Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 3, 2014

” So I did want any rational person who wants to improve does – I hired a coach. They are the lifeblood of many companies yet they are different than the traditional technology startup DNA so the ways that you hire, motivate, compensate and assess performance of these individuals will be different.

Sales 382

Sales Startup Technical Review Matching 382

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 21, 2014

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. When you’re hiring most reference checkers focus on the person’s former bosses. Working hard together at a big company just isn’t the same. You REALLY know.

CTO Hire 320

CTO Hire Cofounder San Francisco Silicon Valley 320

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 17, 2016

It is not uncommon for founders to fight amongst themselves or teams to develop silos that simple can’t stomach talking with other groups so they avoid human contact and revert to flaming wars on email or Slack. My observation is that many companies become Game of Thrones with warring factions and competing interests.

Pakistan 150

Pakistan Technical Review Iran Russia 150

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. Hiring & Firing the CEO. As things got bigger we hired a head of European sales and a head of European marketing. I had developers who thought that the chief architect was a bottleneck – having to be involved in every decision.

Ireland 319

Ireland Sales Bankruptcy Germany 319

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 8, 2010

That’s why I started the Sales & Marketing Series and at one point I will do a bunch of posts on the sales methodology we developed at my first company called PUCCKA. Mavericks do work well in early-stage companies and are probably your best bet for you first hire or two. More on that later. They will not succeed at sales.

Early Stage 350

Early Stage Startup Sales Campaign 350

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 21, 2019

For years software development worked on a “waterfall model” in which you did research, design, build, test, deploy and then watch how users reacted to your product. I also wrote an entire series on the topic of Startup Boards if you want to do any more reading that link has several articles you can dig into. How Do Boards Get Out of Sync?

Management 234

Management Startup Dividend Early Stage 234

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 25, 2009

Many years ago I worked at Andersen Consulting, originally developing software for large corporations and then as a strategy consultant. They encourage you to hire senior people on your team who have gold-plated resumes. At my first company, which was based in London, we decided to set up a development facility in India.

Pakistan 297

Pakistan India Technical Review Software Review 297

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.

Startup 418

Startup Revenue Technical Review Flash 418

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

You develop a cynicism that the future will be better. Ryan was the most talented technologist we had hired at BuildOnline. We hired Ryan at a really young age and without a tremendous amount of prior experience. We had a strategy of hiring people really young because we couldn’t afford to hire too many senior people.

San Francisco 322

San Francisco South Africa CTO Hire Fractional CTO 322

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 30, 2011

In the initial phases of any new market you’re developing a product (hopefully with a minimal set of features), getting feedback from customers, refining your product based on user feedback and then re-launching your product. Markets develop for a complex set of factors that are often beyond all of our control.

Development Team Review 374

Development Team Review Technical Review Bulgaria Lean 374

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 19, 2013

My internal compass has always steered me strongly toward the belief that founders who can scale with their startup companies are better to back that founders who eventually need to hire a CEO. You can simply hire a COO to do these things while retaining the CEO title but focusing mostly on product.

Technical Review 303

Technical Review Cofounder Analytics Founder 303

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 6, 2016

You also ran the risk that if you hired employees quickly and then demand wasn’t as strong as expected it was incredibility hard to fire people. Could Korea’s largest companies increase their funding of startups and provide them with initial business development deals as so often happens in Silicon Valley?

South Korea 261

South Korea Silicon Valley Los Angeles Japan 261

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 14, 2010

Here’s how it goes: You have a business development group with two people. When you hire people in functional roles they want to show that they’re achieving results and results are easiest to measure by tasks accomplished. You get a lot of traffic – not always results. Let me give you an example. I love that saying.

Development Team Review 323

Development Team Review SEM Channel Social Media 323

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

Because I am true to the hiring practices I preach, I wanted a strong exec who would “ punch above their weightclass ” by taking a job they hadn’t yet done but would hugely aspire to and thus work harder to out perform. And we wanted a head of global marketing.

Southern California 359

Southern California San Francisco CTO Hire SEM 359

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 1, 2016

They hire their initial co-founders and early employees and everybody has a sense of “mission.” We try to hire deeply analytical associates to can help companies problem solve and who make us better investors. You can’t let every team hire as many team members as they want. A Sense of Purpose.

Leadership 150

Leadership Southern California San Diego Hiring 150

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2010

Some CTO’s swear that it is a huge improvement in development timeframes and doesn’t cause performance issues. They often aren’t great at planning development work. You still have some leeway to hire above them if need be. They should be setting the standards for how code is developed.

Fractional CTO 400

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 400

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 5, 2011

So I did want any rational person who wants to improve does – I hired a coach. They are the lifeblood of many companies yet they are different than the traditional technology startup DNA so the ways that you hire, motivate, compensate and assess performance of these individuals will be different. Cash, cash, cash.

Sales 316

Sales Technical Review Matching Hiring 316

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 19, 2015

The moment I realized that this hire was the right person for the company I dropped the 20 other things on my plate and didn’t let up until we had a signed order. It doesn’t matter if it’s recruiting, business development, shipping product, writing blog posts, networking … it’s all the same.

LP 150

LP Warrant Portfolio Framework 150

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

That died with waterfall software development. Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small? How many people will you hire in the first 24 months and in which sequence. I won’t need to hire many engineers or customer support staff.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 31, 2010

As your company develops multiple offices, hires a larger number of sales people or increases product complexity over time this kind of tacit knowledge doesn’t scale. We then brought the number up to 8-10 and even hired an SVP of global sales & marketing.

Sales 286

Sales PR Forecast Technical Review 286

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 ).

Founder 309

Founder CTO Hire Silicon Valley Leadership 309

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 7, 2013

Our industry just took one big step towards legitimacy with the hiring of renowned media exec Ynon Kreiz to run Maker Studios. Another major hire was Ryan Lissack who joined as CTO. The industry finally has one of their own at the helm of the largest YouTube network.

Video 320

Video Los Angeles Technical Cofounder CTO Hire 320

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 9, 2013

We developed this at our first company and called it PUCCKA – the overall methodology is described here. If you’re at a startup and new to sales & sales people you might want to read my basic primers: Why hiring seasoned reps at a startup might not work. Unique Selling Proposition. Compelling Event.

Customer 324

Customer PR Marketing Technical Review 324

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 16, 2011

This is where she first developed sales skills. To run an effective business it’s really important to hire women in your company & as advisors - “Men tend to pump up their chests more (than women). I think it’s really important (to hire women). Make sure 50% of the people you hire are women.

Startup 311

Startup Sales Database Community 311

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 2, 2015

What I love about my job is getting to see teams of super-early-stage companies develop ideas that while raw have potential to make an impact on the market. For a well-funded seed company I have controversially recommended hiring a great office manager that doubles as an administrative assistant. HR & Legal.

Operations 150

Operations Metrics Early Stage Non-Compete 150

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 22, 2012

So investing $3-5 million in a company and taking a year to 18 months to see how it develops before adding more fuel can often be the right course of action. We worked with police departments, the ministry of defense, many of the largest utility companies in Europe and a ton of contractors, engineers, architects, developers and suppliers.

Silicon Valley 390

Silicon Valley Venture Capital Startup Technical Review 390

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

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. I developed a totally different understanding of the business and one that would NEVER have come up through a board meeting.

CTO Hire 308

CTO Hire Management Technical Review Part-Time VPE 308

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 19, 2013

The era of VCs investing in successful consumer Internet startups such as eBay led to a belief system that seemed to permeate many enterprise software startups that hiring sales or implementation people was a bad thing. This article initially appeared on TechCrunch. “We want low-touch or zero-touch businesses” was the mantra.

Technical Review 403

Technical Review Software Review Startup API 403

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 19, 2011

o Early on they hired 3 people from ACT software at once (more team hiring) on staff and supplement it with Agency (in LA worked with First Communications – good). If you need money to even hire a developer [means you cannot even excite one person to put in some sweat equity – not a good sign about your ability to motivate people.].

Acquisition 304

Acquisition Warrant Customer Term Sheet 304

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 5, 2010

TWTFelipe is the founder of TWTApps , who had developed some really cool add-on applications for Twitter to extend its functionality. By 2005 I had moved back to the US and we started hiring US employees (The first two employees we hired had both grown up in India! Irony, hey?).

Technical Review 282

Technical Review Canada Green South Carolina 282

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

In fact, we just announced that we hired a new head of our Growth Platform, (follow him on Twitter here ? At the time I wasn’t 100% sure but he made compelling arguments about how other markets have developed as they matured so I took note. Seksom Suriyapa ?—?he Secrets of Sand Hill Road.

Pre-Money Valuation 471

Pre-Money Valuation Valuation Venture Capital Early Stage 471

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 29, 2010

GRP Partners is looking to hire two analysts (maybe even three) to join our practice in Los Angeles. But every time I do recruiting I get so many applicants that don’t come close to the spec that I feel I have to put up at least some filters to avoid people unlikely to be hired from putting in too much work. Are you merging?

Los Angeles 290

Los Angeles Technical Review Due Diligence Venture Capital 290

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

But “he didn’t have the budget to hire a developer until he had raised money!&#. He went out and found a developer and built a product. He looked stunned. I said that he had been talking about doing this for too long. He still had no website and no prototypes. I said that was my point.

Entrepreneur 414

Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Technical Review CTO Hire 414

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 26, 2016

I’m sure there are way more detailed blogs than this one that can help you with a deep dive on CAC methodologies — my point is the bring the issue to the attention of more early-stage founders who probably aren’t developing enough cycles to thinking about metrics.

Metrics 150

Metrics Cost Acquisition Startup 150

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 8, 2009

Traction can simply mean showing that you’re making progress with customers, product development, channel partners, initial revenue as a proof point, attracting well-known angel investors, winning industry awards / recognition. Funding is about developing a relationship over time. They hire key staff. They make progress.

Technical Review 309

Technical Review Term Sheet Venture Capital Revenue 309

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2011

Huge structural under-employment in much of the country and full employment in some niche tech markets where it’s impossible to hire developers, designers or sales professionals. For others it feels like a two-speed economy, where rules apply to hot tech startups that don’t apply elsewhere. You feel it, too.

Saudi Arabia 309

Saudi Arabia Valuation IPO Technical Review 309

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 16, 2009

They had wasted a lot of money because they had raised a lot of money and therefore hired a large staff. We couldn’t cut product development (we had 23 people!) I walked through my logic, “well, if a customer installs your tool on his website he’s going to have to hire an entire staff to manage the project.

Entrepreneur 306

Entrepreneur Burn Rate Cofounder Sales 306