A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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Hiring Employee #1

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Tweet. --> It’s a big decision to make your first hire, because what you’re really deciding is whether you want to keep a lifestyle business or attempt to “cross the chasm” and maybe even get rich. There’s already a lot of great advice about hiring at little startups. (Powered by LaunchBit ).

Hiring 282
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WP Engine passes $100M in revenue and secures $250M investment from Silver Lake

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Every day, 5% of the entire online world visits a customer running on the WP Engine Digital Experience Platform. And everyone else at WP Engine would tell you the same thing. So to everyone at WP Engine, let me repeat the message from one year ago: Look what we did ! Period, full-stop.

Engineer 152
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How do I figure out who my next important hire should be?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

The question is: How do you decide what role is most important to hire for? If I hire someone to do X, I’ll have time for Y and Z. Hire the best person for that role. Examples: You hire the VP of Engineering for Facebook. Now you can scale anything — both computers and people — inside your engineering department.

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A Scorecard: Should a decision be fast, or slow?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

But some decisions should not be made in haste, like a key executive hire , or how to price , or whether to raise money, or whether to invest millions of dollars in a new product line. At WP Engine we’re extremely collaborative across teams. Huge effort. Some things take less time to implement than to estimate or to debate.

Engineer 264
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Scaling by “delegation” isn’t good enough

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

” Introspective young founders appreciate this, and often the stated solution is “delegation,” as defined by: I’ll do it myself, then I’ll understand it, then if further investment is warranted, I’ll have the experience to hire and instruct a new person. .” And it’s wrong.

Warrant 120
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Startup Therapy: Ten questions to ask yourself every month

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

For example, I'm an engineer, so my first answer to "Why don't you have more customers?" More than that, knowing your "padding" as I used to call it is helpful in making decisions like "Can I afford to try this Risky Expensive Thing," such as making your first hire or trying a $20,000 media blitz. Cartoon by Andertoons.

Startup 315
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Imbalanced People

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Even in sales, which is tempting for Vulcan engineers to think of as revenue-acquisition-robots with zombie-like drive to make phone calls, in which a slew of barely productive “closers” may not be financially efficient but will still get the job done. At WP Engine, we’re living proof of this.)

Engineer 257