Nick Rubin
"There’s nothing more fulfilling than bringing a product to life that people truly love. I’ve spent my life building things, and now it’s a privilege to back founders who share that same obsession. Helping ambitious people turn bold ideas into real products is what drives me every day, and as a former founder myself, I know firsthand how exhilarating and humbling that journey can be."
I fell in love with technology at a young age for its ability to empower people — and I’ve seen how, when guided by intention, it can be an incredible force for good. That belief shaped my years at Stanford, where I organized hackathons and launched apps from my dorm room, and it's the same energy that drives me at First Round today.
Nick is a generalist early-stage investor at First Round.
Nick studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford, where he organized the university’s hackathon TreeHacks for three years. After graduating, he founded Sendo, an SMS developer platform for AI companies backed by Y Combinator.
A lifelong builder, Nick taught himself to code in middle school and has launched products ranging from a browser extension to expose political donations — which received international media attention — to Winno, a mission-driven news app featured as Apple’s App of the Day. Before starting Sendo, he interned as a software engineer at Hipcamp and at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.