Sam Parr interviews Camille Ricketts from First Round Capital

About this video

Sam Parr interviews Camille Ricketts, who runs the First Round Review blog alongside one colleague. They discuss First Round’s content strategy—publishing 1-2 deeply reported, 3,000-4,000 word articles per week to serve founders—and the operational decisions behind it, including why they write everything in-house, how they train writers, and which tools and distribution tactics have worked.

Key takeaways

• Camille emphasizes that successful branded content must be either deeply emotional or extremely high-utility; First Round chose high-utility long-form because founders want tactically actionable advice they can reference repeatedly, making text more effective than video for their use case.
• Hiring writers in-house and investing heavily in line-by-line editing (2+ hours per piece initially) proved far more effective than using freelancers; Camille taught her co-writer Sean through detailed feedback on examples, and they eventually developed nearly indistinguishable writing styles.
• First Round distributes each article through email to 135,000 subscribers, then breaks content into smaller pieces (pull quotes, bullet lists) for repeated social promotion on Twitter and LinkedIn; Camille found that compilations of old articles sometimes outperformed original pieces, suggesting unpredictable virality.
• Camille shares that key long-term principles—quality writing, usefulness, and clarity—remain constant, but the packaging and distribution channels continuously evolve; she attributes First Round’s organic growth success partly to having a non-marketing-expert partner who trusts her judgment.

Episode details: published January 19, 2018 · 464 views · 27:49 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. The business ideas, figures and results discussed are the hosts’ and guests’ own claims, shared as brainstorming and entertainment — not verified facts and not investment advice.

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