Special Partner, Decision Science
First Round CapitalCheck size: Firm-level: First Round says its average initial investment is $3.5M, with investments in rounds from $100K to $20M. This is not a personal check range for Annie.
Annie's role applies decision science to venture and company building: formalize investment rubrics, reduce cognitive bias and noise, improve data collection, separate decision quality from outcome luck, and retrospectively calibrate decisions. With founders, she uses base rates, expected value, explicit benchmarks, and pre-committed kill criteria to distinguish productive grit from escalation of commitment.
Annie's documented remit is better decision process rather than a personal sector thesis. She is interested in high-quality decisions under uncertainty: explicit assumptions, multiple possible outcomes, base-rate awareness, disconfirming evidence, and teams willing to learn and recalibrate.
No personal deal pass criteria are published. Her decision-science work warns against outcome-based reasoning, unsupported certainty, hindsight and confirmation bias, sunk-cost escalation, ignoring base rates, and goals without pre-agreed conditions for changing course.
Do not treat Annie as a conventional deal lead. In a decision or portfolio-support conversation, frame the choice, enumerate plausible outcomes, state probabilities and assumptions, use the relevant reference class, surface evidence that would change your view, and define measurable leading indicators and kill criteria before commitment and identity make updating harder.
Define an investment rubric before seeing the outcome, collect the information used at decision time, reduce bias and noise, then review the process retrospectively without confusing luck with skill.
Before commitment escalates, specify measurable leading indicators, a review date, and the conditions that will trigger a pivot or stop; use an outside advisor to hold the decision-maker to those terms.
Improve decisions under uncertainty by making assumptions explicit, consulting outside views, using base rates, and evaluating process separately from the eventual outcome.
Grit is useful only while the path retains positive expected value; founders should define leading indicators and kill criteria before sunk costs and identity cloud judgment.
“We tend to think about quitting as leaving the court. But pivoting is still quitting.”
— https://review.firstround.com/grit-or-quit-tactical-advice-for-founders-facing-tough-company-building-decisions/
“Start thinking about waste as a forward-looking problem, not a backward-looking one.”
— https://review.firstround.com/grit-or-quit-tactical-advice-for-founders-facing-tough-company-building-decisions/
Before First Round, Annie spent two decades as a professional poker player, won a World Series of Poker bracelet and the Tournament of Champions, and retired in 2012. She studied cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania as an NSF fellow and earned a master's degree, later returning as a visiting scholar and executive-education teacher. She co-founded the Alliance for Decision Education in 2014 and wrote Thinking in Bets, How to Decide, and Quit. First Round formalized her Special Partner role in 2022 after several years of collaboration.