If you want to learn more about what a great CFO or VP of engineering does, your best bet is to reach out to people who are great at these roles and ask them for advice. Your investors or mentors may be able to suggest which companies have the best people for each function. For example, if you are hiring a CFO, go and meet three or four great CFOs

It’s super important that employees have a great experience from week one and that includes everything, from making sure the laptop actually works to making sure they are invited to the right meetings. All the little things really do add up at this stage. Internal comms is playing a much bigger role in employee engagement and satisfaction than it

Unfortunately, some early employees also dramatically overstay their optimal tenure at a company as it scales. They may have gotten too rich and lost their hunger, or simply not scaled their skill set and mindset along with the company. Some cling to the past when they had lunch every day with the CEO and had input into every company decision.

I would say that there’s a difference between a CEO or founder facilitating a group discussion to get opinions from people and making a group decision. And they might need to say, “Okay, ultimately, I’m the one who’s going to make this decision.” Sometimes that gets confused, though, because the group thinks they’re the decision-maker and that the

For consumer products, I would 100% say product marketing is the place you should invest the most heavily. You’re essentially trying to build a road map. You’re trying to understand how people use the product, if they like it, if they don’t. I wouldn’t invest in the brand at the outset, because you’ve got to make sure you actually have a market fit

There are a lot of reasons why diversity matters, and it’s important for every company that’s going to invest in this—invest time, invest resources, invest energy—to have a reason that’s specific to them. The first reason is that there is a lot of research showing diverse teams are stronger when it comes to analytical thinking and complex

Typically, the only real “legal” capability of a chair (depending on charter and state of incorporation) is the ability to call for a board meeting independently of the CEO (assuming the roles are split). In early-stage startups, the title “chair” is pretty meaningless; most won’t have a stand-alone chair.

Right now is the lowest-risk time ever to be a founder. You can go into an accelerator and roll the dice, see where it goes. You can get some money, see where it goes. There’s very little risk to being a founder. But early employees are asked to take founder-level risk, because the companies often don’t have product/market fit, without getting

The more technical the product manager, the more likely they are able to analyze the data needed to make crucial trade-offs. In parallel, the product manager should strive to understand customer needs and then make trade-offs versus relative to engineering cost or business impact.