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Todd Jackson
Partner at First Round Capital
Todd Jackson is a Partner at First Round Capital, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco, California. He joined First Round in January 2020, bringing extensive experience in product management and startup leadership to the role. Prior to his position at First Round, Jackson held significant roles at major tech companies and startups, including:
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VP of Product & Design at Dropbox (2015-2018): He played a key role in guiding Dropbox through its growth phase and successful IPO.
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Director of Product Management at Twitter (2014-2015): Jackson led the Content & Discovery teams, focusing on enhancing user engagement through product innovations.
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Co-founder and CEO of Cover (2013-2014): His startup, which developed a smart lock screen for Android, was acquired by Twitter.
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Product Manager at Facebook (2011-2012): He worked on critical features such as the Newsfeed and Photos.
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Group Product Manager for Gmail at Google (2004-2011): Jackson was instrumental in the development and expansion of Gmail, significantly increasing its user base during his tenure.
Jackson is known for his expertise in product strategy and has invested in numerous startups across various sectors, including SaaS, consumer products, and health tech. He holds both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.12345
Highlights
Talked to a few founders recently who were building on Sora. Interesting pattern: the model was getting quite good. Inference usage up ~3X in recent months. Startups using it for video ads, product content, character-consistency - motion quality and audio sync were ahead of others.
But the consumer app was withering based on the numbers I've seen online. Under 500K users, burning $1M a day, downloads down 67% in three months.
OpenAI needed the GPUs for other higher-priority/higher-revenue use cases. Let a billion-dollar Disney deal die with less than an hour's notice, etc.
Bummer for the teams who were building on it. But the things Sora got right — realistic physics, synchronized audio, character consistency — those capabilities are already spreading. Kling, Seedance, Runway, Veo are all iterating fast. Feels like OpenAI proved the market wants these things, and now other labs get to run with it. I'm excited for all of these models to get better and better.




