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

APRIL 3, 2014

” So I did want any rational person who wants to improve does – I hired a coach. They are the lifeblood of many companies yet they are different than the traditional technology startup DNA so the ways that you hire, motivate, compensate and assess performance of these individuals will be different.

Sales 382

Sales Startup Technical Review Matching 382

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. And they seem to have been going really slow in building out the team and you certainly don’t see a ton of too-early PR blitzes from them.

Development Team Review 374

Development Team Review Technical Review Bulgaria Lean 374

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 11, 2014

So rather than hiring a VP Marketing [to establish a strategic marketing plan, build and manage the marketing team, manage outside vendors, etc.] I recommend hiring or appointing a growth hacker.” If you can’t do this, nothing else really matters. But I still believe Sean Ellis was right.

Technical Review 384

Technical Review Hockey Stick SEM Channel 384

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 22, 2011

When you haven’t been decisive in years, when you botched a profitable exit, when you hired a non-visionary CEO and then fired her by email – it’s time to get out of the way. They are great at their respective fields whether they be marketing, sales, programming, PR, whatever. For the good of your people.

Leadership 418

Leadership Technical Review Software Review PR 418

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 16, 2015

” PR. Your job as CEO is to be “ chief adjudicator ” not “chief dictator.” When companies start the founder & CEO is often the only mouthpiece for the business. He or she gets used to deciding what to say to the public and when.

Startup 150

Startup CTO Hire Sales Leadership 150

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 5, 2011

So I did want any rational person who wants to improve does – I hired a coach. They are the lifeblood of many companies yet they are different than the traditional technology startup DNA so the ways that you hire, motivate, compensate and assess performance of these individuals will be different. Cash, cash, cash.

Sales 316

Sales Technical Review Matching Hiring 316

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 25, 2016

They might struggle to hire a-players because, well, would you go work at Public Storage to build their software capabilities? That marketing can be PR or SEO or influencer distribution or other forms of “unpaid” marketing. PR requires time and effort from your team that isn’t spent elsewhere and thus is a real cost.

Startup 150

Startup Seed Money DC Software Review 150

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2010

You still have some leeway to hire above them if need be. new features need to be rolled into PR strategies and competitor analyses. - A “chief architect&# is a young version of a “CTO.&# It’s your hedge. The best CTO’s / Chief Architects are purists.

Fractional CTO 400

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 400

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

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 10, 2011

Given how badly the announcement of the splitting went and their inability to control the PR cycle (or their stock price!) But they sure need somebody at the top handling their marketing and PR better. Or maybe they need to hire somebody with more gravitas / experience. Dumb, da-dumb, dumb, dumb. ” customer segment.

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

NOVEMBER 9, 2012

The main points I’m going to cover today are to demystify a lot of misperceptions people have about startup exists, notably: Acqui-hires are not that frequent, are hard to come by and people make much less money than you think (investors & founders). Often they are “soft landings” for PR purposes.

Technology 323

Technology PR Startup IPO 323

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 22, 2014

Of course it is super helpful if a VC can drop you in to important people for business development, recruiting, PR, sales and eventually M&A. To be clear – I’m not saying huge successes make a VC less likely to be helpful to you – I’m just saying it’s not a guaranteed predictor. Connections? Commitment.

Portfolio 364

Portfolio Chicago Sales Incubator 364

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2011

Huge structural under-employment in much of the country and full employment in some niche tech markets where it’s impossible to hire developers, designers or sales professionals. For others it feels like a two-speed economy, where rules apply to hot tech startups that don’t apply elsewhere. You know what I’m talking about.

Saudi Arabia 309

Saudi Arabia Valuation IPO Technical Review 309

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 26, 2010

One of the large parts of the burn was PR, Marketing and attending conferences. When the CEO of an early-stage startup tells me that they plan to hire a COO I’m usually not interested in the next meeting. Then I’d cut the burn to a realistic level and build a company.&# (yes, I really said this).

Entrepreneur 286

Entrepreneur CTO Hire Cofounder Early Stage 286

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 18, 2015

There’s too much PR and too many tech blogs and too many newsletters and aggregators and Twitter summarizers to even try to catch everything that’s going on and equally there’s so much noise that it becomes harder to be heard. Hire fewer employees until you’re bursting at the seems with work for the ones you have.

Software Review 150

Software Review Turkey Portfolio Syndicate 150

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 26, 2013

Understanding “The Funding Angle” I sit at enough board meetings to hear conflicting advice given to entrepreneurs about how to handle PR and announcements at startups. In stead of doing my typical big long post with 10 PR tips (like I did there), I’m going to break them up into individual (I hope more digestible) chunks.

Startup 355

Startup PR Dividend Merger 355

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 17, 2012

I had dinner with my friend Brooke Hammerling , founder of Brew PR recently. She was lamenting that some startups simply see their PR company as merely somebody who corrals the press when you want to get some inches. And they will offer you some of the best business advice you will ever receive if you’re open to it.

Startup 363

Startup PR Venture Capital Angel Investor 363

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 ]. So we decided to hire a partner, Stuart Lander , who would run operations for Upfront Ventures. And more recently she ran marketing for DogVacay, run by Upfront alum Aaron Hirschhorn.

Portfolio 150

Portfolio PR Partner Early Stage 150

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 20, 2017

If you aren’t careful every PR team will measure inches over impact. 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. You get a lot of traffic — not always results. Efficiency can be an addictive drug.

Cofounder 164

Cofounder Retention PR SEO 164

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 19, 2011

On balance I usually prefer to recruit people from my network both in terms of saving costs as well as hiring people I know & trust. One tip – depending on seniority – you can sometimes hire independent reference check firms. It can get expensive so you’d probably only do it for a very senior hire.

Term Sheet 319

Term Sheet PR Liquidation Preference Stock Options 319

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 4, 2011

Usually you have a catch-all bucket for “direct” or similar that often came through PR or word-of-mouth. How many people would we need to hire? If so, make sure you can track which leads come from this. Measuring viral adoption is obviously important. If you have multiple versions of your product, how many are web vs. mobile?

Metrics 346

Metrics Startup Acquisition SEM 346

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 25, 2010

If I were them I’d hire some ex Salesforce or Intuit folks who could help with this. I just think they should hire an experienced Chief Marketing Officer (I don’t think they have one?) Having a clear rate card (as Apple, Salesforce.com and others have) would help alleviate concerns.

Advertising 276

Advertising PR Revenue Hiring 276

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 21, 2010

I know he’s smart but you wouldn’t hire a Javascript developer to do your database design – would you? But as with consulting, PR, web design and even VC – it’s not just the firm it’s also the individual. Your cousin specializes in entertainment law – that’s different.

Southern California 318

Southern California Silicon Valley IP Stock Options 318

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 17, 2011

When competitors raise money and you don’t the following happens (assuming all else equal on product development, which I know is not always the case): they have a PR advantage both in terms of perceived momentum and also money to spend on it. They get the PR bump. They hire a team that spends more time with more customers.

Pre-Money Valuation 303

Pre-Money Valuation Dilution Valuation PR 303

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 22, 2011

I have always been equally impressed with Brew PR who represented them and would hire them for any company in which I had invested. I have always been impressed with GroupMe as anybody at TextPlus will tell you. I’ve spoken positively about their design simplicity, their UX flow and their marketing prowess.

Silicon Valley 295

Silicon Valley Non-Compete PR Social Network 295

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2015

I’m not saying don’t hire sales staff or market your products aggressively. I’m not saying you shouldn’t grow engineering or do PR. So those bullish pipelines your teams have developed that may be completely real in this market environment but at some point will stop materializing. limit your fixed costs.

Balance Sheet 150

Balance Sheet eCommerce Venture Capital Acquisition 150

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 20, 2010

Twitter never seemed to really take the offense in PR and marketing. Right now the most important role to hire in Twitter would be a seasoned marketing professional who could proactively change the conversation about Twitter and educate people about its significance as an information sharing tool.

XML 349

XML Curation RSS Viral 349

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 13, 2010

Everybody was doing marketing blitzes, over-paying to steal the best staff, pimping out urban offices to the nines , and hiring in a frenzy. It’s clear that the exuberance has returned to hiring, paying large compensation, poaching staff with big payouts and large fund raising events at lofty prices.

Turkey 302

Turkey Differentiation IP Technical Review 302

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 28, 2013

In the startup journey if you have success in your early product launches, fund raising and PR you’re likely to get “inbound interest” from likely acquirers. There are times when you need to “hire above” somebody not rising to the expectations you’d have of their role. Of course I could go on and on.

Startup 417

Startup Dilution San Diego Stock Options 417

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I just completed an exercise where I went out to hire a new associate for my VC firm, GRP Partners. I don’t believe you can hire great business people who outsource the development to a hot incubator who builds you code to match your ambitions. I had to laugh a bit reading it.

NPV 337

NPV Chicago Balance Sheet Database 337

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 7, 2016

From Aspiration to Hero For companies that do have that moment of success where everything seems to come together: funding, hiring, customers, PR, product releases and so forth — you have a “hero” moment where you feel invincible. Maybe it’s the system, maybe it’s me — but either way what could I do differently to change outcomes?

Churn Rate 150

Churn Rate Vesting Dilution Europe 150

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 5, 2011

Your highest priority right now is hiring the 1 or 2 people that are going to join your company and make a difference. Not to mention every major agency, many PR firms, etc. There’s you and your killer CTO co-founder. But who else is going to get out there and close your big biz dev deals with you? That’s natural.

Seattle 317

Seattle Silicon Valley Technical Review Los Angeles 317

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 3, 2011

They never did any PR or marketing to get their videos to first get shown on the news during the 2000 election. The most important trait in hiring to Gregg has always been smart people who are hard working & a good cultural fit. How did you go viral initially? All viral adoption starts with one thing – great content.

Viral 303

Viral Investment Bankers Video Business Model 303

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 23, 2010

Except that most of the these deals end up going in the PR waste bucket. You decide to go out and hire a sales rep. Here they’re already carrying a bag with products from many vendors so while there at the customer they just have to mention your product and budda bing. It’s a perfect love story. End of story.

Channel 293

Channel Startup Sales Partner 293

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 29, 2011

The Venture Capitalists can help these young founding teams scale their engineering departments, develop business development relationships, deal with onslaught of PR, handle executive management challenges, etc. You can’t scale a large business quickly on your $500,000 alone. Not to mention providing the capital for growth.

Venture Capital 296

Venture Capital Software LP Early Stage 296