Our Work

We are an experienced group of Founders, startup executives, and corporate innovation GMs who love to build and solve complex problems that help make the world a better place.

Subscribe to our Product Newsletter and Podcast: Emergent

Client Testimonials

The growing trend of companies fulfilling core business functionalities "as-a-service"  has made its way to product! With First Principles, we instantly got a team of veteran product experts taking full ownership of managing our new product development, from strategy to execution. It is difficult to understate the amount of friction that First Principles has reduced in our product dev process, not to mention the tremendous value their experience has added to our effort. As CEO, there is nothing more reassuring to know than your product dev is in good hands!

-Martin Kurucz, CEO @ Sterling Data Company

Adam is an outstanding CEO coach. He’s helped us take the momentum we generated through our Series B and channel it into strategy and vision refinements as well as stronger product-led growth initiatives and features. He magically blends knowledge of product, engineering, and marketing functions with knowledge of running complex businesses and distills these lessons into bite-sized, actionable guidance even for the most difficult situations. He’s a real human who admits when he doesn’t know and can reflect on his own wins and misses to extract meaningful lessons. He knows when to ask questions I wasn’t thinking about, how to re-frame tough decisions so they feel winnable, and is generally a great person to have in my corner.

-Jin Stedge, CEO @ TrueNorth

Adam and First Principles helped us clarify and crystallize our product vision early after our first major fundraise. His firm additionally developed a series of sales enablement materials that distilled our complex space & AI offerings into clear customer value. This allowed us to start market-testing early concepts ahead of building our satellite constellation. Adam's guidance was always refreshing and thoughtful, and it helped orient us toward creative ways to test these difficult product hypotheses.

-COO, Series A

Working with Adam is fantastic! He brings a high level of professionalism and experience to our organization and mutual clients. He rolls up his sleeves and works alongside us, even joining us on client visits. He helped us structure and implement a massive value-based redesign of a complex AI product, including conducting interviews and leadership workshops, resulting in a successful new flow in just eight days. Additionally, he assisted a joint client in acquiring its first users after a year of stagnation by refining its strategy and implementing fresh tactics. His strategic leadership has also helped our organization mature and I am excited about the next phases of our collaboration.

-James Sullivan, CEO @ OneSeven

Adam's product coaching has been immensely helpful and led to significant value creation for our business. The most impactful outcome was the manner in which it helped us systematically concentrate on the most important factors driving our business results while giving us the courage to ignore the noise we face on a day-to- day basis. As we are two co-founders, it's wonderful to have a joint weekly session with an expert, who is objective and asks us the hard questions which forces us to think from first principles. With Adam's support, we've succeeded in finding numerous opportunities to reduce burn and increase product leverage in our two-sided marketplace. Furthermore. we've come up with numerous ways to refine our value proposition for the ICP within a clear target market. In addition, we developed the metrics that inform our strategic decision making. Lastly, he has been a driving force in  crafting the experiments we ran to identify the best product developments.

-Max Willert and Luca Lallopizzi, Co-Founders & CEO/CPO @ Hyre Talents

We accelerated from ideas to value for end-customers in record time by tapping into expert-level AI+geospatial+space product talent from First Principles. Together we closed millions in contracts in record time and two strong fundraising rounds. Adam has continuously worked to elevate our vision for the product while simultaneously ensuring that highly complex features deliver their intended value on numerous occasions. Thanks to the fractional support model, we've earned strong traction in government and early demand signal for commercial use cases in record time, giving us the opportunity to be deliberate about how we build our product team from a place of strength.

-Jesse Kallman (CEO) and Martice Nicks (CTO) at Danti.ai

"Thanks to Adam's valuable insights and recommendations, we were able to make informed decisions about our product strategy. Thanks to his analysis, we were able to optimize our product and improve our overall business performance."

-Jaden Risner, CEO @ Family Proud

First Principles expertly and efficiently helped us refine our product value hypothesis by first exploring all the possible options for solving our customer problems. We rigorously prioritized our ideas based on real signal from the market, and then validated the pain points with real customers. Finally FP built us a concierge system to test these, and Adam helped me as a coach to craft strategies for finding our first users. Now we're part of Techstars!

-Marcus Collins, Founder/CEO @ NestedFunds

"Adam is phenomenal! His background in leading product teams allows him to immediately dissect and understand the strengths and weaknesses of a company's value propositions and team. Adam provided us with excellent direction around properly defining Jobs-to-be-Done and helped us identify the common thread among our customer conversations. By working with Adam we have a better understanding of our customers, our value propositions, and the way forward, if you have the opportunity to work with Adam, I highly recommend taking advantage of it!"

-Aarik Gulaya, CEO @ SAFA.ai

We started in 2021 as a small team of passionate product managers solving complex challenges

We believe that the principles of excellent product strategy and product management are universal, and while there is no one path to startup or innovation success, there are certainly paths that get to success or failure faster, cheaper, and with better results. We are the evangelists and operators of these models.

At First Principles we believe in starting with the first principles, or better put the most underlying knowledge that helps to inform the approach and solution. We question, probe, and challenge our partners to choose not just a working path, but the best path with the highest value. We love to hunt for value in disparate spaces and are experienced in data, AI, computer vision, data privacy, government, consumer productivity, and much more.

The core values that drive everything we do

Best Quality - Dev X Webflow Template

Vision into Reality

We make ideas into functioning real-world products in weeks, not months or years.

User Centered - Dev X Webflow Template

Value to End Users

We deliver product value to end-customers. Stakeholders are important too, but they are not the user, and above all, we exceed users'  expectations.

Innovation & Technology - Dev X Webflow Template

Data-Driven

We speak from experience, data, research, or all three. We don't guess with your time and money.

Always Iterate - Dev X Webflow Template

Hard Things First

We question root assumptions to truly understand if the path to your North Star is optimal, and then we help set a plan to solve the hardest pieces first.

Top Tier Infraestructure - Dev X Webflow Template

Action Over Discussion

As Tony Robbins said, "Action is what produces results. Knowledge is only power until it comes into the hands of someone who knows how to...take effective action."

Escalation In Mind - Dev X Webflow Template

Scientific Approach

In addition to our experiences, our entire team is exceptionally well read in the best frameworks for solving every aspect of a product challenge from user research through market validation through scaling.

Ready to start working together with our team?

Come and visit us in Los Angeles, CA if you're in the area.

Los Angeles, CA

Offices Worldwide - Dev X Webflow Template