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.
Growth Skills
Product-market fit is a multi-stage journey (Nascent, Developing, Strong, Extreme) rather than a binary state, defined by the intersection of demand, satisfaction, and efficiency.
"There's essentially four levels of product-market fit: nascent, developing, strong, extreme."
True product-market fit requires not just demand and satisfaction, but also an efficient economic model where the marginal customer becomes easier to acquire over time.
"Extreme product-market fit is a state of widespread demand for a product that satisfies a critical need and crucially can be delivered repeatably and efficiently to each customer."
Marketing Skills
Positioning a product within an existing category where budget already exists is often more effective than trying to create a new category.
"When we changed our positioning to play in an existing category of CLM, but a much better CLM, but customers are already looking for a CLM, they're already looking to spend money on a CLM, and just ex..."
Product Management Skills
The 'Four Ps' framework (Persona, Problem, Promise, Product) is the core diagnostic tool for finding product-market fit.
"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."
Effective discovery must move beyond polite conversation to 'dollar-driven' validation to avoid being 'friend-zoned' by potential customers.
"We refer to it as dollar-driven discovery. We get very specific about not just the normal way of doing customer conversations and customer discovery, but how do you find that a customer is willing to..."
Directly asking customers for brutal honesty about the product's criticality helps founders avoid the 'friend zone' trap.
"I need your help. It is very important to me that this company succeeds and does not fail. So I don't want you to be nice to me. I want you to tell me is Persona a necessity for your company? If we we..."
The guest provides a specific framework (The Four Ps) and tactical advice on how to execute a pivot when stuck in the early stages of product-market fit.
"Most founders do a 10% pivot, and what they need to be doing is a 200% pivot."
Sales & GTM Skills
Selling the vision or mock-ups before building the full product provides the necessary signal to ensure the product satisfies the other three Ps (Persona, Problem, Promise).
"I tend to gravitate towards the, 'I want to sell it before I build it,' because I really want the signal from customers and I want that to be the guide and the oxygen that drives what I'm building."