View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 18, 2019

Now it’s time to discuss the “where”. As a seed-stage company, it is understandable to have a nascent (or non-existent) product and a barebone team relative to the great ambition of the company. Once you get to this part of the pitch, investors are trying to get a few things out of this slide: The “people roadmap”.

Part-Time VPE 195

Part-Time VPE Seed Stage CTO Hire Forecast 195

blog.aparttimecto.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

A Part-Time CTO Technology. One of the main challenges of starting a products based company is how do you build your product? This is especially true of web based companies, whose product consists of mainly a web site and very little more. In Plain English. Archive Jun 20th Sun In-House or Outsource?

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Equity Vesting 40

This is going to be BIG.

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

A week or so ago, we launched the Key Hire Wire at First Round. Because people live, shop, and buy in real time, Monetate products enable e-commerce web sites to market in real time. You will initially spend majority of time personally working with individual accounts and coaching sales team.

Part-Time VPE 92

Part-Time VPE CTO Hire Engineer Sales 92

This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 10, 2010

A CTO will also want to ensure that the businesspeople on their team will understand important product and technical decisions. They want to work in an environment where their opinions are respected and they also feel like they can have intelligent discussions about product. This is where product and design leads come into play.

Cofounder 123

Cofounder CTO Hire Design Founder 123

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 21, 2014

The truth is you really don’t know how your teammates or your bosses will perform in good times and bad. You hire people who look good on paper. So one of the surest signs you’ve hired a leader is the willingness of his or her former team to re-assemble. After 6 months – you know. You REALLY know.

CTO Hire 320

CTO Hire Cofounder San Francisco Silicon Valley 320

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

You love converting marketing requirements into 960-wide artwork, replete with whitespace, custom fonts. We can all write code — at least well enough to get a product launched and through a few iterations. Have you talked to 50 potential customers? The weakness is your love of creation. Here are two: 1.

Fractional CTO 310

Fractional CTO Coder CTO Hire Design 310

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 30, 2008 What does a startup CTO actually do? Often times, it seems like people are thinking its synonymous with "that guy who gets paid to sit in the corner and think technical deep thoughts" or "that guy who gets to swoop in a rearrange my project at the last minute on a whim."

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

View from Seed

MARCH 29, 2016

But even well-prepared startups that have laid out strategies for scaling can find themselves scrambling in the face of a fast-growing customer base. Founders need to make sure the quality of the startup’s offerings remains high and provide adequate sales and service support for prospective customers and new users.

Metrics 120

Metrics Founder CTO Hire Technical Review 120

ConversionXL

JUNE 16, 2022

They map out a repeatable process to avoid chaos and confusion in your team and with customers. This consistency creates familiarity, breeding trust that turns prospects into customers and customers into advocates. So, how can marketers align every department for a consistent customer experience? Positioning.

Campaign 149

Campaign CTO Marketing Social Media 149

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2014

Much has been written about when it is time to hire a “professional CEO” to run a startup company and of course that has long been a norm in Silicon Valley when founders find that their inexperience may be a limiting factor in company growth ( know as the Peter Principle ). It now seems that Mark is more firmly in control.

Founder 309

Founder CTO Hire Silicon Valley Leadership 309

This is going to be BIG.

MAY 19, 2010

That's why hiring at the stage that our companies tend to be at is a unique proposition.one that can seriously create or destroy a ton of value. Because this is so important to our companies, we've been spending a lot of time trying to figure out how we can add more value on this front. That's the way a lot of this stuff goes.

CTO Hire 99

CTO Hire Hiring Portfolio Early Stage 99

Austin Startup

AUGUST 19, 2018

Why Corporate Innovation Fails Design Sprints Done Right: Creating Lasting Change User-centered design is critical in making or breaking consumer technologies, but sometimes, on small product teams, day-to-day needs can get in the way of larger, longer term goals and solutions that resonate with your customer can’t manage to get off the launch pad.

CTO Hire 48

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Fractional VPE Austin 48

www.bothsidesofthetable.com

MAY 13, 2012

Want to Know Difference Between a CTO and a VP of Engineering? The terms “CTO” and “VP Engineering” have such stigmas associated with what they are that I’m sure some people will feel uncomfortable with the definitions I’ve put forward. I’ve heard both arguments from CTO’s.

Fractional VPE 89

Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE Fractional CTO CTO Hire 89

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. You’ll get sales information from your VP of Sales, marketing information from your VP Marketing, tech information from your CTO and so on.

CTO Hire 308

CTO Hire Management Technical Review Part-Time VPE 308

www.lanceglasser.com

MAY 13, 2012

Product development. Queuing theory and product development. The Essential Product Investigation Phase Gate. So you want to ship the product early? Customer Equity. What does a CTO do? The minimum viable product. What does a CTO do? So what is the CTO job? The Year of the Black Swan.

CTO 40

CTO CTO Hire Technical Review Architecture 40

SVPG

OCTOBER 14, 2014

The role of the product organization is to consistently deliver significant new value to the business through continuous product innovation. At a startup, the product team either innovates and provides real value or the startup dies. They just make minor optimizations to existing products.

Product 91

Product Technical Review Engineer CTO Hire 91

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

I’m super excited to announce that GRP Partners led the investment in Ethan Anderson’s new company MyTime (link has LA-based merchants but will give you a good feel for the product). ” So Ethan went to work as a product manager at Google Video. So I asked Ethan to build his product first and then we would fund.

Southern California 359

Southern California San Francisco CTO Hire SEM 359

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 6, 2015

by Tal Segalov, CTO & co-founder of Mintigo. Last year, Twitter announced that it would unveil its Buy Button in the first quarter of 2015, cementing the role social commerce will play in the way businesses must market their products to consumers. Hire the right marketing team. Constantly create “Calls to action”.

CTO Hire 100

CTO Hire Cofounder Social Media Mobile 100

Venture Chronicles

AUGUST 2, 2013

I have covered a couple of topics in this series, the first being hiring the best people and the second organizing for success based on the attributes of the people you are hiring. 3) It all starts with the product: Companies can overcome a great many challenges with band-aids, duct tape, and bailing wire.

Product 62

Product CTO Hire Architecture Startup 62

www.allthingsdistributed.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

Main July 11, 2007 The Different CTO Roles I was putting together a short panel presentation on the roleof a Chief Technology Officer in corporate innovation and I once again realized that there is quite a bit of confusion around the role of the CTO. I am posting it here as it might be of generalinterest.

CTO 40

CTO CTO Hire Syndicate Syndication 40

Steve Blank

JUNE 20, 2022

How does a newly hired Chief Technology Officer (CTO) find and grow the islands of innovation inside a large company? How not to waste your first six months as a new CTO thinking you’re making progress when the status quo is working to keep you at bay? But this is the first time he was the CTO of a company this size.

CTO 358

CTO Technical Cofounder CTO Hire Incubator 358

SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 17, 2007

skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Saturday, February 17, 2007 Finding Good Developers in Los Angeles? Im part of a CTO group that meets once a month to discuss various topics. He has twenty years’ experience as a CTO. He has been the CTO for several start-ups, most notably eHarmony.

Los Angeles 150

Los Angeles Technical Cofounder Southern California CTO Hire 150

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. Collective Intellect’s customers use this analysis to inform and measure the effectiveness of their PR and marketing strategy.

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire Part-Time VPE Architecture Ruby 40

ReadWriteStart

FEBRUARY 1, 2012

These will receive $50k in seed funding, free office space and credits toward other useful services as part of their acceleration program. Some of the first companies have launched products or services or are in the process of getting there, according to their entrepreneurs. They also signed Global eTelecom as a customer, one of U.S.'

St. Louis 118

St. Louis CTO Hire Fractional CTO Entrepreneur 118

www.huffingtonpost.com

MAY 10, 2011

We sell the winning designs to customers in the form of personalized wedding invitations, Christmas cards , and other stationery and photo card products. We sell the winning designs to customers in the form of personalized wedding invitations, Christmas cards , and other stationery and photo card products.

CTO 43

CTO CTO Hire PHP Cofounder 43

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2014

Most large companies manage three types of innovation: process innovation (making existing products incrementally better), continuous innovation (building on the strength of the company’s current business model but creating new elements) and disruptive innovation (creating products or services that did not exist before.).

Acquisition 332

Acquisition Intellectual Property Silicon Valley Startup 332

Growthink Blog

OCTOBER 23, 2015

The ability to measure outputs, in real time, allows for fractionalized delivery of traditional industrial services - like as mentioned by Splunk CTO Snehal Antani - the rental and leasing forklifts not by a period of time (i.e. hour, day, year) but instead by the amount of lift of weight lifted and moved. The result?

Internet 48

Internet CTO Hire Fractional CTO Silicon Valley 48

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 16, 2015

Here is where I see this really play out: Product Management. Most CEOs fancy their own product skills and like to weigh in on priorities. At times I wanted the engineering team to produce features to support our sales efforts to I occasionally leaned on them a bit. CEOs often meddle in products and dev teams hate it.

Startup 150

Startup CTO Hire Sales Leadership 150

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

He’s a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed Facebook, Skype, Jawbone, and dozens of other companies whose products you use. Melissa will talk with Lean Startup Productions CEO and co-founder Sarah Milstein about how experimentation continues on the site even with millions of eyes on it every day.

Lean 165

Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

www.informationarbitrage.com

FEBRUARY 24, 2010

Main February 23, 2010 Advice for CTO Founders: Dont Let Business Kill the Business Founding a technology company is an amazing thing. Too often, however, I have found CTO / Founders paired with business people who not only don't add value, but frequently detract from the value of the business.

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire Founder Cap Table Vesting 40

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 5, 2010

They often make great team members such as head of products, CTO, head of sales, CFO, etc. And we’re lucky because they deliver many of the great products, services and content that we consume in our lives every day. We weren’t ready to hire an associate yet so I offered him a summer internship. It was May.

Entrepreneur 293

Entrepreneur CTO Hire South America Salary 293

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

You’re sales person is getting blocked by the CTO who says she shouldn’t go above him but the CTO isn’t approving the deal. But “he didn’t have the budget to hire a developer until he had raised money!&#. He went out and found a developer and built a product. He looked stunned.

Entrepreneur 414

Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Technical Review CTO Hire 414

Mucker Lab

APRIL 6, 2023

Hila Qu joined Mucker’s Tony Yang for an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) conversation about Product-Led Growth (PLG) for Startups to kickoff the 2023 Mucker Growth Series. The other dimension you need to think about is the product complexity. The other dimension you need to think about is the product complexity. This is a spectrum.

Product 78

Product CTO Hire Startup Fractional CTO 78

SoCal CTO

MAY 15, 2009

Social networking sites and microblogs are used not only to build company brands, but to foster productivity; social media tools help build communities around the question, "What are you working on?" Formerly, he was Managing Director of both Product Management and of Business Development at Los Angeles Times Interactive.

Social Network 150

Social Network Networking Los Angeles Fractional CTO 150

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 4, 2018

Of the last 15 investments we’ve made, 8 have been pre-product or pre-seed style rounds. According to First Round’s State of Startups 3 out of 4 early-stage founders (series A or earlier) say hiring is their #1 concern, but the same amount say they spend less than 20% of their time on it.

North America 120

North America Seed Stage Early Stage Lead Investor 120

The Next Web

DECEMBER 2, 2013

How much does it really take to build a product like Twitter or Instagram? With mobile development agencies and product incubators on the rise and more corporate “labs” spinning out each day, there’s no shortage of talent to help you build the next great Web or mobile app. Still, a product is nothing without scalability.

Cost 168

Cost San Francisco New York City Ruby 168

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 16, 2020

Being relatively a new service trend in today’s tech-driven world, CTO-as-a-Service (CaaS) is notably gaining its momentum. Though CTO as a traditional full-time position exists for decades, some companies do not feel they need a technology executive. Ideal scenario assumes there’s a CTO in house. Early-stage startups.

Fractional CTO 85

Fractional CTO CTO CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 85