TWITTER_POST

Liz Wessel said that while at Y Combinator she wrote more than 20 internal…

2026-02-04 · 16:21 UTC ·lizwessel ·1 min read

Brief

Liz Wessel is turning internal startup operating advice into public content after seeing repeated demand from founders. Drawing on more than 20 YC-era articles and later First Round founder memos, she is selectively releasing tactical guides and says weighted pipeline management is a priority topic because it directly affects early-stage revenue forecasting, hiring plans, and runway decisions.

Why it matters

Liz Wessel said that while at Y Combinator she wrote more than 20 internal founder-only User Manual articles, mostly focused on enterprise sales, and later rewrote and expanded many of them as private one-page Google Docs for First Round Capital founders.

Key details

  • She has started publishing some of the purely tactical documents publicly on X as Articles, including topics like setting OKRs/KPIs, attending sales conferences, and hiring a contract lawyer, because founders reference them often enough to justify broader sharing.
  • Wessel plans to keep writing in spring 2026 and said her next article will likely cover weighted pipelines, which she argues many first-time founders do not understand despite its importance for projecting revenue, planning sales hires, and managing runway.
Source evidence

title: @lizwessel: Back when I worked at YC, I wrote over 20 articles for the internal (founder acc...
author: lizwessel
contenttype: twitterpost
published: 2026-02-04T16:21:18+00:00
source_url: https://x.com/lizwessel/status/2019083854506774656/history

word_count: 246

Tweet by @lizwessel

Back when I worked at YC, I wrote over 20 articles for the internal (founder access only) User Manual, most about enterprise sales. Then when I joined as a Partner at First Round, I found myself re-writing (and expanding on) a bunch of them as Private google doc one pagers for my FRC founders. Some docs need to stay private in there, but there are a bunch that are purely tactical and have no reason not to be shared externally (First Round is big on sharing content for the whole startup community — hence The Review). So I’ve started publicly posting some — Setting OKRs/KPIs… doing sales conferences…. hiring a contract lawyer… these articles are just starting points ofc, but I find my founders referencing them enough that I thought it was worth it to keep going. So I’m going to keep posting them (here on X as Articles, because, why not?) even though they seem weirdly niche/specific and random. Next one: I was thinking about weighted pipelines. Mostly because first time founders usually have no clue what it is or why it matters, and then they often struggle to project revenue and therefore project sales hires and runway, etc. Lmk if there’s any other high level topics that come to mind that you wish you knew about in the early days of founding a company! I’m going to have a decent amount of time to write this Spring and I’m thinking of writing a bunch.

Posted: 2026-02-04T16:21:18.000Z
Engagement: 317 likes, 6 retweets, 27 replies