ReadWriteStart

JUNE 14, 2012

A founding team with a technical lead, a sales lead, a product lead and a marketing lead, for example, will likely be more effective than a team with only two of those four key functional roles. Don’t be fooled by titles. Focus on candidates’ real hands-on experience and accomplishments. It’s worth spending time on recruiting.

Technical Review 159

Technical Review CTO Hire Software Review Startup 159

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 5, 2010

They often make great team members such as head of products, CTO, head of sales, CFO, etc. Your financial risks of starting most technology companies these days are so low. It’s lost salary for a period of time. Pay me half salary until the fund is closed. On half salary and my own moving expenses.

Entrepreneur 293

Entrepreneur CTO Hire South America Salary 293

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 25, 2019

CEO brought in to replace the founder, 5 - 10% CTO, CFO, VP of Marketing or Sales, 1.5 - 3% Chief Engineer or Architect, 1 - 1.5% Offers near the high end of a range will likely come with a lower cash salary, maybe even 50% of the going rate. Your compensation is the total package of stock plus salary plus benefits.

Equity 237

Equity Stock Options Advisory Board Stock 237

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 21, 2017

CEO brought in to replace the founder, 5 - 10% CTO, CFO, VP of Marketing or Sales, 1.5 - 3% Chief Engineer or Architect, 1 - 1.5% Offers near the high end of a range will likely come with a lower cash salary, maybe even 50% of the going rate. Your compensation is the total package of stock plus salary plus benefits.

Stock 140

Stock Stock Options Advisory Board Startup 140

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. My ex-boss was going to be the VP of Engineering and I would report to the CEO whose marketing acumen and sales instincts seemed at the time to be telepathic and sense of theater was legend.

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 17, 2013

CEO brought in to replace the founder, 5 - 10% CTO, CFO, VP of Marketing or Sales, 1.5 - 3% Chief Engineer or Architect, 1 - 1.5% Offers near the high end of a range will come with a lower cash salary, maybe even 50% of the going rate. Your compensation is the total package of stock plus salary plus benefits.

Stock Options 224

Stock Options Stock Advisory Board Startup 224

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 22, 2012

CEO brought in to replace the founder, 5 - 10% CTO, CFO, VP of Marketing or Sales, 1.5 - 3% Chief Engineer or Architect, 1 - 1.5% Offers near the high end of a range will come with a lower cash salary, maybe even 50% of the going rate. Your compensation is the total package of stock plus salary plus benefits.

Stock Options 230

Stock Options Stock Advisory Board Startup 230

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 24, 2011

CEO brought in to replace the founder, 5 - 10% CTO, CFO, VP of Marketing or Sales, 1.5 - 3% Chief Engineer or Architect, 1 - 1.5% Offers near the high end of a range will come with a lower cash salary, maybe even 50% of the going rate. Your compensation is the total package, stock plus salary.

Equity 234

Equity Advisory Board Stock Options Stock 234

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 29, 2015

CEO brought in to replace the founder, 5 - 10% CTO, CFO, VP of Marketing or Sales, 1.5 - 3% Chief Engineer or Architect, 1 - 1.5% Offers near the high end of a range will likely come with a lower cash salary, maybe even 50% of the going rate. Your compensation is the total package of stock plus salary plus benefits.

Stock Options 120

Stock Options Stock Advisory Board Startup 120

www.avc.com

SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

The first bracket is the senior management team; the CFO, Chief Revenue Officer/VP Sales, Chief Marketing Officer/VP Marketing, Chief Product Officer/VP Product, CTO, VP Eng, Chief People Officer/VP HR, General Counsel, and anyone else on the senior team. Director Level: 0.25x.

Equity 64

Equity Employee CTO Hire Fractional CTO 64

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 20, 2010

CEO brought in to replace the founder, 5 - 10% CTO, CFO, VP of Marketing or Sales, 1.5 - 3% Chief Engineer or Architect, 1 - 1.5% Offers near the high end of a range will come with a lower cash salary, maybe even 50% of the going rate. Your compensation is the total package, stock plus salary.

Stock 144

Stock Stock Options Advisory Board Startup 144

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2017

This required a repeatable and scalable sales process, which required a professional sales staff and a product stable enough that customers wouldn’t return it. If the founder was lucky, he got to stay as chairman or CTO. Twenty-five years ago, to go public you had to sell stuff – not just acquire users or have freemium products.

Founder 245

Founder Technical Review CTO Hire IPO 245

Berkonomics

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

Perhaps surprisingly, the components are NOT the traditional coding/business pieces; nor are they even coding /user interface / business / sales, or whatever. Similarly, a crackerjack CTO might be in the mid six figures, but a kid performing inside sales may start at the opposite end of the spectrum.

Coder 75

Coder Accredited Investor New York Angel Financing 75

rob.by

MARCH 8, 2012

They can easily get great benefits and a six figure salary. Whilst the average tech entrepreneur may lack some of the more business relationship, networking, and sales/marketing skills – they still need to have an entrepreneurial mindset, understand financial models, market factors, and how the business ultimately makes money.

Technical Cofounder 42

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Engineering Fractional CTO 42

The Next Web

OCTOBER 7, 2013

Although salary information is now relatively easy to find online, insight into early option grants is still sparse and vague. In a CTO Salary and Equity trends report by Safire Partners, it finds non-founder equity compensation to settle out below 2 percent. percent to 3 percent range for engineer #1s.

Engineer 129

Engineer Dilution Option Pool Vesting 129

The Next Web

OCTOBER 10, 2013

Since we bootstrapped Backblaze, early on we would have months when the company did not have enough cash from sales to buy the additional servers it needed. It’s easier to take that vacation when you know someone will be at the office that will care the way you do and share your goals. Break – you need one at some point.

Cofounder 143

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Kenya Dilution 143

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 10, 2013

He believed we had a weakness with his CTO. It would be yet another distraction for this fledgling CEO and he felt he needed to focus on biz dev, sales, marketing and fund raising. Another $100,000 in drained money (salary plus benefits of just one poorly contributing individual). He said we couldn’t make a change yet.

Vesting 344

Vesting Cofounder Salary Sales 344

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 28, 2011

I’m looking for somebody who can sell, but not better than our head of sales. You want somebody who can raise $15 million to build out your R&D, business development and sales organizations. He took this as a challenge and had a CTO in one week. And then I sneezed and he’s hired a kick-ass sales team.

Leadership 363

Leadership CTO Hire Technical Review Cofounder 363

www.chubbybrain.com

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

created a vastly higher cost structure; I had 80 people mostly on base salaries under $100,000 and was bringing in revenue at the rate of $20 million annually. The ArsDigita of Greylock, General Atlantic, and Allen had nearly 200 with lots of new executive positions at $200,000 or over, programmers at base salaries of $125,000, etc.

Cofounder 89

Cofounder Startup Technical Cofounder CTO Hire 89

Altgate

APRIL 26, 2009

Basically the survey collects salary, cash bonus and equity information for the top executives in private companies (mostly venture- and preventure-backed companies). If you haven’t seen the results of this survey before, I’m including both of last year’s unabridged reports results below. Bookmark the permalink.

Term Sheet 60

Term Sheet Venture Capital Startup 60

VC Cafe

NOVEMBER 11, 2010

We got Ophir [CTO Ofir Herzas ], a technical guy and started implementing. It took me half a year to find Ophir and Haim [ Haim Pekel , sales and marketing]. Because you ask people to quit their jobs and leave the security of a salary. VC Cafe: How to you manage new customer acquisition/sales? It was fine but not great.

Cloud 134

Cloud South America Bootstrapping 134

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2015

Previously, Steve was CTO at Deluxe Entertainment , the provider of production, post-production and distribution services to the movie and TV industry; and EVP and Chief Strategy and Technology Officer at Rovi , where he led the media company’s transition from physical technologies to e-commerce, connected home and subscription services.

Channel 120

Channel India Technical Cofounder Silicon Valley 120

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

Options and future value are great ‘add ons’ but not for a welfare check salary until ‘this great idea makes it.’ Pitch an idea :) Usually somewhere in the pitch the listener will ask if you’d also be interested in being a CEO, CTO, etc at something they are already funding! Who knows.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Gust

SEPTEMBER 17, 2014

Perhaps surprisingly, the components are NOT the traditional coding/business pieces; nor are they even coding/UI/business/sales, or whatever. This is where you find the superb Rails coder, AND the world-class information architect, AND the consummate sales guy, AND the persuasive biz dev gal, AND the brilliant CFO.

Coder 147

Coder Web Startup Salary 147

blog.expensify.com

APRIL 24, 2012

I think the real moral of this story is, (1) if you want to work at a startup, make sure the CTO cares about problem solving and not technology religion, (2) if you’re cooking steaks on a gas grill and you see your CTO warming up a dead squirrel over a book of matches, starting looking for a new job.

Java 107

Java PHP Software Review Coder 107

sivers.org

JUNE 25, 2010

Dont make cheap skate equity offers, with programmer getting equity share of first employee and salary of founder(nothing or next to nothing). Sales is more difficult and more important that you think, if you build it they wont just come. Learn programming with python language and do 1.0 This site shows a good example of UI design.

CTO Hire 84

CTO Hire Hiring Software Review Technical Review 84