Business Plan Blog

AUGUST 20, 2013

In order to be a successful tech startup, the team must consist of a Chief Technical Officer (CTO) level member to help with the technology plan. This is generally achieved in one of the following ways: CTO Level Co-Founder (Equity). CTO Level Board Member or dedicated Adviser (Free or Equity). CTO Employee (Salary).

CTO Hire 55

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Architecture Cofounder 55

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 21, 2014

The truth is you really don’t know how your teammates or your bosses will perform in good times and bad. You hire people who look good on paper. So one of the surest signs you’ve hired a leader is the willingness of his or her former team to re-assemble. You should also focus heavily on his or her former employees.

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CTO Hire Cofounder San Francisco Silicon Valley 320

blog.aparttimecto.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

A Part-Time CTO Technology. One of the main challenges of starting a products based company is how do you build your product? This is especially true of web based companies, whose product consists of mainly a web site and very little more. In Plain English. Archive Jun 20th Sun In-House or Outsource?

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Equity Vesting 40

This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

A week or so ago, we launched the Key Hire Wire at First Round. Because people live, shop, and buy in real time, Monetate products enable e-commerce web sites to market in real time. You will initially spend majority of time personally working with individual accounts and coaching sales team.

Part-Time VPE 92

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Engineer Sales 92

blog.alinelerner.com

JUNE 21, 2013

Lessons from a year’s worth of hiring data. Because I used to be an engineer, one part of my job was conducting first-round technical interviews, and between January 2012 and January 2013, I interviewed roughly 300 people for our back-end/full-stack engineer position. Aline Lerner's Blog. Jun 21, 2013.

CTO Hire 98

CTO Hire Hiring Software Review Technical Review 98

View from Seed

MARCH 29, 2016

This desperate need for employees often leads to an equally desperate, ad-hoc approach to recruiting without any relevant recruiting metrics being tracked. Founders furiously work their networks, post open positions on every reasonable-looking job board, and hope to quickly start hiring. Candidate-company fit: Interview-to-hire.

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Metrics Founder CTO Hire Technical Review 120

This is going to be BIG.

MAY 19, 2010

Early stage startups have that task many times over after they receive their first funding. Sure, we may only be talking about less then twenty or even less than ten employees in total, but it still remains no small feat. Secondly, and this was the bigger issue, is that most startup hiring is completely opportunistic.

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CTO Hire Hiring Portfolio Early Stage 99

Austin Startup

AUGUST 19, 2018

Why Corporate Innovation Fails Design Sprints Done Right: Creating Lasting Change User-centered design is critical in making or breaking consumer technologies, but sometimes, on small product teams, day-to-day needs can get in the way of larger, longer term goals and solutions that resonate with your customer can’t manage to get off the launch pad.

CTO Hire 48

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Fractional VPE Austin 48

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

I never built a Google-sized business but I did build an organization from scratch that grew to 120 employees in 5 countries before we sold it. As your organization grows and you hire senior staff where you are no longer managing every employee directly the issue of how to manage people that are not your “direct&# reports arises.

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CTO Hire Management Technical Review Part-Time VPE 308

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2014

Much has been written about when it is time to hire a “professional CEO” to run a startup company and of course that has long been a norm in Silicon Valley when founders find that their inexperience may be a limiting factor in company growth ( know as the Peter Principle ). It now seems that Mark is more firmly in control.

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Founder CTO Hire Silicon Valley Leadership 309

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 30, 2008 What does a startup CTO actually do? Often times, it seems like people are thinking its synonymous with "that guy who gets paid to sit in the corner and think technical deep thoughts" or "that guy who gets to swoop in a rearrange my project at the last minute on a whim."

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CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

View from Seed

DECEMBER 3, 2015

Hiring and onboarding new engineers are time consuming and expensive. A team that can mitigate turnover is a more productive and efficient team. The culture they have built, the thoughtfulness that goes into the hiring process, and an emphasis on peer mentoring has helped keep engineers at thredUP. In the past 3.5

CTO Hire 120

CTO Hire Retention Marketing Engineer 120

blog.chrisomeara.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

Chris OMeara Main | Probing Code Quality » 01/31/2010 Startup CTO: Could It Work? A CEO friend of mine recently asked my opinion about Tony Karrers Startup CTO or Developer article. I think the part time CTO could work. They tend to know where to find good help in terms of employees and consultants.

Fractional CTO 40

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Startup Cofounder 40

www.lanceglasser.com

MAY 13, 2012

Product development. Queuing theory and product development. The Essential Product Investigation Phase Gate. So you want to ship the product early? What does a CTO do? The minimum viable product. What does a CTO do? What does a CTO (Chief Technology Officer) do in a high-tech company?

CTO 40

CTO CTO Hire Technical Review Architecture 40

Hunter Walker

JUNE 7, 2014

Not because they’re all operating in stealth or pre-product – in fact some already are earning $1m+ in revenue per annum. Hiring Has Changed: Before the press was a way of generating interest for hiring. Now the employees carry your technology into the enterprise via their own phone and cloud services.

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Technical Review CTO Hire Finance Stealth 118

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 14, 2012

Most businesses stay that way - there are many more solo entrepreneurs than business owners with employees. To learn more about how your startup can find, hire and keep the top talent and quality workers it needs to succeed, download this free ReadWriteWeb Report: The Talent Wars: Today’s Toughest Startup Challenge.

Technical Review 159

Technical Review CTO Hire Software Review Startup 159

www.avc.com

SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

Employee Equity: How Much? The most common comment in this long and complicated MBA Mondays series on Employee Equity is the question of how much equity should you grant when you make a hire. For your first key hires, three, five, maybe as much as ten, you will probably not be able to use any kind of formula.

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Equity Employee CTO Hire Fractional CTO 64

devver.wordpress.com

NOVEMBER 9, 2010

Boulder CTO December Lunch with Tim Wolters with 5 comments The Boulder CTO Lunch meets once a month with a guest speaker and covers topics and questions that startup CTOs should find interesting. The Role As a CTO, you paint a landscape of the product and market. Becoming the CTO vs VP of engineering?

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire Part-Time VPE Architecture Ruby 40

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2014

Most large companies manage three types of innovation: process innovation (making existing products incrementally better), continuous innovation (building on the strength of the company’s current business model but creating new elements) and disruptive innovation (creating products or services that did not exist before.).

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Acquisition Intellectual Property Silicon Valley Startup 332

Version One Ventures

DECEMBER 7, 2015

The evolution from one-on-one to full-scale production. Cody Fauser , one of Shopify’s first employees, was promoted to CTO. One of the remarkable things about Shopify is that they hired Cam as a part-time coach when the company had around 60 employees and full-time when they reached 160 employees.

CTO Hire 60

CTO Hire Leadership Startup Programming 60

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2010

One of the first potential advisors I reached out to was someone who 10 years earlier tried to hire me as the VP of Marketing of his new division at Sun Microsystems. For lots of reasons that never worked out, but I liked him so much that the following year I tried to hire him as the VP of Engineering of Ardent. (He But I was crushed.

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Advisory Board Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Stock 260

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 21, 2016

When an organization is within the startup phase, the first thing on their mind is “How do we get our product to market as fast as possible?” followed up by “How do we scale our product(s) the fastest and most efficient way possible?”. Do we have an internet connected product/app? by Andrew Ostashen, co-founder of Vulsec.

Security 100

Security Intellectual Property CTO Hire Offshore 100

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

He’s a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed Facebook, Skype, Jawbone, and dozens of other companies whose products you use. He was a very early employee of Facebook , and engineering director there through the moment it blew up. Eric Ries will interview him. Aditya Agarwal has lived through startup hypergrowth--twice.

Lean 165

Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 22, 2012

And I’ve talked openly about why many services businesses should not feel product envy and chase the commensurate growth rates. Ryan Lissack is the CTO of Maker Studios. ” And many more examples of employees launching careers including several employees at Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com and elsewhere. .”

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Silicon Valley Venture Capital Startup Technical Review 390

The Next Web

DECEMBER 2, 2013

How much does it really take to build a product like Twitter or Instagram? With mobile development agencies and product incubators on the rise and more corporate “labs” spinning out each day, there’s no shortage of talent to help you build the next great Web or mobile app. Still, a product is nothing without scalability.

Cost 168

Cost San Francisco New York City Ruby 168

Mucker Lab

APRIL 6, 2023

Hila Qu joined Mucker’s Tony Yang for an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) conversation about Product-Led Growth (PLG) for Startups to kickoff the 2023 Mucker Growth Series. The other dimension you need to think about is the product complexity. As an individual user, I have absolutely no interest in using this product myself or testing it out.

Product 78

Product CTO Hire Startup Fractional CTO 78

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2017

Bootstrapper Pass - Offers the same benefits as the Silver Pass, but brings the cost of the conference down to $350 for people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to attend (think: fledgling solopreneurs, employees at very young startups, and small non-profits). 31 ( limited to the first 200 Gold Passholders.) Apply for a Bootstrapper Pass here.

Lean 108

Lean Programming San Francisco Cofounder 108

SoCal CTO

JULY 23, 2012

I seem to encounter a lot of people who want to attach a CTO label to me as I'm the only programmer on the founding team of three. While I do fill that role at the moment, I'm a little hesitant to refer to myself as a CTO as we still haven't launched a product, acquired a single user, or turned or a penny in profit.

CTO Hire 231

CTO Hire Technical Review Developer Software Review 231

The Next Web

AUGUST 12, 2013

Define how you want to motivate your employees every day to produce high-quality and industry-leading results. At 6Wunderkinder, our motivation is a combination of passion for what we’re doing (creating the best productivity software in the world) as well as our strong and endless will to build up an impressive team and business.

Cofounder 119

Cofounder CTO Hire Startup Europe 119

SoCal CTO

APRIL 9, 2013

And you will want to make sure you see what the particular designers have done, samples of their work product, their process, etc. You are looking for someone who cares about the look, but you are hiring the development firm for it''s development skills not its graphic design skills. How many full-time W2 employees do you have?

Web Development 204

Web Development Web Developer Los Angeles 204

adamac.blogspot.com

MARCH 9, 2010

Adam MacBeth Tuesday, April 07, 2009 10 Startup Red Flags Ive worked on a number of startups: from seed-stage through IPO, as a founder, employee, advisor, and consultant, as well as evaluating a bunch from the outside, so Ive seen my share of screw-ups. Ever met a CTO/VP Engineering or CEO/CTO? Adamac Attack! Yeah me neither.

Technical Review 41

Technical Review CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup 41

BeyondVC

JANUARY 3, 2019

We are purpose-built to not only invest pre-product but also to help accelerate your path to product-market fit with our decades of entrepreneurial and investing experience along with our active CXO advisory board. Some of these themes include privacy/ML, next gen CMS, intelligent automation, and developer productivity.

Stealth 79

Stealth Advisory Board Cloud Virginia 79

Ben's Blog

AUGUST 29, 2010

In my last post, I mentioned that you should strive to hire people with the right kind of ambition. That may have worked in the past but I believe today, the company’s success and the executive’s success should go hand in hand, not one coming as a by-product of the other, particularly as described above. Stay in your place.

CTO Hire 78

CTO Hire Technical Review Leadership Sales 78

SVPG

JUNE 27, 2015

I would argue that two of the most importance competencies in building great product organizations, indeed nearly any significant organizational undertaking, are leadership and management. Leadership is creating a compelling vision that tugs on the heartstrings of employees and “pulls” them to do the right thing for the company.

Leadership 60

Leadership Management CTO Hire United States 60

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 19, 2017

by Steve Owens, Founder and CTO of Finish Line Product Development Services. In this article we explore the unique challenges of a lean start-up and how Outsourced Product Development (OPD) can be used to overcome them. Reducing product turn time. Extending the runway. The Lean Start-Up Environment.

Product Development 153

Product Development Lean Developer Product 153

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 5, 2018

With data collected from digital payments, Pawame is creating credit profiles on its customers, enabling the company to offer other life-changing products, from TVs and refrigerators to solar water pumps and school loans. Our CTO and Co-founder Majd Chaaya and colleague Hella Bennani are representing us there at the end of January.

Africa 48

Africa Kenya Startup CTO Hire 48

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2017

The result is a combination of design thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile Scrum, and Ignacio’s innovation team includes 25 coaches who train employees in PACE best practices. LESSON #3: Avoid these three hiring mistakes. When it comes time to grow your team, Jeff Jordan and Eric pointed out three hiring mistakes to avoid.

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Lean Startup CTO Hire Cofounder 245