This site uses cookies to improve your experience. To help us insure we adhere to various privacy regulations, please select your country/region of residence. If you do not select a country, we will assume you are from the United States. Select your Cookie Settings or view our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Used for the proper function of the website
Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Strictly Necessary: Used for the proper function of the website
Performance/Analytics: Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
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.
I’ve been having discussions with several people recently about the role of the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) in very early stage companies. In December 2007, I described how I commonly take on an Acting CTO Role in a Start-up. I used an image from Roger Smith that describes the varying roles of a CTO as the company matures.
Once you build it, they will now ask you about the key metrics that they need proven in order to see if you really are a good investment. The real reason to build an MVP is to do early tests of key Startup Metrics for the business. " Once you have the metrics defined, it focuses your effort. To prove/disprove a hypothesis.
I seem to encounter a lot of people who want to attach a CTO label to me as I'm the only programmer on the founding team of three. While I do fill that role at the moment, I'm a little hesitant to refer to myself as a CTO as we still haven't launched a product, acquired a single user, or turned or a penny in profit. Who will do that?
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."
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.
This desperate need for employees often leads to an equally desperate, ad-hoc approach to recruiting without any relevant recruiting metrics being tracked. Founders furiously work their networks, post open positions on every reasonable-looking job board, and hope to quickly start hiring. Candidate-company fit: Interview-to-hire.
Hire a CEO to Go Public. The VCs would hire a CEO with a track record who looked and acted like the type of CEO Wall Street bankers expected to see in large companies. The role of the independent member was typically to tell the founding CEO that the VCs were hiring a new CEO.). People had to actually pay you for your product.
At a board meeting yesterday, a management team was talking about their hiring needs and some of the challenges they're having hiring great people. Here's a simple tip: track hiring analytics and assign them to someone. If you're not interviewing enough people, you're not going to be able to hire someone--simple as that.
My daily life consists of (a) setting the strategy and rationale of the Engineering & Innovation department, based on a mixture of vision, data, and the needs of the rest of the company, (b) participate in doing the same for the whole company, (c) hire, (d) manage the managers whose teams execute the real work.
To learn more about how your startup can find, hire and keep the top talent and quality workers it needs to succeed, download this free ReadWriteWeb Report: The Talent Wars: Today’s Toughest Startup Challenge. And you need to do it sooner rather than later. So what does it actually take to build a kickass startup team?
Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. He also has a discussion of how your choice of business model determines which of these metric areas you want to focus on. Choose one.
As a CTO, I can definitely say without a doubt that few people understand what a CTO does. When I tell someone I’m a CTO, I’m often met with a blank stare. Even when someone is aware of what a CTO does, they often have limited context due to the wide variety of CTO roles.
In the Agency I dealt with a few difficult personalities focused on empire-building and metrics rather than running sound operations. Unless you can translate how your skills provide commercial value, you won’t get hired. Judgment remains paramount. You have to do a lot of networking to create your list and build your network.
Here are just a few things you might look for: Reducing risk in young companies Bringing innovation to the enterprise Designing and running experiments Customer development strategies All conference passes are on sale right now, and you can compare them here.
It should include primary and secondary KPIs and metrics related to marketing goals , as well as the platforms (e.g., When teams know what to track and how metrics relate to the overall objective, they can transform data into actionable insights to improve the play. Think about your playbook from the perspective of a new hire.
This is a guest post by Chris Hollindale, co-founder and CTO of Hasty. It could be anything: over the last few days I’ve had ideas for new product features, potential advertising campaigns, strategies for hiring the right type of people to fit into our team, and ways of creating the company culture we want to build. Food Consumption.
And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even with the highest standards imaginable, theres no way to hire just genius hackers. Hire a CTO or VP Engineering. Worst of all, your teammates are constantly wanting to have meetings.
Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,
Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) Eric, I landed upon your blog when I was searching for the path to CTO a couple of months back and I have been a frequent to the site since then. Your "startup-lessons-learned" are very valuable.
Focus on the output metrics of that part of the product, and you make the problem a lot more clear. I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. Whatever its purpose, try measuring it only at the level that you care about.
Metrics for cyclical businesses. What does a CTO do? What does a CTO do? What does a CTO (Chief Technology Officer) do in a high-tech company? So what is the CTO job? The CTO is not responsible for delivering products every quarter, but if you miss the internet or a similar technical inflection point, fire him.
Correction: Last week's CTO position at Modcloth is actually a San Francisco opportunity, not Pittsburgh. If you know of senior level business and technical professionals looking for exciting startup opportunities, they can sign up here: [link].
She was the former CTO of Cisco Systems from 1998-2000, and is on the boards of Disney and Packet Design and was a board member at Sun and FedEx for many years. The point here is that you can have very different and all valid success metrics, but it is important to keep in mind what you are trying to accomplish with your startup venture.
Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,
“Everybody felt the burden of supporting all those transactions every day,&# says Pascal-Louis Perez, kaChing’s CTO. “It took a ton of our time, and just wasn’t contributing to our long term vision.&# “It took a ton of our time, and just wasn’t contributing to our long term vision.&#
Lightspeed Prototyping: A Collaborative Workflow Cultivating Conditions for Inclusion Many organizations view diversity challenges as a numbers game… just a matter of hiring and retaining enough talent to balance the equation. Cultivating Conditions For Inclusion What is a Fractional Executive (CTO, CMO, CFO)?
For people we hired from larger companies especially, this was challenging. Im an ex-Googler, and now a CTO of a small company with lots of talented people ([link] I discovered your site not long ago, and I am learning a lot from it. where an initial bad impression affects a significantly larger percentage of potential customers.
Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,
As the CTO/VP Engineering, I was the worst offender. Leading up to a pivot, each cycle, despite our best efforts, the metrics werent good enough. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev.
Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,
Joel is focused on the fact that in many environments, programmers are considered "just the hired help" akin to manual labor, and not treated properly. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev.
Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,
Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,
Ellie Mirman was the first marketer hired by the CMO of HubSpot, the Boston-based marketing software startup that IPOed in 2014. Initially, we promoted it to a list that we’d already developed through Website Grader, the free app our CTO Dharmesh Shah had built before we even had a product.
Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,
Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,
As a shoestring entrepreneur with a SaaS (well, not really, but sort of) offering that we present to very large companies (think 10K+), I love your common sense suggestions about metrics and testing. My background isnt metrics, but we came to it as a matter of practicality. 4) More posts about metrics, scaling, and online games.
Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0,
If that’s you, by all means hire a VP of Sales with a great rolodex and call on established mainstream companies – and ignore the rest of this post. Little did they know, that he was also the CTO and the person responsible for making all tech decisions Folklore has some interesting stories about Burrell Smith ( [link] ).
gathered at the event. It is not very polished but was designed for a fast read. Successful on your platform but not sticking to guidelines, can also affect the rest of your customers - you need to help developers become more successful - can you outsource support in an authentic way?
Obviously if you target enterprise customers, you usually have a very large ACV (Annual Contract Value) and the product usually is complex. We talk about using the product complexity, your target customer size, your contract value, and whether there's individual use case–those four things--to help you decide if PLG is a fit.
So one of the first things we did was to hire an Oracle expert and get to work. Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. I was building a new startup in 1999, and wanted to do it right.
We organize all of the trending information in your field so you don't have to. Join 5,000+ users and stay up to date on the latest articles your peers are reading.
You know about us, now we want to get to know you!
Let's personalize your content
Let's get even more personalized
We recognize your account from another site in our network, please click 'Send Email' below to continue with verifying your account and setting a password.
Let's personalize your content