Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 16, 2014

You hire great people. You motivate, cajole, reassign tasks, hire, fire and push the organization forward. You have this tension between on the one side being a micro-manager (by which great people won’t want to work with you) or being hands off (and having quality lapses or team alignment issues). You set direction.

CTO Hire 385

CTO Hire Entrepreneur Technical Review Leadership 385

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 6, 2013

But not anal if one founder who shares equity graciously with early employees who are treated as “co-founders” My idea startup team is heaving on tech personnel but also has strong product management. Don’t hire a homogenous team. Don’t hire “relationship management” sales people too early.

Cofounder 388

Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 388

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 8, 2014

Most firms hire associates straight out of MBA programs and usually it is a “2-3 years and out” type of job. At Upfront VC we have a very strict policy to hire pre MBAs into the role. Ability to manage and prioritize large amounts of tasks since you’ll get many things thrown at you from various directions.

Jordan 365

Jordan Technical Review Portfolio Partner 365

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

APRIL 17, 2016

But they also take on issues in science, technology and management. But in my experience it’s surprising at how little time we as investors and as board members and startups as management teams spend thinking about how to create the best team dynamics. I watch whether the CEO talks over other people or lets them participate.

Pakistan 150

Pakistan Technical Review Iran Russia 150

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 31, 2010

The next few posts are going to talk about scaling your sales operations as you move out of the evangelical phase. 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. Be realistic about your skills.

Sales 286

Sales PR Forecast Technical Review 286

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 9, 2013

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. Or thinking about how much capital you have and therefore how many people you can hire – you rigorously prioritize. Managing C deals is called “nurturing.”

Customer 324

Customer PR Marketing Technical Review 324

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 16, 2015

recently wrote a post talking about how some VCs meddle in operating company decisions or some executive teams are too reliant on VCs to jump in and make hard calls for them. So operating at a higher level, helping to set the framework for decision making and then sitting down and watching the game be played, is certainly the way to go.”

Startup 150

Startup CTO Hire Sales Leadership 150

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 28, 2012

“Yeah, but I’m just going to execute this [channel sales deal, international license of my product, new industry, new operating system, biz dev deal] and then it will pretty much run itself.” I always tell teams I meet with, “The scarcest resource in your company is management bandwidth. I hear it every week.

Bandwidth 415

Bandwidth Management Startup Channel 415

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 30, 2016

It is a truism that with more capital you will hire people more quickly and spend more liberally whether it’s on external contractors, PR firms, attending events, doing legal work (trademarks, patents) or whatever. It forces harder decisions about whom you’ll hire and whom you’ll delay. million or $4 million.

Pre-Money Valuation 292

Pre-Money Valuation Valuation Early Stage Startup 292

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 22, 2014

Industry or Operating Experience? It felt like there was a wavelength with management and somebody wasn’t on it. I know many VCs who don’t have operating experience and frankly some of them are fantastic. And let’s be clear – in almost every company there is executive management fighting.

Portfolio 364

Portfolio Chicago Sales Incubator 364

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 14, 2010

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. But many CEO’s and management teams fail to set clear guidelines on what the company objectives are and make sure that everybody is driving toward the same goal.

Development Team Review 323

Development Team Review SEM Channel Social Media 323

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

Great product managers who are not great business people still often fail. 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. 66% Net Operating Margins? What assumptions do you make in the cost lines about people?

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 29, 2010

million and we seemed likely to raise another $40 million within the first 18 months of operations. Once a company has raised $2-3 million dollars I often advise them to get an office manager. I will quote one portfolio company CEO who said about his office manager, “Mark, this is the most important hire we made last year.

Warrant 333

Warrant Germany France Cost 333

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 1, 2016

It feels like something you could turn your attention to once you have tens of millions of dollars and a large staff to run operations and you could step back from it all and think about how to lead. They hire their initial co-founders and early employees and everybody has a sense of “mission.” A Sense of Purpose.

Leadership 150

Leadership Southern California San Diego Hiring 150

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 1, 2009

But whether it’s Naval’s “power of two&# or my “start things and then hire your co-founder&# approach the reality is that you’ll need to find a partner. You might be great at networking and leading but bad at planning and managing. Are you a leader vs. a manager? - Are you technically inclined? -

Hiring 289

Hiring Cofounder Dilution Startup 289

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. Well, aside from it showing discipline and intelligence – we always get flooded with emails when we recruit and when you have to manage volume you need to go for obvious filters. We manage nearly $1 billion.

Los Angeles 290

Los Angeles Technical Review Due Diligence Venture Capital 290

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 22, 2012

The constraint between good ideas and growth operates in both directions. My first company was used to manage workflow & share CAD drawings and plans on the $16 billion refurbishment of the London Underground. “Why do founders want to take the VCs’ money? Growth, again. Our second company was bought by Salesforce.com.

Silicon Valley 390

Silicon Valley Venture Capital Startup Technical Review 390

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2011

Howard Morgan earned a PhD in Operations Research/Computer Science in 1968. They did not take salaries during the first two years and invested more money in the firm than they received from management fees. SecondRound.com – This is a proprietary CRM system that was built to help manage the fundraising process.

Pre-Money Valuation 284

Pre-Money Valuation Technical Review Cofounder Cram Down 284

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 30, 2011

You hire people too fast, you over build your products, you try to force market adoption and you do PR blitzes before your product is really ready for prime time. I had my operations team telling me it was too hard for them to run analytics unless we built in our new BI platform. I was management. What did he know? He was tech.

Development Team Review 374

Development Team Review Technical Review Bulgaria Lean 374

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 17, 2017

If you hire 6 senior 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 6 months. If you don’t have a strong balance sheet and can’t hire more people that’s fine — but understand this may lead to slower growth.

Stock Options 227

Stock Options Startup Dilution Venture Capital 227

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 3, 2010

It meant that the management teams hadn’t figured out a product / market fit for their own businesses. But to be clear the overwhelming majority of deals involve one company driving the cultural integration, establishment of uniform processes, hiring / firing decisions, etc. They often involve big hugs on stage.

Merger 276

Merger Technical Review Early Stage Dilution 276

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 13, 2014

Operating experience (Helped run parts of CitySearch & UrbanSpoon, tons of product management experience, Board of Hatch Labs which helped spawn Tinder). People often ask me what VCs look for when we hire partners and many have asked how to become VCs themselves one day. She has been in operations in Seattle and Los Angeles.

Partner 408

Partner Las Vegas Los Angeles Baltimore 408

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 17, 2016

Any hiring manager at a company who has any operational experience and common sense will never want to hire somebody remotely anyways. Anybody with experience has been burned by somebody else just like you who wanted to get hired for a remote job. Let’s see how that works out. Fair enough. Again, understandable.

Search 150

Search Los Angeles Chicago San Francisco 150

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 11, 2013

” We explained what we felt the core values of a firm of the future needed to uphold: Provide real operational insights to entrepreneurs (the days of being “money men” are gone). Expand our partnership, bringing in and nurturing next-generation talent who bring operational experience and different points-of-view.

Ireland 324

Ireland Jordan Portfolio Flash 324

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 19, 2019

While the management of a startup company deals with the day-to-day decision-making within the company (strategy, budgets, goals, tasks, compensation) ultimately the Board of Directors has the legal governing responsibilities for these things. hiring & firing the CEO. in case you’ve never heard that term.

Startup 204

Startup Dilution Government Stock Options 204

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 6, 2010

When I was running startups I felt like a horse with blinders on because I was super focused on the content management market and ignored many other markets. My job doesn’t involve the daily grind of customer complaints, product outages, business partner / channel problems, hiring / firing, etc.

Technical Review 312

Technical Review Due Diligence Spain Warrant 312

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 13, 2011

Product Management – Brad and Mark discuss the role of Product Managers in Startups. One (thing) we have talked about in the past is a lack of Product Managers, experienced technology Product Managers. (in So I think the hardest role to fill in a startup is a Product Management role. And how do you overcome that?

Technical Review 288

Technical Review Venture Capital Silicon Valley Software Review 288

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 10, 2011

Or maybe they need to hire somebody with more gravitas / experience. But they sure need somebody at the top handling their marketing and PR better. Maybe the person that runs this is tremendously talented and Reed Hastings is setting the agenda. Sometimes that is the best strategy, sometimes it is not.

Customer 287

Customer Technical Review Caching PR 287

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 10, 2014

It’s why I wrote this post that the controversial first hire after an A round out to be an office manager / assistant / HR person who handles everything from stocking supplies to booking travel to scheduling group meetings. What they do with the money is add more engineers and maybe hiring a marketing person.

Startup 381

Startup PR Finance Hiring 381

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 3, 2016

Side Note : Upfront has hired Kerry Bennett as a member of our executive management team to run marketing – please follow her on Twitter here ]. As a starting point you have to realize that investment firms (which a VC is) have management needs. There is no right or wrong – these are the three basic models.

Portfolio 150

Portfolio PR Partner Early Stage 150

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 13, 2013

I started as a programmer, and then a database designer, and then a project manager, and I led conversion teams. Because I’m going to say no to you, and the guys you want to hire from Facebook are going to say no to you. Should I hire or not hire this person? And I’m now managing partner six years later.

Cofounder 337

Cofounder Technical Cofounder San Diego Startup 337

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 10, 2016

I joined Upfront Ventures in 2007 and took over as co-Managing Partner in 2011 along with the founder, Yves Sisteron. I asked for the responsibility of setting out the firm’s future strategy and our daily operating tasks. My first task was to expand the partnership and my first hire was Greg Bettinelli.

Los Angeles 150

Los Angeles Early Stage LP Partner 150

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 12, 2013

For starters they has asked him to hire a CEO (Hamet was a first timer) and that person lived in Seattle even though NextMedium was based in LA. We have been on a drive to add more operational partners. I was the first operational startup partner added – having built and sold two software companies. What does that mean?

Partner 340

Partner Los Angeles South Africa Cap Table 340

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 2, 2014

Thus I hear many talk about “radical transparency” when virtually ever experienced operator in my inner circle talks knowingly about that naiveté. Given how important people management is it’s surprising more of us don’t have group coaches. In today’s terms that probably a billion! Foursquare?

Startup 385

Startup Stock Options Cofounder Campaign 385

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2010

The path I went down after a few years was to hire more process driven people and devolved more daily operational ownership to people running individual functions such as product management, sales management, finance, etc. Unwillingness to devolve power is the bane of many management teams at startup companies.

Non-Compete 296

Non-Compete Sales Hiring France 296

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 5, 2012

You need to segment your audience and find a way to get your highest quality customers over to O&O (owned & operated) inventory where you can get higher CPMs, sell merchandise and capture more customer information. ” Them, “Oh, we’ve hired A,B,C company to do it for us.” They have to. Hello, Yahoo!?! (I

Silicon Valley 374

Silicon Valley Los Angeles Distribution Java 374