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. We asked Sylvain to share his secret tips with us.

Part-Time VPE 48

Part-Time VPE Engineer Retention API 48

Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 25, 2018

But as the start-up scales and you hire employees, your day-to-day is taken over by more managerial tasks, like hiring and managing people, running company meetings, etc. It’s unusual to hire a non-founder CEO early in a start-up’s life because it will most likely fail. There’s typically little choice for a founder CEO.

Part-Time VPE 258

Part-Time VPE Management CTO Hire San Francisco 258

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 13, 2015

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. For all possible roles, think of the perfect person for the job — a person so amazing you could never recruit them. How to determine (1)?

Part-Time VPE 120

Part-Time VPE Hiring Retention Revenue 120

Steve Blank

JULY 11, 2017

They make hardware with a large part of their innovation in embedded software and services. The CFO asked me to stay as one of the engineering directors came in for a meeting. So, this was a meeting of last resort, as the engineering director was making one last appeal to the CFO to keep his team in town. I wish I hadn’t.

Part-Time VPE 308

Part-Time VPE Liquidity Event Stock Engineer 308

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

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. .&# I would discover that there was a more effective alternative in building a marketing department than hiring traditional marketers with MBA’s. Context here.)

Engineer 198

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 198

Version One Ventures

MAY 23, 2019

And Sin-Mei Tsai , VP of Engineering at Shippo, discussed code quality. And she has just about completed 60 to 140 ( Ada is hiring !). Unlike “traditional” departments such as Engineering, Product, Sales, Marketing, BD, Customer Support/Success, People is a relatively new leadership function. Shared my thoughts with you!

Part-Time VPE 136

Part-Time VPE Software Review Salary Non-Compete 136

Austin Startup

DECEMBER 16, 2018

It is all about how you hire the best and the amazing impact doing so will have on your culture. And my answer always is, “Recruiting”. Recruiting has to be a top-three priority for any CEO, for any size organization. Brant and I came up with a process for recruiting that was so obvious in hindsight but yet is so rarely done.

Part-Time VPE 48

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Hiring Austin 48

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 13, 2018

If you’re an early employee at a startup, one day you will wake up to find that what you worked on 24/7 for the last year is no longer the most important thing – you’re no longer the most important employee, and process, meetings, paperwork and managers and bosses have shown up. The company was going to hire a VP of Marketing.

Part-Time VPE 333

Part-Time VPE Employee Cofounder Hiring 333

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. He hired an operating exec as the CEO a few years ago. My observation was that the CEO and VP of Engineering were confusing cause and effect.

Part-Time VPE 318

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 318

Feld Thoughts

AUGUST 9, 2013

I’ve written before about hiring for cultural fit, and about the importance of prioritizing cultural fit over competence when hiring at startups. I started thinking about it again when I saw this Dilbert comic , because it pokes fun at the culture of startups and their propensity only to hire people who fit into them.

Part-Time VPE 153

Part-Time VPE Hiring Engineer Portfolio 153

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

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

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

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

YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 8, 2011

If you’re looking for a space, simply type in an address and find available spaces around it. Kowitt and Gupta then hired a full-time VP of Engineering, Nick Shiftan, who rebuilt the site from scratch. However, the quality wasn’t quite what they expected.

Part-Time VPE 223

Part-Time VPE Philadelphia Singapore Engineer 223

Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 18, 2017

A CTO will guide your product strategy, market validation, architectural decisions, process optimization, recruiting, and hiring. A CTO’s real value is in finding opportunities with asymmetric payoffs. They seek the 80/20 economical solution, present options, and discuss tradeoffs. “A

Fractional CTO 54

Fractional CTO CTO Hire CTO Technical Review 54

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

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. First, your hiring/team building strategy should follow two key rules. Founders should focus their time and efforts on the areas that create the most value. 2 nd hire: VP of Finance. 5 th hire: VP Product.

Part-Time VPE 60

Part-Time VPE Management Finance Vertical 60

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2010

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. For lots of reasons that never worked out, but I liked him so much that the following year I tried to hire him as the VP of Engineering of Ardent. (He

Advisory Board 260

Advisory Board Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Stock 260

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. If they hire an accountant to help prepare and file their taxes that may cost around $500. Be sure to post your opportunity here.

Part-Time VPE 41

Part-Time VPE Sweat Equity DC Washington 41

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.

CTO Hire 48

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Fractional VPE Austin 48

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 never built a Google-sized business but I did build an organization from scratch that grew to 120 employees in 5 countries before we sold it.

CTO Hire 308

CTO Hire Management Technical Review Part-Time VPE 308

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 9, 2010

If you can't find ten people who say they'll buy it, your company is bullshit. I say "find ten people who say they'll buy." If the VP of Engineering thinks the target customer is just like him/her, you're doomed. If there are millions, it's trivial to find ten. Short-sighted, no? But you're still not listening.

Software Review 312

Software Review Part-Time VPE Houston Cofounder 312

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 11, 2023

The story starts with a company you probably never heard of – Engineering Research Associates. While unique for the time, this public-private partnership was in-line with the wartime experiment of Vannevar Bush’s OSRD – using civilians in universities to develop military weapons. Parker agreed to invest. Paul was the place to be.

Minnesota 281

Minnesota Engineer Minneapolis Silicon Valley 281

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 were going to be guessing.

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

ReadWriteStart

SEPTEMBER 20, 2012

Maybe they don’t hire fast enough or they’re too short-tempered to attract top talent. In one way or another, someone on your board has been indicating to you that it’s time to ramp it up well before the ultimate conversation ever takes place. You’ve raised enough money, you’ve hired enough people, you’ve built a great product.”.

Part-Time VPE 133

Part-Time VPE Founder Silicon Valley Startup 133

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. Dan drew up his thoughts around a job description for a web Chief Technology Officer (or Chief Technical Officer), and invited us to follow suit.

Fractional CTO 40

Fractional CTO CTO Technical Review CTO Hire 40

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. Their engineers hated us.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. But since I spent a long time in a hybrid CTO/VP Engineering role, I still have this nagging question. Instead, they find options and can communicate them to everyone in the company. Find the 80/20 - this was my favorite part of the job.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

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

ReadWriteStart

SEPTEMBER 20, 2012

Maybe they don’t hire fast enough or they’re too short-tempered to attract top talent. In one way or another, someone on your board has been indicating to you that it’s time to ramp it up well before the ultimate conversation ever takes place. You’ve raised enough money, you’ve hired enough people, you’ve built a great product.”.

Part-Time VPE 70

Part-Time VPE Founder Silicon Valley Startup 70

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. For one thing, you’ll learn from his mistakes.

Fractional CTO 40

Fractional CTO CTO CTO Hire Fractional VPE 40

devver.wordpress.com

NOVEMBER 9, 2010

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? VP of engineering is a managing role. Are you good at managing or not?

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire Part-Time VPE Architecture Ruby 40

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 21, 2013

They may run a function, such as product or engineering, or they may have a broader operational role and carry a COO title. For example, at one of my portfolio companies, the other founder looked after administration, finance, operations, product and engineering. But then the company hired a VP of operations.

Cofounder 45

Cofounder Founder Part-Time VPE Portfolio 45

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 16, 2020

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. The “right” time to bring in a CTO varies from company to company. Where to find a skilled CTO? OK, I need a CaaS.

Fractional CTO 85

Fractional CTO CTO CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 85

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 2, 2014

CEOs who are tough but fair-minded set aggressive targets on “time” and communicate clearly with engineering why there is a deadline. For engineering it focuses one’s energy on a critical date and there is the satisfaction of being able to see the immediate results of your hard work in front of a large audience.

Software 344

Software Part-Time VPE Engineer Leadership 344