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

This is going to be BIG.

A week or so ago, we launched the Key Hire Wire at First Round. 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.

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How to Keep Your Job As Your Company Grows

Steve Blank

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. I know a change is going to come.

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Spotlight on Engineering Team Building: Lessons learned from Algolia

Cracking the Code

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.

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Hiring Executives: If You’ve Never Done the Job, How Do You Hire Somebody Good?

Ben's Blog

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.

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You Negotiate Commodities, But You Seize Opportunities

Steve Blank

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

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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees. Thats an important job, for sure, and Ive been called upon to do it from time to time.

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The Secret History of Minnesota Part 1: Engineering Research Associates

Steve Blank

Norris became the VP of Engineering, Engstrom the VP of Research, and Meader VP of Manufacturing. And by 1949, 652 employees and by 1955, 1400. At the time, no programming languages existed. When they couldn’t find any customers they donated the ERA 1101 to Georgia Tech. ERA’s headcount grew rapidly.

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