Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

How do you figure out what’s the right mix of skills for the co-founders of your startup? “After reading your post on Why Founders Should Know How to Code it looks like web/mobile startups have it easy. Trying to figure out what the right set of co-founders isn’t so clear. Who can I hire later?

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Founder Intellectual Property Business Model 335

TechEmpower

AUGUST 14, 2023

Startup founders make decisions on a daily basis – significant decisions that will have lasting impact on their business. CTO Founder – Do they really still need a technical advisor? No good innovator turns down advice! Why do this without the right technical advisor? Would you create contracts without an attorney?

Technical Review 260

Technical Review CTO Hire Fractional CTO Software Review 260

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

Hunter Walker

AUGUST 11, 2022

In addition to our dollars, we are eager to help founders with the construction of their cap table, not just generically with the highest profile folks available, but more specifically where they might get some help along the way. What expertise do the founders personally have? Founders Often Don’t Come From These Backgrounds….

Seed Stage 102

Seed Stage Cap Table Founder Marketing 102

SoCal CTO

MARCH 2, 2015

As the organizer of the LA CTO Forum , I get lots of inquiries by job seekers and people looking for CTO / VP Engineering talent. I’ve written quite a bit about aspects of this topic, especially from the perspective of startup founders looking for talent – you can find these in: Startup CTO.

Technical Cofounder 150

Technical Cofounder Los Angeles CTO Hire Part-Time VPE 150

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2010

This time I thought I’d try and address engineering talent. Often I’m asked by startup CEO’s about how to best build an engineering team. This post is designed mostly for non-technical founders. You still have some leeway to hire above them if need be. I have much experience in this domain.

Fractional CTO 400

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 400

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 14, 2023

Of course, their answer is that the second intends to get to market faster, but every engine has limits regardless the fuel applied. This could equate to two technical founders (with a minimal salary), funding two developers for a year. Tackling most of the support tasks yourself. Use social media for early marketing.

Burn Rate 258

Burn Rate Hockey Stick Management Salary 258

YoungUpstarts

NOVEMBER 9, 2016

by Saqib Ayaz, co-founder of Hire an Assistant. A virtual assistant is a self-employed person who is being hired on contractual basis for as long as the client needs his/ her services. Virtual Assistants are being increasingly hired by a number of people and businesses some of which are: Entrepreneurs. Contractors.

Hiring 145

Hiring Software Review Technical Review Cofounder 145

Austin Startup

OCTOBER 11, 2021

The funding will be used to further invest in hiring remote workers, with an emphasis on the greater Austin and San Francisco areas due to Honor’s existing office footprints, and to expand Honor’s groundbreaking operations and technology capabilities across the Home Instead network, which has three offices in the greater Austin area.

Technical Review 62

Technical Review Engineer Finance Technology 62

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2018

With the reckless and naïve abandon of founders who had no clue what they were about to tackle, we had just started Ardent , a supercomputer company. Ben Wegbreit, the VP of Engineering (one of my mentors and then co-founder of Epiphany), broke his foot skiing just as the company started. Here was the day I got that lesson.

Part-Time VPE 321

Part-Time VPE Leadership Silicon Valley Los Angeles 321

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 13, 2015

The question is: How do you decide what role is most important to hire for? Founders typically revert to whatever they’re already expert in, and decide they need more of that. So, a technical founder decides she needs another developer, or a sales-oriented founder decides she needs another sales person.

Part-Time VPE 120

Part-Time VPE Hiring Retention Revenue 120

Version One Ventures

SEPTEMBER 25, 2018

A few weeks ago I shared some important leadership lessons from Stewart Butterfield , including investing in your own growth to make sure that the founder scales as fast as the company. Growing with your start-up can be a very tough undertaking for a founder. There’s typically little choice for a founder CEO.

Part-Time VPE 258

Part-Time VPE Management CTO Hire San Francisco 258

Hunter Walker

MARCH 21, 2022

We’ve sent hundreds of millions of dollars to startup bank accounts but none of those have gone to teams which don’t have at least one founder we consider to be ‘mission-driven.’ But I’ll tell you, my experience suggests that mission-driven founders also have some hurdles to becoming great leaders and CEOs. How do I define that term?

Founder 117

Founder Startup LLC Software Engineering 117

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

I would discover that there was a more effective alternative in building a marketing department than hiring traditional marketers with MBA’s. .&# I would discover that there was a more effective alternative in building a marketing department than hiring traditional marketers with MBA’s. Context here.)

Engineer 198

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 198

Steve Blank

JULY 11, 2017

The CFO asked me to stay as one of the engineering directors came in for a meeting. The director had complained to his boss, the VP of Engineering, who admitted his hands were tied, as this was a “facilities matter,” and the VP of facilities reported to the CFO. These new CEOs would also act as a brake to temper the founder’s excesses.

Part-Time VPE 308

Part-Time VPE Liquidity Event Stock Engineer 308

Cracking the Code

MAY 2, 2019

Team building is top of mind for any start-up founder or exec. 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.

Part-Time VPE 48

Part-Time VPE Engineer Retention API 48

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 16, 2014

Eventually you need a VP of Product to handle your product roadmap, a CTO for engineering leadership and VPs of sales, marketing & biz dev. You hire great people. You motivate, cajole, reassign tasks, hire, fire and push the organization forward. Engineering? You set direction. You course correct. What do you do?

CTO Hire 385

CTO Hire Entrepreneur Technical Review Leadership 385

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 12, 2010

Even if you don’t have “direct&# sales I would tell you that “everything is a sale&# including fund raising, hiring, getting press and doing business development. One of the biggest mistakes I see early-stage startups making is hiring “seasoned&# sales professionals or hiring people too senior, too early.

Hiring 346

Hiring Sales Startup Early Stage 346

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 17, 2018

by Felix Winstone, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Talkative. As a new entrepreneur or business owner, the most important thing you will do is hire talent. As a startup co-founder with a growing team, here are the recruiting tips I’ve learnt over the last couple of years. Hiring = Sales. Know When To Hire.

Cofounder 164

Cofounder Elevator Pitch Hiring Dividend 164

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 19, 2020

Of course, their answer is that the second intends to get to market faster, but every engine has limits regardless the fuel applied. This could equate to two technical founders (with a minimal salary), funding two developers for a year. Tackling most of the support tasks yourself. Use social media for early marketing.

Burn Rate 310

Burn Rate Hockey Stick Salary Angel Investor 310

Transformify

MARCH 14, 2020

Startup hubs like Berlin, London, New York, Los Angeles, Bangalore, Hong Kong and Singapore offered access to venture capital and vibrant start ecosystems thus attracting the brightest founders. Out of a sudden, both startup founders and investors started asking themselves ‘’ What is our remote strategy?

Hiring 98

Hiring Bulgaria Italy Spain 98

The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

While you are working away on your business plan, looking for ways to raise capital, finding the right people to hire, etc., But have you ever had the opportunity to pick the brains of founders who created amazingly successful startups and companies like Envato , Backblaze , Simple , or Treehouse ? Things snowballed from there.”.

Cofounder 164

Cofounder Founder Startup Bootstrapping 164

View from Seed

APRIL 21, 2015

On the heels of our research on HBS entrepreneurs , NextView’s Dimitri Dadiomov (HBS ’15) interviewed several top founders on the early stages of their companies. Matt Prince , Co-Founder and CEO, CloudFlare (Web performance and security to protect and accelerate websites; $72.1 On Launching and Finding Early Traction.

Founder 120

Founder Las Vegas Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

This is going to be BIG.

OCTOBER 10, 2010

Every business person with a dollar and a dream these days thinks they’re a technical co-founder away from interweb stardom. Remember the joke on Office Space where you can’t have the engineers talking to the customers? That the one guy’s job was just to interpret what the customers wanted for the engineers.

Cofounder 123

Cofounder CTO Hire Design Founder 123

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

As a startup in this phase you often raise capital, get press, hire staff and everything feels possible. As the idea went from innovating on software & systems to launching a company to rolling it out in the field brought on Rahul Gandhi as his co-founder to physically launch the company. As an early-stage VC I love this phase.

Operations 286

Operations New York City Technical Review Startup 286

View from Seed

APRIL 21, 2016

How do you build your engineering/dev team from the ground up? Let’s make a few assumptions: You are a founder, you have your idea, and you have your money. What kind of engineers do you need? What kind of engineers do you need? Now consider a few high-level categories of engineers: Front-End. It is just you.

Engineer 149

Engineer Hiring Non-Compete Dividend 149

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 18, 2019

Projecting from the seed stage, there are two types of team-building topics you want to address – key senior hires and org-level team building. As the company progresses through product market fit (PMF), you will want to highlight other key senior hires required to scale and round out the functional expertise of the exec team.

Part-Time VPE 195

Part-Time VPE Seed Stage CTO Hire Forecast 195

Up and Running

AUGUST 30, 2021

Entrepreneurs have to get really comfortable with rejection, especially as a first-time founder. This is what most founders do. It can be a small and nimble startup like Origin, or a company with 50 employees and hiring more every quarter. Talk to the people who are experiencing the problem, and then build your solution.

Entrepreneur 132

Entrepreneur Lean Colorado Engineer 132

Version One Ventures

NOVEMBER 17, 2015

Since then, over 400 Insight alumni have been hired as data scientists or data engineers at top tier companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Airbnb, and Google. However, drawing math-loving engineers from the tech talent pool isn’t a sustainable strategy. When we launched Insight, the term “data science” was still new.

Hiring 60

Hiring SQL Artificial Inteligence Engineer 60

Ben's Blog

APRIL 15, 2013

Perhaps the most common mistake that I see a technical founder make when building her sales organization is she applies strategies that worked in building the engineering team to the sales hiring process. It starts with the hiring process. A good engineering interview will include some set of difficult problems to solve.

Hiring 78

Hiring Sales Engineer Software Engineering 78

Eric Friedman

FEBRUARY 7, 2023

Why Shipping Is Important When Building Shipping defines software engineering in a magical way that is challenging to understand. By working with people who care about the craft of engineering and building their own products to simplify the lives of others, we can ship smarter.

Engineer 78

Engineer United States Software Engineering Bootstrapping 78

David Teten

OCTOBER 7, 2013

This week, I’ll discuss the second-choice alternative: how to hire an outsourced designer for your company. Internet marketers help increase traffic to your site through search engine optimization. Don’t just hire the first promising candidate. It isn’t always wise to hire the first promising developer you identify.

Design 114

Design Web Hiring Offshore 114

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 28, 2020

by Pablo Listingart, Founder and Executive Director of ComIT. To begin again, to start anew, to have a fresh, blank slate — the corporate advantages of hiring entry level employees, strong professionals at their career beginnings, seem self-explanatory. And success depends on a well-developed, entry-level hiring protocol.

Hiring 264

Hiring Early Stage Non-Compete Salary 264

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 13, 2018

I worked with engineering to try to find product/market fit ( big endian or little endian ?) and get the chip designed into companies building engineering workstations – powerful personal computers, all while trying to refine how to find the right markets, customers, and sales process. Declare them cultural co-founders.

Part-Time VPE 333

Part-Time VPE Employee Cofounder Hiring 333

Ben's Blog

APRIL 15, 2013

Perhaps the most common mistake that I see a technical founder make when building her sales organization is she applies strategies that worked in building the engineering team to the sales hiring process. It starts with the hiring process. A good engineering interview will include some set of difficult problems to solve.

Hiring 77

Hiring Sales Engineer Software Engineering 77

View from Seed

MARCH 24, 2021

Doing Reference Checks on VCs “Try to speak to at least one founder that the investor has worked with in a failed investment. The Seed VC Decision Tree “If the market is attractive and there just isn’t great founder/market fit, we will be open minded as well. Hiring Your Team. This is not always easy to do.

Seed Stage 177

Seed Stage Hiring IPO Analytics 177

ReadWriteStart

DECEMBER 15, 2022

Being able to hire talented professionals remains a difficult proposition in the current job market, especially when sourcing experienced developers, designers, and project managers. Today’s Talented Engineers & Designers Need Top-Shelf Tools of the Trade. Build a Talented Team of Technology and Business Professionals.

Incubator 188

Incubator Startup Software Developers Software Development 188