada started before the company was incorporated. Hans Robertson, co-founder of Meraki, wanted a world-class product mind to build a new kind of physical security company with. Bill Trenchard, an investor on our team, knew Filip Kaliszan from a prior startup and made the introduction. We led the first round. Filip went to great lengths to get the product into customers’ hands — he was on a ladder pulling cable at 1:00 AM to install cameras at Verkada’s first customer, Beverly Hills Equinox.

That intensity compounded. Verkada now has 30,000 customers across 171 countries, two million devices online and a $5.8B valuation.

Beginnings go against the grain.

Imagine if large spacecraft made previously impossible missions possible.

K2 Space

When we led K2 Space's pre-seed, Karan and Neel Kunjur believed something almost no one else did: that cheap, abundant launch would make satellites bigger, not smaller. While most investors ridiculed it, early customers believed it — signing million-dollar contracts before anything was in space. The best engineers had so much confidence in the company that K2 was able to bring on more former SpaceX and NASA JPL employees than any other startup. In March 2026, K2 launched Gravitas, one of the highest-powered spacecraft ever flown. They’ve since raised almost half a billion dollars at a $3B valuation.

Beginnings are easy to dismiss.

Imagine if kids learned to code while playing video games.

Roblox

We first met Dave Baszucki in 2007 — shortly after Roblox launched out of beta — and passed on the seed round. The product was early, simple and easy to underestimate. Max, the son of First Round partner Chris Fralic, disagreed; he became obsessed with the platform, spending night after night creating and playing. Not long after, the company raised a small extension to its seed round, giving us the chance to correct our mistake and begin a partnership that has now lasted nearly two decades. There were countless moments when the company could have failed, but Dave's belief in user generated worlds never wavered. Today, Roblox is one of the largest platforms on the internet.

The strongest beginnings are the least obvious ones.

Imagine if the web was built with, by, and for AIs.

Parallel

In 2023, when Parag Agrawal came to our partner meeting, he hadn't written a line of code. What he had was a ten-slide deck arguing for a new web, one built for AI rather than humans. Todd Jackson had worked with him at Twitter, and his memo got at why we backed him: Parag makes exceptionally good technology bets, seeing where the world is going and putting his chips on the pieces that will matter most.

Beginnings challenge a fundamental assumption.

Imagine if daily satellite data gave us a new way to understand Earth.

Planet Labs

When we first got to know Will Marshall and Robbie Schingler in 2013, their company was called Cosmogia. At that time, the industry standard was large, expensive satellites built one at a time. Will and Robbie believed the opposite. By shrinking satellites and deploying them in large numbers, they could image the entire Earth every day. To many experts, the idea sounded unrealistic. But the team persisted, launching satellite after satellite until what seemed impossible became inevitable. Today, Planet operates the largest fleet of Earth imaging satellites ever assembled.