First Round Capital was founded in 2004 by Josh Kopelman, a serial entrepreneur who had already taken one company public and sold another to eBay, together with Howard Morgan, a co-founder of Idealab and founding president of Renaissance Technologies. The firm set out specifically to reinvent seed-stage investing, deliberately writing small initial checks - often just $500,000 to $1.5 million - to companies with little more than a founding team and an idea. That approach paid off spectacularly in 2010, when First Round led Uber's first-ever institutional funding round, a bet that grew into one of the highest-multiple returns in venture capital history.
Uber's 2019 IPO - First Round led the company's first-ever institutional funding round in 2010, a roughly $1.25 million bet that became one of the highest-multiple returns in venture history