At USV we have talked about and invested in the power of networks. We have also been applying this network thesis to our portfolio companies, building out the USV network. One area where I am particularly happy with how we have “walked the walk” is in recruiting for the analyst position. Instead of relying on more traditional channels or criteria (e.g. past job titles or degrees) we have been using a completely open application process. This means we can leverage the network at large. So if y...

Later today I am giving a talk titled the “ABC of Startup Recruiting” as part of a speaker series that Susan is putting together for Ziggeo. This is the first time I am giving this talk and I am quite excited about it as this is such a critical topic for startups. The opening slide is a picture of Alec Baldwin from Glengarry Glenn Ross in the famous “Always Be Closing” scene. For startups and hiring the ABC instead stands for “Always Be Collecting Candidates.” I have found that the best entre...

I already hinted at this topic in my last Tech Tuesday, when I wrote about having a healthy mix of young and more experienced engineers. More generally, diversity in engineering teams (and teams more generally) tends to be a healthy thing. Diversity helps prevent group think and provides for a better match with the wide variety of tasks that come up in the live of a startup engineering team. In the extreme if all you have are say realtime systems engineers your UI/UX is likely to be atrocious...

As a board member I am often actively engaged in helping to recruit new hires to a company. A lot of people have written about the importance of cultural fit. I want to add the idea of “mission desire” to the characteristics companies should look for. That’s not just true for companies that would self identify as mission driven (as in having a social component to their business) but all companies. By mission desire I mean a candidate’s desire to work in this particular domain and on the speci...

I have always loved the videos illustrating orders of magnitude of scale. It simply seems a marvel that the world around us encompasses all these different scales. It turns out to also be a useful way to think about ability when you are recruiting. Talent comes in orders of magnitude. Before going to recruiting for startups, consider talent in tennis for a moment. At one level I am a decent player in that I can hit the ball reasonably hard and look good doing so (ok so that is subject to inte...

I love Vernor Vinge’s concept of a “programmer-archeologist” (A Deepness In the Sky, he also coined “programmer-at-arms”) as someone who digs through the layers of existing systems to understand why and how stuff works. I was reminded of this over the weekend, as I worked through some old code of my own and that from a bunch of other developers on DailyLit. My exposure to “software archeology” goes as far as back as the first time I earned money from programming. I was 17 and had just come ba...