Exciting day today for First Round as we celebrate two years of starting it. A number of announcements:

New website

When we first did the event in New York in 2018, I put a one-page website together fairly quickly, not thinking too far ahead and with the premise that it was a one-time event so the website was not really built to accommodate past event archives or provide good information for upcoming events. That has all been addressed in a new proper website in WordPress that makes it much easier to manage each event at its different stages for us and to browse for you.

New York Speakers Announced

Speakers for the New York edition on May 8 have been announced. Early-bird registration will end on March 27. While this is a bigger venue (where we have held the Brand New Conference before) we expect — cautiously and optimistically — to sell out, so don’t sleep on getting tickets!

We are coming to Europe!

Based on expressed interest we are taking a fun — hopefully — risk this year by bringing First Round to Europe in early June. We will be hitting London, Berlin, Barcelona, Madrid, and Amsterdam all in a span of two weeks. We have registered in the four countries and are ready to issue invoices to our VAT-loving audience.

A few notes about the European tour:

• The venues are on the small side, 300 to 400 people, as a way for us to be able to finance this. So, if things go well — fingers crossed — they’ll sell out quickly.
• Both Madrid and Barcelona, the presentations will ALL be in Spanish.
• Both Amsterdam and Berlin, the presentations will ALL be in English. Additionally for these two cities, there will be 6 local speakers and 6 international speakers. (First Round speakers are always local in all other cities.)
• If you are on that side of the world: come! It’s a huge effort to do events in Europe and we would love to keep doing them, so, yeah, come : )
• Speakers will be announced on March 9, but you can get cheaper tickets now in pre-sale.

A few other things

We now have a dedicated account for @FirstRoundUC on both Instagram and Facebook and there is also a proper mailing list.

That’s it! The response to First Round has been so great and we appreciate everyone that has attended and made this new stage of it possible.