View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 18, 2019

Projecting from the seed stage, there are two types of team-building topics you want to address – key senior hires and org-level team building. As the company progresses through product market fit (PMF), you will want to highlight other key senior hires required to scale and round out the functional expertise of the exec team.

Part-Time VPE 195

Part-Time VPE Seed Stage CTO Hire Forecast 195

Ben's Blog

OCTOBER 14, 2010

The biggest difference between being a great functional manager and being a great general manager—and particularly a great CEO—is that as a general manager, you must hire and manage people who are far more competent at their jobs than you would be at their jobs. So, with no experience, how do you hire someone good? Probably none.

Part-Time VPE 78

Part-Time VPE Hiring Wisconsin Matching 78

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 28, 2014

We particularly like this post, Hiring Executives: If You’ve Never Done the Job, How Do You Hire Somebody Good? , In order to ensure completeness, I find it useful to include criteria from the following sub-divisions when hiring executives: Will the executive be world class at running the function?

Part-Time VPE 160

Part-Time VPE Sales Lean Cofounder 160

Cracking the Code

MAY 2, 2019

Recruiting and retaining top talent is even more challenging for software engineers. To get an insight into how successful start-ups approach team building, we spoke to Sylvain Utard, employee number 1 and VP of Engineering at Algolia, an Accel portfolio company. That is a very powerful statement.

Part-Time VPE 48

Part-Time VPE Engineer Retention API 48

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling.

Part-Time VPE 318

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 318

Feld Thoughts

JUNE 16, 2016

Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. Let’s focus on “ recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company.” ” This is where the vexing part comes in. Now, consider a VP Engineering who has never worked in a company smaller than 5,000 people.

Part-Time VPE 70

Part-Time VPE Leadership Engineer Hiring 70

YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 8, 2011

If you’re looking for a space, simply type in an address and find available spaces around it. The founders started working in a basement from May this year, putting together mockups and building the site with an off-shore development team. However, the quality wasn’t quite what they expected.

Part-Time VPE 223

Part-Time VPE Philadelphia Singapore Engineer 223

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

Another way to learn more about who’s speaking is to sort the conference program by category and find people addressing specific topics. He was a very early employee of Facebook , and engineering director there through the moment it blew up. Now he’s VP of engineering at Dropbox , where he’s seeing similar growth.

Lean 165

Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 18, 2017

A chief technology officer (CTO) is a C-suite executive who is focused on scientific and technological issues including web applications, mobile applications, electronic and digital media development. A CTO will guide your product strategy, market validation, architectural decisions, process optimization, recruiting, and hiring.

Fractional CTO 54

Fractional CTO CTO Hire CTO Technical Review 54

Version One Ventures

AUGUST 26, 2016

There’s a lot of debate surrounding the right time to bring executive level hires into your start-up. With that said, here are some general guidelines I have developed over the years for building a management team. First, your hiring/team building strategy should follow two key rules. 2 nd hire: VP of Finance.

Part-Time VPE 60

Part-Time VPE Management Finance Vertical 60

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

I would discover that there was a more effective alternative in building a marketing department than hiring traditional marketers with MBA’s. Some of these advisors from the academic community would work with our of VP of Engineering and help us solve specific technical problems.

Engineer 198

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 198

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2010

In the early days of Rocket Science I realized that we needed high-level advice on multiple fronts; technology, game development, video game distribution, etc. 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.

Advisory Board 260

Advisory Board Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Stock 260

Seeing Both Sides

JANUARY 14, 2013

Today's post is brought to you by my friend, Paul Blumenfeld , a recruiter who is one of the most thoughtful people I know when it comes to hiring processes. Many hiring managers write a job spec that is heavy on wishes and low on real needs. I see two reasons for this discrepancy: Static Specs. that would get the interview.

Part-Time VPE 54

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Matching Hiring 54

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 then spent time with the VP Product Management to understand his functional roadmap and his perception of what customers wanted.

CTO Hire 308

CTO Hire Management Technical Review Part-Time VPE 308

Austin Startup

AUGUST 19, 2018

You can still get on a panel by finding an existing panel that was submitted and adding yourself to it. It’s not too hard to find the panel organizer on social media and reach out to them. You just raised $10MM from Sequoia, you’re 3 co-founders, and you want to go hire the VP of Engineering from Uber. Don’t worry.

CTO Hire 48

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Fractional VPE Austin 48

socialmatchbox.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The first part is the hardest part: hunting for a programmer. If you have a friend who is a recruiter then ask them to tell you what they recommend that will not cost anything. This means considering what the opportunity cost for working on a high risk venture is relative to other things they can spend their time on.

Part-Time VPE 41

Part-Time VPE Sweat Equity DC Washington 41

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I’ve convinced the team you’d be perfect, come join us as the VP of Marketing.” 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. We’re building a supercomputer.”

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.) They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors. Help them?!!

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

www.reincubate.com

FEBRUARY 1, 2010

Start-ups often hire at one extreme -- closer to a Lead Developer or VP of Engineering -- whereas corporates may focus on their CIO, which is potentially quite a different role. Strategic Report to the CEO or board as an active part of the senior management team. Firstly, theres no one-size-fits-all description.

Fractional CTO 40

Fractional CTO CTO Technical Review CTO Hire 40

This is going to be BIG.

AUGUST 25, 2010

The path to our involvement with the company dates back to last December, actually, when I attended a Gilt Groupe “Expert Talk” run by Josh Knowles, formally their VP of Engineering. He introduced himself and we kept in touch through all the various social media channels—until I heard he was leaving Gilt.

Part-Time VPE 109

Part-Time VPE New York City SMS Syndicate 109

rapidrollout.wordpress.com

JANUARY 15, 2011

He or she might call himself a “consulting CTO,&# “freelance CTO,&# “on-demand CTO,&# “CTO on call,&# “CTO for hire,&# or just a “technology strategy advisor.&# If you find him, he’s gold, and not only because of his knowledge and experience.

Fractional CTO 40

Fractional CTO CTO CTO Hire Fractional VPE 40

devver.wordpress.com

NOVEMBER 9, 2010

The Devver Blog A Boulder startup improving the way developers work. 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. Becoming the CTO vs VP of engineering?

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire Part-Time VPE Architecture Ruby 40

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 21, 2013

The challenge for the other founder is that as a startup evolves from “the jungle” (super early stages, chaotic organization, prior to achieving product-market fit) to the “dirt road” (developing some organizational maturity and initial product market fit), senior functional executives often get hired from the outside to take over departments.

Cofounder 45

Cofounder Founder Part-Time VPE Portfolio 45

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees. Thats an important job, for sure, and Ive been called upon to do it from time to time.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 16, 2020

The same person can be a developer and a technical manager, while a non-technical founder is more likely to be accountable for marketing. The expertise of administrators and senior-level developers suffices to handle routine technical tasks under the guidance of such company members as VP of Engineering, Team Lead, and Project Manager.

Fractional CTO 85

Fractional CTO CTO CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 85

Business Plan Blog

OCTOBER 4, 2013

Don’t hire people with skills and qualifications similar to yours. If you have a technical background and you are focused on product development, consider a co-founder with a sales and marketing background that can focus on selling your world class product. Hire based on functionality and avoid having too many C’s.

Part-Time VPE 79

Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE Cofounder CTO Hire 79

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Its common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company. And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even with the highest standards imaginable, theres no way to hire just genius hackers. Just change it.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

firstround.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

I was their first full-time engineering hire and I helped build out the team and set the agenda for product development. When you’re at a large company however, especially as a software engineer, it’s easy to get disconnected from the business side of the organization and its direction.

CTO Hire 52

CTO Hire Engineer Software Review Part-Time VPE 52

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 16, 2012

I first met Steve when he was VP of Engineering at Centerline software, a software development tools startup, and I was a junior in college. He was a fellow Harvard computer science graduate and I was looking for a summer job in software development and found him through an alumni directory.

Part-Time VPE 54

Part-Time VPE Software Review Costa Rica Technical Review 54

www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

Published on: July 13, 2011 Posted By Angie Tags: Elizabeth Knopf , Finding A Co-Founder , FounderDating , Sorced , Technical Co-Founder , Tips & Tricks. After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development.

Cofounder 47

Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 16, 2010

We met back in 2005 through our respective blogs—he was writing at Businesspundit at the time. Always working on something entrepreneurial, he had a team of developers at the ready to execute on new projects. Rob's had a number of conversations with key market players around business development and is open to more.

Cloud 112

Cloud Part-Time VPE API Louisville 112

www.paulgraham.com

AUGUST 1, 2008

We could hire employees, but we want to be forced to figure out how to scale investing. We think of the techniques were developing for dealing with large numbers of startups as like software. Larry and Sergey only started Google after making the rounds of the search engines trying to sell their idea and finding no takers.

Web 54

Web Startup Silicon Valley Technical Review 54

blog.expensify.com

APRIL 24, 2012

Update: The end is near, Expensify is hiring a.NET programmer! Or, rather, more offensively to Facebook and Google employees, less offensive to.NET developers, though the underlying message is the same.). As you might know, we’re hiring the best programmers in the world. Expensify Blog. Some additional comments at the end.

Java 107

Java PHP Software Review Coder 107