Stories of Opportunity from the First Round Capital Key Hire Wire – VP of Sales, CTO, VP of Engineering

A week or so ago, we launched the Key Hire Wire at First Round. We realized that there were certain open positions in our portfolio we wanted to call extra attention to.  Over 1,000 senior professionals have since signed up for the mailer, which goes out on Fridays.  I tried to make it a little more entertaining than your average job RSS feed. 

If you know of senior level business and technical professionals looking for exciting startup opportunities, they can sign up here.

VP of Sales, Monetate - Philadelphia, PA


A finger hovers above a mouse button.  It wants to click.  It wants to buy that horrifically expensive purse... 

It...must...have...Prada... and oh would it go well with the shoes it clicked on the last time it was here.  


Must... click...   Noooo.  


Just can't get over that hump.  Reason sets in.  It's just a little too expensive--plus when you add in shipping, and handling.  Oh, that handling.  Damn those people for getting to handle my purse.


If only--if only there was a little extra nudge...


DING!
 

"Free shipping when you buy in the next 15 minutes."

CLICK.  

Done. 

Accessory nirvana awaits... as does beating this month's quarterly numbers.

 

Every day, Monetate (www.monetate.com) helps major online retailers like QVC, Casual Male, and Urban Outfitters, to make the most of their online marketing dollars.Because people live, shop, and buy in real time, Monetate products enable e-commerce web sites to market in real time. That means marketers can change and test anything, anywhere on their sites, for any segment of shoppers, instantly, without I.T. Using Monetate Real-time Marketer, companies are boosting sales while slashing costs and time-to-market. Monetate Mobile adds mobile-native navigation, search, GPS store location, cart access and more, to any site, overnight.

The company is not just looking for a VP of Sales, but for a champion for all things sales throughout the organization.  Let’s face it, most successful businesses are—at their core—sales organizations.  You believe it.  You make it happen.  You'll be responsible for the successful management of the sales organization in order to meet the objectives of the Company.

You will initially spend majority of time personally working with individual accounts and coaching sales team.  You will hire (over time) and manage a field and inside team of Sales Directors and Market Developers, including for each direct report creating and managing goals directly tied to Company goals.  This includes establishing sales objectives and compensation plans for all sales personnel, including salary structures, commission plans, sales contests and bonus plans.

You will excel at this because you have 5+ years of online and offline sales experience, recent experience working with a SaaS B2B company, and exceptional sales management skills, experience building a sales force and sales channels that sell SaaS services to the heads of marketing and/or eCommerce at online retailers, existing relationships with heads of marketing and/or eCommerce at online retailers and extraordinary success selling SaaS products and services to online retailers.

Interested candidates should e-mail keyhirewire@firstround.com with "Monetate VPS" in the subject.


CTO, Modcloth – San Francisco, CA (corrected from e-mail version)

Remember that girl from back home? 

You'd pass her by on your bike late on a summer day, sitting in her parents' screened-in porch, sipping lemonade in her airy sundress...  textured periwinkle cotton shell dressed with rosy bouquets resembling the enviable award-winning bushes tracing your childhood home.

That girl now has now has 200,000 paying customers and a profitable run rate of over $40M within 18 months of raising capital.  

How do you like them apples?

Now Susan, and her now husband Eric, who co-founded the company with her when they were just 17, need an entrepreneurial CTO who can build a team to scale a game-changing platform, while at the same time supporting complex business intelligence and supply chain systems.

Modcloth (www.modcloth.com), is a hyper-growth eRetailer with an internationally recognized brand and a website viewed by over 10,000,000 women in the last two years. In that time, the company has grown from 3 to 104 employees (and growing!).  They began by selling only vintage and expanded to sell vintage-inspired pieces by indie designers, but Modcloth still launches one new true vintage item each day.

The company needs a serious technologist that can modernize their global fashion supply chain so it can empower a new generation of professional independent designers and artisans, and help the most talented individuals rise to the top.  Candidates must have a proven track record of scaling consumer applications, growing world-class technology teams, and delivering fast iterative business results.

The ideal candidate has experience with eCommerce systems, emerging mobile and social technologies, as well as RoR.

Interested candidates should e-mail keyhirewire@firstround.com with "Modcloth CTO" in the subject.


VP of Engineering, AppNexus - New York, NY

"It's over a billion ad impressions a day, we got a full tank of venture capital, half a pack of cigarettes, the future of ad networks is dark, and we're wearing sunglasses."

"Hit it."

For major buyers of display advertising, real-time access to the largest audiences on the internet holds the promise of vastly improved targeting and performance. To take advantage, buyers need scalable, enterprise-caliber ad technology solutions.

Led by an accomplished management team from Yahoo/Right Media and Google/DoubleClick, AppNexus (www.appnexus.com) is the most advanced platform for buying display ads in real time.  We've got some pretty exciting products — front-end systems that handle billions of requests a day, multi-terabyte server-side key/value stores, data pipelines that process and aggregate hundreds of GB daily and a series of user-interfaces and APIs that allow our customers and partners to interact with all of the above--all built on top of our proprietary enterprise cloud-computing infrastructure and software stack.

We are looking for a seasoned engineer with management experience to take ownership of our engineering team. In this role you’ll need to provide mentorship and technical guidance to individual team members as well as get hands-on in helping to maintain and improve on our products. One thing is for certain — you must have experience dealing with large scale distributed applications. We have a strong preference for candidates with experience working with advertising systems written in C or C++.

AppNexus is most definitely still a startup so we are looking for someone familiar with an environment where a select few individuals are trying to accomplish a tremendous amount — all while requirements change weekly (or daily!) and everything we build runs 24/7 with incredibly strict latency and uptime requirements.

Requirements

> Experience managing and mentoring a team of at least 5 engineers working on a variety of projects

> Experience setting up a flexible engineering process whereby we can maintain our pace of rapid development without sacrificing code quality, product stability and employee burn-out
> Experience establishing Q&A policies and procedures that don’t inhibit innovation

> Strong C/C++ experience — specifically in developing large-scale web, analytics or adserving systems

> Capable of providing technical guidance and leadership to a team of PHP/MySQL front-end and API developer

Interested candidates should e-mail keyhirewire@firstround.com with "Appnexus VPE" in the subject.

Anecdote from an actual turndown note I wrote today

This Week in NYC Innovation - February 22, 2010