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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. VP of Sales, Monetate - Philadelphia, PA A finger hovers above a mouse button. and oh would it go well with the shoes it clicked on the last time it was here. Let’s face it, most successful businesses are—at their core—sales organizations.

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Why good people leave large tech companies

Steve Blank

They make hardware with a large part of their innovation in embedded software and services. The CFO asked me to stay as one of the engineering directors came in for a meeting. So, this was a meeting of last resort, as the engineering director was making one last appeal to the CFO to keep his team in town.

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Pitch Deck Month: The “Where Are You Going?” Slide

View from Seed

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.

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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. That is a very powerful statement.

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Yes, but who said they'd actually BUY the damn thing?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

If you can't find ten people who say they'll buy it, your company is bullshit. I say "find ten people who say they'll buy." If the VP of Engineering thinks the target customer is just like him/her, you're doomed. If there are millions, it's trivial to find ten. Short-sighted, no? But you're still not listening.

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What is a CTO?

Austin Startup

A CTO will guide your product strategy, market validation, architectural decisions, process optimization, recruiting, and hiring. If outward facing, they will attend important sales calls and speak to the technology strategy and vision. A CTO’s real value is in finding opportunities with asymmetric payoffs.

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See More than 120 Speakers and Mentors at The Lean Startup Conference

Startup Lessons Learned

Another way to learn more about who’s speaking is to sort the conference program by category and find people addressing specific topics. He was a very early employee of Facebook , and engineering director there through the moment it blew up. Now he’s VP of engineering at Dropbox , where he’s seeing similar growth.

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