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MARCH 24, 2021

How to Build a Great Product Before Hiring Your First PM “At any moment, be crystal clear (and stay consistent) about what the “top company priorities” are for the quarter. Hiring Your Team. ” (Rob Go). This sounds incredibly straightforward in theory, but it’s actually hard to practice in reality.” ” (Rob Go).

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Seed Stage Hiring IPO Analytics 177

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APRIL 11, 2019

The last thing you want to do is go through all the time and energy of finding and hiring a new employee only to find out, after you’ve extended the offer, that they’re not a good fit. Below are some tips to help you avoid the pitfalls of a bad hire and ensure you’re using your time wisely. It happens all of the time.

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JANUARY 23, 2017

They talk about what business development roles actually do for their companies, and when and why a founder would hire someone to lead up the function. This is a deep, nuanced exploration of a job role that doesn’t often fit as neatly into departmental categories as engineering, product, sales, or marketing.

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APRIL 21, 2015

Joris Poort , Founder and CEO, Rescale (Software platform and hardware infrastructure to perform scientific and engineering simulations; undisclosed capital raised, per CrunchBase): We spent two and a half years writing custom software to run large-scale simulations on Boeing’s data centers.

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SEPTEMBER 9, 2014

Many startup CEOs hire COOs or launch companies with a co-founder carrying the title. When should founders hire one? There’s simply too much nuance and too many options, all with varied pros and cons, to suggest a silver bullet in your hiring process. More importantly, A-players attract and hire other A-players.

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Hiring Cofounder Startup Technical Cofounder 336

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MARCH 19, 2015

Engineers and even marketers proudly claim to be “full stack.” Starting in 2009, Savoia began using an approach as an engineering director at Google that helped the tech giant know whether it was about to build the right product for the market … or a product that would flop. Why doesn’t everyone do this?”

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NOVEMBER 4, 2019

And to do that, founders either spend way too much money on a third party dev shop, or hire a “lead engineer” that is capable, but not really a star. Although this seems obvious, you’d be surprised how many early stage companies immediately invest too much time and energy to build a product that doesn’t really prove anything.

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Seed Stage Bootstrapping Demand Early Stage 180

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SEPTEMBER 4, 2018

For example, in the case of one recent company that we’ve been working with for the last 7 months, we have sourced half of the new team members for the company, including their CTO, head of marketing, head of customer success, and a talented senior engineer.

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DECEMBER 14, 2016

NYTech does not mirror the diversity of its host city… Today on Gotham Alpha, I talk to Alex Qin, Skillshare engineer and founder of Code Cooperative, about the reality of New York Tech’s diversity gap…what factors actually reinforce hiring prejudice here…and how we can all start to fix this problem, right now.

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FEBRUARY 18, 2016

Startup salaries — especially on the engineering side — are at near record highs. In other words, while lots of things floated up with increasing frothiness they are going to be harder to drive down quickly the same way valuations and invested capital has collapsed in the last three months. Here are the two most obvious examples: Wages.

Seed Stage 120

Seed Stage San Francisco Startup Valuation 120

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JULY 21, 2022

Beyond offering disruptive and fair pricing, we’re becoming the go-to, trusted one-stop shop to discover and hire the talent clients always wanted, but didn’t know how to find and didn’t think they could afford. For creatives, we’re a premium, value-aligned partner to help grow their networks and portfolios, and monetize their passions.

Early Stage 156

Early Stage San Francisco Michigan Portfolio 156

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APRIL 16, 2015

The reason why hiring a technical co-founder or someone else in role X seems like a milestone is because investors might actually have questions about whether the team can be successful. But again, it’s not specifically the hiring of people that is the value inflection, it’s answering the question of confidence in the team.

Seed Stage 120

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FEBRUARY 27, 2019

Most startups don’t have the luxury of hiring an experienced PM early in their journey. When you have extremely limited engineering resources, it’s even more critical to stay focused and clearly set your priorities. Approach 2: Allocate [x]% of your engineering bandwidth for such activities and do not go over.

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FEBRUARY 9, 2016

As a result, the interview process during the seed stage can feel a bit more meandering to the hiring manager — who is most likely the founder(s) given the size and stage of the company. Here’s what we learned… Hire a Missionary. Adam Brod , VP of Technology and Engineering, BookBub. Built in Boston.).

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Founder Seed Stage Cofounder Boston 120

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MARCH 15, 2016

Here are are two super common answers: “You know, it’s all about the team and we were able to hire great people.”. There’s often debate about whether or not you should publish on Medium instead of your own blog because of the impact on search engine optimization. It’s all about having a great product experience.”. Forget about that.

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MAY 2, 2019

I wrote about this in this post on After Organic as well as in our interview with the founders of WildType about engineered fish protein. This could be through community (as in the Wing ), through training and continuing education (as with our portfolio company Strive ), or through more effective hiring and recruiting.

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