Both Sides of the Table
DECEMBER 27, 2011
If you hire 6 sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business for 4-6 months. So your Q1 results will be $180,000 less profitable than if you hadn’t hired them. Hiring more people isn’t always the right answer.
Both Sides of the Table
MARCH 25, 2016
Most of this advice boils down to an argument in favor of basic planning before starting a company or raising money. In many ways the fact that it has become so cheap to start a company and relatively cheap to raise angel/seed money that we as an industry have gotten lazy on basic planning. Incumbent Strengths & Weaknesses.
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Up and Running
SEPTEMBER 11, 2013
He is also the founder of Hallspot , a new social networking site exclusively for college students that has raised hundreds of thousands in seed money and will launch on September 27 at Thorne’s alma mater, where more than 6,000 students have pre-registered for the service. Did you make any mistakes in the hiring process?
The Equity Kicker
AUGUST 20, 2014
With no team and no technical expertise Matt was planning to find a team and build out some product before starting to raise some seed money. We worked with Matt to design interview questionnaires and coached him on interviewing technique. Our unique model allowed him to get started straight away. USER RESEARCH.
www.paulgraham.com
OCTOBER 23, 2010
One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. And when businesspeople try to hire hackers, they cant tell which ones are good.Even other hackers have a hard time doing that. Some believe only businesspeople can do this-- that hackers can implement software, but not design it.
techcrunch.com
OCTOBER 23, 2010
Inevitably, the excuses begin: I need to hire people to build the product. I need money for the servers. No raising money. In later posts I’m going to get into more detail on specific topics like hiring, raising money, what types of ideas have the potential to get big, finding your founders, and the like.
www.paulgraham.com
APRIL 28, 2010
It wasnt because they werent accredited investors that I didntask my parents for seed money, though. When we were starting Viaweb,I didnt know about the concept of an accredited investor, anddidnt stop to think about the value of investors connections.The reason I didnt take money from my parents was that I didntwant them to lose it.
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