Jessi Craige, Editor at First Round Capital, has a “pretty full-stack role.” She conducts interviews, writes, and edits for First Round Review. She also strategizes, crafts social media posts, and does assorted content and marketing work to support the rest of the company. The Review was created in 2013 by the company’s first content hire, Camille Ricketts (who now heads up marketing at Notion). Jessi finds that the established publication is an interesting challenge, especially for the tech sector, where everything is usually trying to get off the ground. Camille built the audience with her “coffee meetings at scale” interview series. Jessi’s goal is to further that success and adapt The Review so it can reach new heights.
Does The Review fall under content or marketing at First Round?
If you’ve worked in-house at a tech company, you’ll find that venture funds are organized a little differently. So there’s an investment team that sources and evaluates companies. Then there’s an operations side, or platform team as it’s often called, which supports the companies we’ve invested in, builds our community, and then my piece, which is awareness and brand building.
The Review has always been a scrappy team of two, one editor and one writer, and then a handful of freelancers we lean on. My colleague Emily Stanford and I are the only people working on marketing and brand, but we get so much exposure to the other sides of the business, and we get to learn a lot. The team that’s supporting the companies works with founders every day, so they hear questions on what they need help with and what’s most challenging. It’s a really good hunting ground for what our audience is looking to learn about.
[Read more…] about Jessi Craige Shikman: Being a resource means not talking about ourselves