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What does it mean to be a CTO for a startup? Should a startup CTO spend their time programming? Here’s a graphic from Socal CTO that illustrates the roles as they change over time: In its earliest days, a startup’s top need is often to produce a product. A CTO can help you find the right answers.
Dear SaaStr: When should a bootstrapped startuphire a (CFO, COO, CMO)? How can a CEO hire those C-level positions for the first time as a CEO and entrepreneur? Here are some rough rules: You want a VP of Everything (Sales, Marketing, Product, Eng) by about $5m ARR, and ideally, Sales and Marketing well before that.
A mediocre tech team, a part-time CTO, or even just a decent CTO just doesn’t get you there. Wait until you find a great partner here. Finally you have great customers and traction — but you can’t afford to hire all the people you need to meet their needs. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the startup.
Q: When should a bootstrapped startuphire a (CFO, COO, CMO)? How can a CEO hire those C-level positions for the first time as a CEO and entrepreneur? Here are some rough rules: You want a VP of Everything (Sales, Marketing, Product, Eng) by about $1m-$2m ARR. IME, rough order to make hires in: VPM: $0.2m
Did you hire a good enough VP? 4 part test: – who great did they hire in the first 60 days? – did they take part of the job off your plate? If they don't pass the 4 part test, they aren't good enough. Hiring your VPs as a founder is tough. – does the team believe?
While there is no legal definition for CTO or bright line between CTO and VPE, I’d suggest a start-up CTO really only has to do a few things — which are very hard: Assemble a small team (3–9) of very good engineers. That often were never anticipated and aren’t part of the job spec. Dear SaaStr: What Makes a Bad CTO?
That you absolutely, positively, have to only hire “Rockstars” in your startups. A Rockstar engineer really is 10x better than the next tier. And yet … is it worth waiting 6-9 months to hire a VP that’s a true Rockstar, if you’ve struggled to make the hire? It’s true.
As part of that, we wanted to look back at some of our most iconic content and sessions. One of the first what How to Hire a Great VP of Sales at the New York Enterprise Tech Meet-Up (thank you to John Lehr and Work-Bench for setting this up). I’m doing this thing for the first time. SaaStr is Turning 10!
but you can’t afford to hire all the people you need to meet their needs. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the startup. You have to love, or at least commit to, recruiting constantly. You have to hire so many functions in SaaS?—?VPS, VPS, VPM, VPP, VPCS, VPE, etc. More here: TAM is Great.
The first type is the kind of management team hired by second+ time founders. They often staff up their teams with folks they already know and have been successful with at their last startup. Often folks they convince to once again be a VP of Eng or VP of Sales. The director that wants a shot at VP.
Dear SaaStr: When Should a CEO of a Startup Stop “Doing the Work” and Let Others Do the Work? A great VP of Engineering that can just ship the product from spec with no drama, etc. A great VP of Marketing that can just get you leads. You spend all your recruitingtime just on VPs and above.
For me, it took a while to build up the experiences and confidence to get there: First, I worked with enough startups and CEOs to “get it”. I had a chance as a startup lawyer working in “Silicon Valley” to work with 20+ startups. Second, I joined the best startup that would have me, as a Director and then Senior Director.
To some extent, if you have the hottest startup in the world, the full package, you can play some games with investors. 99% of startups aren’t that. No one has time to have coffee with all of those folks. For 99% of startups, when you want money, tell VCs you want money. 2 “Give the VP of Sales more time.”
Q: How do you deal with bus factor in a startup? Goodness this is one of the toughest parts of scaling. I remember Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, and I discussed this at one of the SaaStr Annuals, when he lost his VP of Engineering. All I can tell you is this: First, if you hire great VPs, it partially takes care of itself.
Lloyed : Startup-. Keith : The other thing someone said to me that really resonated and has become an important lesson is you can raise the odds of success at any startup from the very early days from something like the proverbial one to 10 percent that people talk about to probably 30 to 40 percent just by changing the team composition.
He had hired a recruiter to help him grow his team. But at some point in time, most quickly growing startups will need help forming their teams. One of my partners, Tim Haley, was a top recruiter in the valley for many years and having his experience and expertise has been invaluable. How to Pick a Search Firm.
Internships have sparked millions of successful careers, and they can be a valuable talent pool from which companies can eventually hire full-time employees. Interns are a pipeline for full-time talent. Your company could be one of them by hiring ambitious interns. Recruitment Tips.
Meanwhile the equity stakes of founding VP of Engineering and VP of Product have remained relatively constant throughout the same five year period across all stages of company. Another cohort has a founding CEO and VPE. Another group has a founding CEO, VPE, VPP and so on.
Founder CEO Todd McKinnon was VP of Engineering at Salesforce and left to start Okta in the depths of the last downturn. Customer Count Up 8% Year-over-Year to 18,950 It’s hard to find net net customers after $1B ARR. Way, way too many startups focus 100% on direct sales. Wow, what an engine at $2.5
Lloyed : Startup-. Keith : The other thing someone said to me that really resonated and has become an important lesson is you can raise the odds of success at any startup from the very early days from something like the proverbial one to 10 percent that people talk about to probably 30 to 40 percent just by changing the team composition.
Since 2008, there has been a secular trend to increase cash compensation and decrease equity to startup management teams. Tho two tables below tell the story for VPs of Engineering (VPE) and VPs of Product (VPP) across the US broadly and in the SF Bay Area. Cash +10% +16%. Equity -19% -17%. Cash +26% +8%.
It means reducing choices amongst engineering teams and standardizing technology, so our team can spend as much time as possible delivering value to customers. Rich Archbold , Senior Director of Engineering, has been at the forefront of codifying and scaling this philosophy over the past few years.
Scott Beechuk, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners, brings together world-class SaaS engineering leaders Claire Hough, Vijay Gill and Weiping Peng for a dynamic conversation on where SaaS technology is headed, how to build top performing engineering teams and what it takes to lead in today’s high-velocity engineering environment.
As part of the run up to 2021 SaaStr Annual in the SF Bay Area Sep 27-29 , we’re taking a look back at some of our favorite classic sessions. (And You’ll find out tomorrow. And grab the best deal ever on 2021 Annual tickets here ). Hubspot today is a $23B juggernaut. But of course, it wasn’t always quite that big!
Though our second day of the event is focused on mythical creatures of all kinds, you’ll find that there are unicorns hiding in our agenda every day this year. Prior to Shopify, Jean-Michel was a VP of Engineering at Atlassian for four years and held several positions at IBM for six years. The Unicorns ??
Lee coined the often-used Silicon Valley term unicorn in a TechCrunch article “Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning from Billion-Dollar Startups.” 347: Ready to hire your first VP Sales? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin.
Earlier this week, I wrote about the increase in cash compensation and decline in equity grants to VPs of Engineering and Product in startups. I dug a bit deeper into the data set to find an explanation. I received a lot of comments about the analysis, and in particular hypotheses to explain the data. Venture capitalists.
Prior to joining BetterCloud as our new VP of engineering, she served as a director of engineering at Twilio. We sat down with Brandon to discuss her vision for engineering at BetterCloud, her approach to building teams, and her advice to young female engineers. I’m a big fan of creating innovation time.
We’ll have some time. It sounds minor or technical, but if you want to due diligence on a human being, I get to do it a few 100 times a year. I used it in kind of my breakfast pre warm-up, the crazy times we’re in. From Satya from Homebrew, we just heard that seed’s at an all time high.
On day one as Reddit’s new VP of Engineering, Nick Caldwell faced a dilemma. He had just spent 13 years at Microsoft, most recently as the head of 300 engineers. At Reddit, he led a team of 35 – none of whom knew how to manage other engineers. Short on time? Nick Caldwell: I’m VP of engineering at Reddit.
I actually think I never met any company that have not made a few mistakes about build versus buy and most of the time it’s linked to the long term cost. First of all, I think any good engineer can easily give you 10 good reason to build instead of buy. It’s super easy, like we never find enough arguments to buy.
This time last year, 24 SaaS experts predicted big things for 2024. Next we’ll be hiring it. However this will take time, so until then, companies will experiment with usage based pricing, and continue the debate whether usage based or licensing is the better pricing model in the long run. What will 2025 bring?
Today the State of Remote Work 2017 report revealed that 63% of people in product and engineering roles work remotely at least once per week, which is 21% more than the average. When breaking down remote work by company size, the report found that smaller companies are 2X more likely to hire remote workers than larger companies.
Today the State of Remote Work 2017 report revealed that 63% of people in product and engineering roles work remotely at least once per week, which is 21% more than the average. When breaking down remote work by company size, the report found that smaller companies are 2X more likely to hire remote workers than larger companies.
The farther you get into your startup journey, the bigger the challenges are likely to become. But challenges and obstacles are just part of the reality of entrepreneurship. If you feel that your startup’s getting caught in the doldrums, it’s important for you to show focus and determination. Bills may begin to pile up.
Finding Opportunity Through Humility and Curiosity [07:50]. Our second sponsor is Outreach , the leading sales engagement platform that enables sales reps to humanize their communications at scale, from automating the soul-sucking manual work that eats up selling time to providing action-oriented tips on what communications are working best.
Tanya Reilly, Principal Software Engineer @ Squarespace, Joy Ebertz, Principal Software Engineer @ Split.io, Izar Tarandach, Senior Staff Engineer @ Datadog, and Mike McQuaid, Principal Engineer @ GitHub will be talking about modern strategies that you must consider in 2023.
But with it comes immense benefits and competitive advantages such as the diversification of ideas, speedier product development, and representation in important regions and time zones. We got a chance to celebrate our initial public offering on the New York stock exchange back in September, which was a really exciting time for me.
356: Pete Kazanjy is the Co-Founder @ Atrium, the startup providing proactive, always-on insights for sales operations, managers, and leaders. Pete is also the author of Founding Sales, the canonical writing on early-stage startup sales. Pete is also the author of Founding Sales, the canonical writing on early-stage startup sales.
In his spare time, he also hosts his own growth-focused podcast, called The Growth TL;DR. Short on time? I’m really excited to be on your podcast; it’s one of the ones I listen to all the time. I joined HubSpot at a very interesting time when we were about 300 people globally, way back in 2013.
Ep: 413: Join four-time Founder and CEO Auren Hoffman as he breaks down how businesses can become the right model for explosive growth, emulate their strategy, and join the path to Unicorn potential in eight simple, hand-made steps. So hopefully we’ll have a lot of time for questions. This is also true with people you hire.
In Intercom’s early years, it wasn’t uncommon to find a support rep looped into a deal or asked to assist with onboarding. What we and our customers needed was a dedicated team – one that could jump on calls, assist with implementation, and spend time on complex problems. Maximize impact by embracing what doesn’t scale.
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