Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 21, 2014

The truth is you really don’t know how your teammates or your bosses will perform in good times and bad. You hire people who look good on paper. So one of the surest signs you’ve hired a leader is the willingness of his or her former team to re-assemble. After 6 months – you know. You REALLY know.

CTO Hire 320

CTO Hire Cofounder San Francisco Silicon Valley 320

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

Consider: Would you rather get hired as the CTO of a company with 1,000 daily new, unique, qualified visitors with no product, or the CTO of a company with a stable product and 10 uniques visits to the home page? If not, solving that is much harder and much more outside your control than building software.

Fractional CTO 310

Fractional CTO Coder CTO Hire Design 310

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 15, 2019

The reason is that good attributes apply equally well to “external” partners, as they do to internal partners, like a co-founder or CTO. A good overall example is the synergy between Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as well as long-time Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. Marty Zwilling.

Cofounder 221

Cofounder Software Review CTO Hire Founder 221

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

I’ll talk in a separate post about dealing with B or C players, the rest of this post focuses on your star performers. Ryan was the most talented technologist we had hired at BuildOnline. We hired Ryan at a really young age and without a tremendous amount of prior experience. One example was Ryan Lissack.

San Francisco 322

San Francisco South Africa CTO Hire Fractional CTO 322

Up and Running

OCTOBER 13, 2022

As you find your footing and begin to scale, you might feel ready to hire a formal executive team. What’s right for one company may not make sense for another, but the goal is always the same — to hire talent that will ultimately help the business thrive. When is the right time to hire an executive team?

CTO Hire 163

CTO Hire Fractional CTO CTO Hiring 163

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 5, 2014

We will persevere and move forward together,” to which the CEO added “The future rests in many ways on hard days like this, but we believe we owe it to the team to understand this and to move forward. of Elon’s ideas to come to fruition and let him fail on the rest. We hired outside experts. I was not fried.

Technical Review 417

Technical Review South Korea San Francisco Software Review 417

Gust

APRIL 13, 2014

The reason is that good attributes apply equally well to “external” partners, as they do to internal partners, like a co-founder or CTO. Partner decisions are more important than hiring decisions. Then, as I suggested before, it’s time to establish a formal agreement or contract to cement the partnership.

Partner 179

Partner Software Review CTO Hire Fractional CTO 179

Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 18, 2017

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.

Fractional CTO 54

Fractional CTO CTO Hire CTO Technical Review 54

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 15, 2014

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.

CTO Hire 266

CTO Hire RSS Cofounder Algorithm 266

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2014

In response, venture capital firms like Sequoia and Andreessen/Horowitz are hiring new partners just to work with their portfolio companies and match them to corporations. The rest is just overhead surrounding what is the core value to the acquiring company. Actually there is a simple heuristic to guide this decision.

Acquisition 334

Acquisition Intellectual Property Silicon Valley Startup 334

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 16, 2017

The reason is that good attributes apply equally well to “external” partners, as they do to internal partners, like a co-founder or CTO. Partner decisions are more important than team member hiring decisions. Then, as I always recommend, it’s time to establish a formal agreement or contract to cement the partnership.

Partner 140

Partner Software Review CTO Hire Cofounder 140

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 18, 2019

*This post is part of our “pitch deck” series where we dissect the seed stage pitch deck and discuss the ideal flow for a pitch. You can read the rest of the posts in the series by clicking here *. Now it’s time to discuss the “where”. So you’ve covered the “who”, “what”, “why”, & “when”.

Part-Time VPE 195

Part-Time VPE Seed Stage CTO Hire Forecast 195

SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

August was a slow month in terms of traffic and I was away for a lot of the month, but there were some really great posts at the intersection of startups, technology, product and being a Startup CTO. He blogs to 10,000 web entrepreneurs at Software by Rob and co-hosts the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us. m the f%*kin’ boss.”.

Startup 191

Startup CTO Hire Cofounder Venture Capital 191

blog.alinelerner.com

JUNE 21, 2013

Lessons from a year’s worth of hiring data. Because I used to be an engineer, one part of my job was conducting first-round technical interviews, and between January 2012 and January 2013, I interviewed roughly 300 people for our back-end/full-stack engineer position. Aline Lerner's Blog. Jun 21, 2013.

CTO Hire 98

CTO Hire Hiring Software Review Technical Review 98

konamoxt.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

January 21, 2009 Why Your Startup Can’t Afford To NOT Hire a CTO As I mentioned in my last post, one of the many things I do as an entrepreneur is to advise other start up companies. One of the common requests I get as an adviser is the help interview and vet potential CTO candidates. This is critical!

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire CTO Hiring Engineer 40

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 10, 2023

Unless you can translate how your skills provide commercial value, you won’t get hired. Meanwhile, three years before I left the Agency I had done a cold outreach on LinkedIn to the person I suspected was the hiring manager for a job advertisement for a company that I liked. Read the rest of Laura’s blogs at [link]

Government 196

Government CTO Hire Technical Review Salary 196

ConversionXL

JUNE 16, 2022

As Maryanne Wolf notes in the Guardian , skim reading is the new normal: “Many readers now use an F or Z pattern when reading in which they sample the first line and then word-spot through the rest of the text.”. Think about your playbook from the perspective of a new hire. What information do they need to execute a task immediately?

Campaign 149

Campaign CTO Marketing Social Media 149

The Next Web

OCTOBER 7, 2013

They were referring to non-founder engineers, most commonly the first hire for technology businesses. Often difficult to get, the first engineer sets the tone for the rest of the development team. Every time a startup raises capital, all common shareholders are diluted.

Engineer 129

Engineer Dilution Option Pool Vesting 129

SVPG

MARCH 5, 2011

With some exceptions, it it is important that this role be a peer to the CTO and the VP Marketing. For this position, you need to ensure you are hiring someone that has proven the ability to develop others. The second bad situation is when the CEO is not strong at vision, but he also hires someone in his own image.

Product 82

Product CTO Hire Hiring Leadership 82

SoCal CTO

APRIL 9, 2013

Most of the rest of the post is going to focus more on finding development rather than design firms. You are looking for someone who cares about the look, but you are hiring the development firm for it''s development skills not its graphic design skills. Others that are heavier on development. Some will have some specific skill sets.

Web Development 204

Web Development Web Developer Los Angeles 204

The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 24, 2013

At the time, RIM was the dominant smartphone company and Livingston settled into a “process-heavy” job within the company, where he worked tirelessly all hours. “By At the end of my four-month term, they brought me on part-time to run a team that built out a system around the software I’d developed at night.”.

Entrepreneur 167

Entrepreneur CTO Hire Startup Mobile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

So if youre new, consider not paying any attention to the rest of this post, and just diving into the archives, if you havent already. Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) Your "startup-lessons-learned" are very valuable. Would love to get in touch.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 4, 2018

The rest have been companies with some early market validation. For example, in the case of one recent company that we’ve been working with for the last 7 months, we have sourced half of the new team members for the company, including their CTO, head of marketing, head of customer success, and a talented senior engineer.

North America 120

North America Seed Stage Early Stage Lead Investor 120

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 21, 2016

Hire qualified internal resources or outsource as needed for the required IT positions. Bring on a security-conscious CTO at the beginning. Be conscious of the flow of data within your organization to make sure data is encrypted at rest and in transit. Detect anomalies during this phase to keep ahead of unauthorized access.

Security 100

Security Intellectual Property CTO Hire Offshore 100

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

Starting instead from a position where feedback cycle time is the priority and allowing quality to ratchet up as the product matures provides a more natural lead in to continuous deployment. The rest of the post, which you can read here , discusses the application of these principles to other contexts. I recommend you take a look.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review Lean 131

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

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. In Apple’s case Burrell Smith was designing a computer in a skunk works unbeknownst to the rest of Apple’s engineering.

Silicon Valley 146

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 146

Venture Chronicles

AUGUST 2, 2013

I have covered a couple of topics in this series, the first being hiring the best people and the second organizing for success based on the attributes of the people you are hiring. Lastly, a foundational skill of great product managers is GSD. Entrepreneurship engineering Get Satisfaction product management Startups User Experience'

Product 62

Product CTO Hire Architecture Startup 62

Up and Running

FEBRUARY 2, 2012

The so-called “Internet” had existed for years, but seemed to the rest of us (anybody outside of a few spook havens and ivory towers) like a nerdy background utility for emails. I did the earliest bplans.com sites myself, in my spare time, while running a company growing about 50% per year. January of 1995. And I started bplans.com.

CTO Hire 66

CTO Hire New York Software Web 66

Board Effect

JANUARY 15, 2020

Many companies are now also hiring a CISO or CTO to fulfill their need for IT expertise. Regulators are taking a well-thought-out and meaningful approach to regulations around digital governance matters, which is why they’re pacing a bit behind the rest of the corporate world. Best Practices for a Digital Governance Team.

Government 94

Government CTO Hire Security Internet 94

Cracking the Code

MARCH 24, 2015

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? gathered at the event. It is not very polished but was designed for a fast read.

API 48

API Fractional CTO CTO Hire San Francisco 48

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Heres my favorite part: If youve got a team, part of the team should obsess about the backlist, honing it, editing it and promoting it, while the rest work to generate (as opposed to promote) the frontlist. His post is ostensibly about how often to release new work (whether youre a blog writer, movie star, software team.)

San Francisco 76

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 76

Austin Startup

AUGUST 11, 2017

When we were left to our own devices in that conference room, our CTO and I wrote down our goals, our aspirations, our fears, and everything in between. We wrote things like what five traits a new hire should have, or values everyone in the company should act on. The wrong word can mean the rest of it doesn’t work.

CTO Hire 48

CTO Hire Austin Cofounder eCommerce 48

Hearpreneur

JUNE 21, 2017

8 – You cant change the world working part time. You can’t change the world working part time. This quote is from Oleg Vishnepolsky the global CTO at DailyMail Online and Metro.co.uk. Spend precious time focusing on launching, acquiring feedback and achieving product/market fit.

Entrepreneur 73

Entrepreneur Africa Cofounder CTO Hire 73

www.metamorphblog.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

We hired three guys from that batch and paid them in iPhones. Treat everyone you hire like a co-founder. It builds trust and earns buy-in from the people you hire. When you’re hiring folks, don’t promise equity upfront. Tiny, contracting market. You’ll be the only startup there. Win-win-win.

Founder 51

Founder Startup Cofounder Vesting 51

Duct Tape Marketing

AUGUST 10, 2017

We’ve had a lot of challenges that we’ve overcome, for example, hiring and retaining an engineering team when we were a tiny little company, it was hard to get a high quality engineer to come bet their career on you. I’d say that writing software is hard but really we’re getting pretty good at that now.

Software Review 51

Software Review CTO Hire Fractional CTO Software 51

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 4, 2018

The rest have been companies with some early market validation. For example, in the case of one recent company that we’ve been working with for the last 7 months, we have sourced half of the new team members for the company, including their CTO, head of marketing, head of customer success, and a talented senior engineer.

North America 36

North America Seed Stage Early Stage Lead Investor 36

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 28, 2011

So yes, I want to hire somebody with really high IQ and EQ but not somebody who is more knowledgeable at your specific skill set than you are. or; “I don’t have enough money to hire my team yet. We’ve met three times over 18 months and you still have no team. How can I hire a team without any money?

Leadership 363

Leadership CTO Hire Technical Review Cofounder 363