Bill Trenchard — Co-Founder

I’ve spent my life working in the formative years of startups — the fragile early stretch when everything is still taking shape and the path ahead is just starting to harden. I started my first company at nineteen and learned how much the early moves matter: who you hire, what you build, who you build for, and how you tell the story. Those choices become the foundation everything else rests on. Get them right, and the startup compounds. Get them wrong, and you spend years trying to undo them. I’ve lived that firsthand — leading multiple startups through nearly every scenario: raising money in forty-eight hours and failing to raise for six months, building products customers loved and ones they ignored, hiring great people and having to let people go, scaling past $100M in revenue and then stalling out, selling one company and merging another. Since joining First Round almost fifteen years ago, I’ve worked to be the kind of partner I wished I’d had — someone who knows how lonely those early stretches can feel and what it takes to make it through them. Each time I work with a founder, my goal is to help set the right foundation so the company that follows has the strength to endure. I work best with founders who chart their own course — who care more about serving their customers than anything else. The ones who dig deep to find insights others miss, and who have the rare intensity to turn those insights into lasting businesses. That approach has led me to partner early with companies like Uber, Looker, Verkada, Superhuman and Flexport — and more recently, Rillet, Serval, Assort Health, Omni Analytics, Cache, EvolutionIQ, and Together AI.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Venture Capital expert with extensive experience in startup growth and investment.

Experience: 27 yrs 4 mos