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I hope many will read this and have an answer for the question, “what’s the different between a CTO and a VP of Engineering?&#. The CTO / Lead Architect - If you want to build a great technology company, you’ll need a “rockstar&# engineering lead. The VPEngineering aspires to manage teams.
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. Hiring a hands-on lead developer might seem like the right move for an early stage startup. It’s understandable - a hands-on developer can produce a product.
A week or so ago, we launched the Key Hire Wire at First Round. Because people live, shop, and buy in real time, Monetate products enable e-commerce web sites to market in real time. You will initially spend majority of time personally working with individual accounts and coaching sales team.
Want to Know Difference Between a CTO and a VP of Engineering? I hope many will read this and have an answer for the question, “what’s the different between a CTO and a VP of Engineering?” You still have some leeway to hire above them if need be. The VPEngineering aspires to manage teams.
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. 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.
This time, I am very excited to introduce Sin-Mei Tsai , VP of Engineering at Shippo , a Version One portfolio company. To help us perform functional testing without mock objects, we maintain a seed database that reflects the database schema and contains the data definitions that we would expect in production.
This is Part 3 of the series: 5 lessons from 150 startup pitches.? Of hundreds of startup pitches at Capital Factory , almost none had unearthed 10 people willing to say, "If you build this product, I'll give you $X.". If you can't find ten people who say they'll buy it, your company is bullshit. Short-sighted, no?
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. At first the company just consisted of the founders, but Ben soon started to hire his engineering team. And how long would the change in engineering dress take? The next day?
As your organization grows and you hire senior staff where you are no longer managing every employee directly the issue of how to manage people that are not your “direct&# reports arises. In addition to attending board meetings I spent time with the CTO trying to understand the technical challenges he was trying to solve.
I would discover that there was a more effective alternative in building a marketing department than hiring traditional marketers with MBA’s. I set up an advisory board as a vehicle to get these industry experts engaged with the company and product. At the time this was a pretty controversial decision.
The question is: How do you decide what role is most important to hire for? If I hire someone to do X, I’ll have time for Y and Z. Hire the best person for that role. For all possible roles, think of the perfect person for the job — a person so amazing you could never recruit them. How to determine (1)?
If you’re an early employee at a startup, one day you will wake up to find that what you worked on 24/7 for the last year is no longer the most important thing – you’re no longer the most important employee, and process, meetings, paperwork and managers and bosses have shown up. The company was going to hire a VP of Marketing.
We particularly like this post, Hiring Executives: If You’ve Never Done the Job, How Do You Hire Somebody Good? , In order to ensure completeness, I find it useful to include criteria from the following sub-divisions when hiring executives: Will the executive be world class at running the function? Melissa Bell, Vox.com.
Now it’s time to discuss the “where”. As a seed-stage company, it is understandable to have a nascent (or non-existent) product and a barebone team relative to the great ambition of the company. Once you get to this part of the pitch, investors are trying to get a few things out of this slide: The “people roadmap”.
And Sin-Mei Tsai , VP of Engineering at Shippo, discussed code quality. And she has just about completed 60 to 140 ( Ada is hiring !). Unlike “traditional” departments such as Engineering, Product, Sales, Marketing, BD, Customer Support/Success, People is a relatively new leadership function.
Another way to learn more about who’s speaking is to sort the conference program by category and find people addressing specific topics. He’s a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed Facebook, Skype, Jawbone, and dozens of other companies whose products you use. For example: Mitch Kapor was a founder of Lotus.
But as the start-up scales and you hire employees, your day-to-day is taken over by more managerial tasks, like hiring and managing people, running company meetings, etc. It’s unusual to hire a non-founder CEO early in a start-up’s life because it will most likely fail. There’s typically little choice for a founder CEO.
The biggest difference between being a great functional manager and being a great general manager—and particularly a great CEO—is that as a general manager, you must hire and manage people who are far more competent at their jobs than you would be at their jobs. So, with no experience, how do you hire someone good? Probably none.
A product demo is a critical tool in the sales process. What makes a compelling product demo? A good product demonstration should do three things: 1. Introduce your product. If you can demonstrate how your product makes a user’s life easier, everything else will fall into place. Done right, it’s a deal maker.
A Phone Call After I left MIPS Computers I was in New York tagging along with a friend (a computer architect whose products at Apple a decade later would change the shape of personal computing) who was consulting for a voice recognition startup. I’ve convinced the team you’d be perfect, come join us as the VP of Marketing.”
Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.
So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. Instead, they find options and can communicate them to everyone in the company. Find the 80/20 - this was my favorite part of the job. Whats one thing a brand-new first-time CTO could learn from them? I mean, have you seen other people?
The expertise of administrators and senior-level developers suffices to handle routine technical tasks under the guidance of such company members as VP of Engineering, Team Lead, and Project Manager. The “right” time to bring in a CTO varies from company to company. Where to find a skilled CTO? Early-stage startups.
Today's post is brought to you by my friend, Paul Blumenfeld , a recruiter who is one of the most thoughtful people I know when it comes to hiring processes. Many hiring managers write a job spec that is heavy on wishes and low on real needs. I see two reasons for this discrepancy: Static Specs. that would get the interview.
Norris became the VP of Engineering, Engstrom the VP of Research, and Meader VP of Manufacturing. ERA was undercapitalized and always looking for other products to sell. When they couldn’t find any customers they donated the ERA 1101 to Georgia Tech. The professional staff owned the other 50%.
In a few cases, they are clearly smart people in a bad situation, and Ive written about their pain in The product managers lament and The engineering managers lament. Its common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company. The "just fix it" mentality is counter-productive here.
Don’t hire people with skills and qualifications similar to yours. If you have a technical background and you are focused on product development, consider a co-founder with a sales and marketing background that can focus on selling your world class product. Hire based on functionality and avoid having too many C’s.
The path to our involvement with the company dates back to last December, actually, when I attended a Gilt Groupe “Expert Talk” run by Josh Knowles, formally their VP of Engineering. I wouldn’t negotiate weekend plans via Twitter, or debate a feature with a product team.
A CTO will guide your product strategy, market validation, architectural decisions, process optimization, recruiting, and hiring. The Face of the Product and Technology A CTO is often the face of the technology and product. They will attend conferences and tradeshows to evangelize your product and technology.
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. The second is to demonstrate the reach of the product.
With this round, Backupify is going to be able to sharpen its product and business focus, and make some much needed engineeringhires. We're looking for a solid VP of engineering and some additional developers. It's also great to have such great folks joining us in our investment.
There’s a lot of debate surrounding the right time to bring executive level hires into your start-up. First, your hiring/team building strategy should follow two key rules. Founders should focus their time and efforts on the areas that create the most value. 2 nd hire: VP of Finance. 5 th hire: VPProduct.
Last week, I wrote about Akamai , a company with strong network effects that successfully transitioned from a single product to build a platform that garners over a billion dollars in revenue and is now a core part of the Internet’s fabric. Scaling Lesson 1: Focus On Finding A Great Business Model.
You can still get on a panel by finding an existing panel that was submitted and adding yourself to it. It’s not too hard to find the panel organizer on social media and reach out to them. You just raised $10MM from Sequoia, you’re 3 co-founders, and you want to go hire the VP of Engineering from Uber. Don’t worry.
Product and Engineering. How to Go From Google Engineer to First-Time CTO. Product and Engineering. How to Go From Google Engineer to First-Time CTO. Ian Langworth started his career as an O’Reilly author and software engineer at Google. First Round Capital. The Review.
They may run a function, such as product or engineering, or they may have a broader operational role and carry a COO title. For example, at one of my portfolio companies, the other founder looked after administration, finance, operations, product and engineering. But then the company hired a VP of operations.
Published on: July 13, 2011 Posted By Angie Tags: Elizabeth Knopf , Finding A Co-Founder , FounderDating , Sorced , Technical Co-Founder , Tips & Tricks. After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development.
We could hire employees, but we want to be forced to figure out how to scale investing. In essense, let the market design the product. As the volume of startups increases, big companies will start to develop standardized procedures that make acquisitions little more work than hiring someone. Weve done the same thing ourselves.
But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. Re-architect and re-write” the product. He hired an operating exec as the CEO a few years ago. Who Wants to Work on The Old Product. The logical solution? “Re-architect
One of the first potential advisors I reached out to was someone who 10 years earlier tried to hire me as the VP of Marketing of his new division at Sun Microsystems. For lots of reasons that never worked out, but I liked him so much that the following year I tried to hire him as the VP of Engineering of Ardent. (He
You see there is a creative tension along the spectrum of time and scope. If you pull too hard at the scope end of the chain your time drifts. If you pull hard at the time end of the spectrum you end up shipping inferior product. The adrenaline of time pressure stimulated the frontal cortex and kicks in a creative gear.
Often founders with a genius for product are not so good at managing people. Maybe they don’t hire fast enough or they’re too short-tempered to attract top talent. In one way or another, someone on your board has been indicating to you that it’s time to ramp it up well before the ultimate conversation ever takes place.
He or she might call himself a “consulting CTO,&# “freelance CTO,&# “on-demand CTO,&# “CTO on call,&# “CTO for hire,&# or just a “technology strategy advisor.&# If you find him, he’s gold, and not only because of his knowledge and experience. For one thing, you’ll learn from his mistakes.
Often founders with a genius for product are not so good at managing people. Maybe they don’t hire fast enough or they’re too short-tempered to attract top talent. In one way or another, someone on your board has been indicating to you that it’s time to ramp it up well before the ultimate conversation ever takes place.
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