Todd Jackson

Background

Todd Jackson is a Partner at First Round Capital based on the West Coast ¹. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University ¹.

Jackson began his career at Google in 2004 as part of the second class of the Associate Product Manager (APM) program, going on to lead product for Gmail for five years and overseeing its growth from beta to over 200 million users ^{2 3}. He then joined Facebook as a Product Manager for News Feed, Photos, and Groups ². In 2012, he left Facebook to co-found Cover, an Android lock screen startup ². Cover was seed-funded by First Round Capital in 2013 and gained over two million users before being acquired by Twitter in April 2014 ^{2 4}.

After the acquisition, Jackson served as Director of Product Management for Twitter’s Content & Discovery teams ¹. He then became VP of Product & Design at Dropbox in 2015, a role he held through the company’s IPO in 2018 ^{1 2}.

In April 2018, Jackson joined First Round Capital as a Founder-in-Residence ⁵. He was promoted to Venture Partner in February 2020, and subsequently became a full Partner ^{6 1}.

Stated Thesis

Jackson publicly describes his investment focus as centered on founders building products that are complex under the hood but simple and powerful for users. From his First Round profile: “Figuring out how to translate complex technology into elegant ‘power tools’ is a passion of mine” ¹.

He has stated that identifying the right market is the single most important decision a founder makes: “When it comes to finding product/market fit, the most important choice you make is the one before you get started — when you identify the right market” ². He has also articulated a four-criteria framework for evaluating startup ideas: the idea should meet functional needs, emotional needs, sit in a billion-plus market, and leverage a breakthrough user experience ².

Jackson says he seeks founders who are “intensely focused, insanely driven and totally immersed in their company-building journeys” and who “aren’t afraid to take what feels like an unsolvable problem, obsess over it until they feel like they have a better understanding of it than anyone else and then build an elegant solution” ¹.

He has supported over 75 founders through his Product-Market Fit (PMF) Method, a structured program he created at First Round that walks seed-stage founders through a framework with four levels of PMF: nascent, developing, strong, and extreme ^{1 7}.

Inferred Thesis

Based on 13 verified investments where Todd Jackson is identified as the lead or key partner (see Portfolio table below):

Stage distribution: All 13 verified investments are seed or Series A stage, consistent with First Round’s seed-stage mandate. Of these, 10 are seed rounds (77%) and 3 are Series A or later follow-on (23%).

Sector breakdown (of 13 verified investments): - AI/ML infrastructure and applications: 5 of 13 (38%) — Fal, Parallel, Actively, Lamini, Town - SaaS/enterprise tools: 4 of 13 (31%) — Turnstile, Kubecost, Subscript, Steno - Design/creative tools: 2 of 13 (15%) — Spline, Daydream - Health-tech: 1 of 13 (8%) — Rupa Health - Edtech: 1 of 13 (8%) — Woolf

Founder profile patterns: Jackson shows a strong preference for technical founders with prior experience at major tech companies. Multiple portfolio founders have backgrounds at Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Coinbase, and Oracle ^{8 9}. His investment in Parallel (Parag Agrawal, former Twitter CEO) and Actively (Stanford AI researchers) reflect this pattern ^{10 11}. He frequently invests in founders he has worked with or knows from his own career in big tech ¹⁰.

Geographic focus: Primarily US-based startups, with concentration in San Francisco/Bay Area. Woolf (EU-based, Oxford) is an outlier ¹².

Pivot tolerance: Jackson has shown willingness to back teams through significant pivots. Fal pivoted from a data product for ML teams to generative media infrastructure, reaching $200M in revenue on an entirely different idea from what was pitched at seed ⁸. He has publicly highlighted this as a sign of exceptional teams.

Check size: Seed investments range from $3.5M (target) to $7.5M (Woolf), consistent with First Round’s typical seed range. The Signal NFX data indicates a range of $100K–$12M with a sweet spot of $3.5M ¹³.

Co-investor patterns: Jackson frequently co-invests with Andreessen Horowitz (Fal), Khosla Ventures and Index Ventures (Parallel), and Bain Capital Ventures (Actively follow-on). He is also comfortable leading rounds solo under First Round’s banner (Steno, Woolf, Daydream).

Notable gap: Despite stating broad interest in consumer and fintech on aggregator profiles ¹⁴, Jackson’s verified portfolio skews heavily toward B2B SaaS, developer infrastructure, and AI — with no verified consumer or fintech investments.

Note: This analysis is based on 13 verified investments where Jackson is identified as the partner. First Round Capital invests as a firm, and Jackson’s full deal involvement may extend beyond what is publicly attributed to him individually.

Portfolio

This table represents verified investments where Todd Jackson is identified as the partner or lead. It does not capture all First Round Capital investments that Jackson may have been involved with internally. Years marked with ~ are approximations based on company founding dates or announcement timing.

In Their Own Words

“Over the years, I’ve been lucky to work on some of the biggest tech products in the world… Figuring out how to translate complex technology into elegant ‘power tools’ is a passion of mine.” — Todd Jackson, First Round Capital website ¹

“When it comes to finding product/market fit, the most important choice you make is the one before you get started — when you identify the right market to go after. Aside from choosing your co-founder, it’s the single most important decision a founder makes.” — Todd Jackson, First Round Review, 2020 ²

“If you think of ideas that simultaneously meet people’s functional needs and emotional needs, while sitting in a big market and making use of a breakthrough user interface, that’s a recipe for a really good company.” — Todd Jackson, First Round Review, 2020 ²

“Building really high-quality products takes an incredible amount of behind-the-scenes discipline, especially as your team grows.” — Todd Jackson, First Round Review, 2020 ²

“Back in 2022, I backed @burkaygur and @gorkem for @fal’s seed while they were working on a product for data teams. Just 3 years later, they’ve hit $200M in revenue on a completely different idea in a category they created: generative media. Very few teams are capable of pulling [this off].” — Todd Jackson, X/Twitter, 2025 ⁸

“Quote-to-cash has been an under-the-radar pain point for startups for several years now.” — Todd Jackson, Turnstile press release, February 2026 ²²

“10 years ago, @paraga and I were working together to introduce ranking to Twitter’s timeline for hundreds of millions of consumers. Now he’s started @p0 to build infrastructure for a very different kind of user: AI agents.” — Todd Jackson, X/Twitter, 2025 ¹⁰

“daydream’s approach to automate and make great SEO possible via LLMs makes complete sense — and it’s clearly solving a huge pain point for their customers.” — Todd Jackson, Daydream seed announcement, 2024 ²¹

“Turnstile is the first platform that’s tailored to how growing companies actually sell, capable of handling complex deals without the complex setup.” — Todd Jackson, Turnstile press release, February 2026 ²²

What Founders Say

Daydream’s founding team stated that Todd Jackson “impressed us with his methodical approach to achieving product-market fit and willingness to get into the details of our business” when describing why they chose First Round to lead their seed round ²¹.

No additional independently sourced founder testimonials found. Jackson’s First Round profile notes he has supported over 75 founders through his PMF Method program ¹, and he is listed as a board member at Steno and Woolf and advisor at Range ¹³, suggesting active post-investment engagement, but public founder quotes about working with him specifically are limited.

Sources