What are the six hires start-ups can’t afford to get wrong? (Part I)
Seed and Series A founders face countless challenges and dilemmas when it comes to hiring. Chief amongst them is: how do I hire the right people for key senior roles?
This article looks at the leadership roles we believe Seed start-ups simply have to get right and part II focuses on key senior roles for Series A start-ups.
At Santa Monica Talent we believe there are six leadership roles a Seed and Series A start-up simply has to get right. They are:
CTO
CPO / Head of Product
COO
CMO / Head of Marketing
Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)
Interim Head of HR, People, or Talent
We’ve listed the above in order of their importance - as we see it - but not in order of when you should look to hire them.
If you’re a Seed stage start-up you should focus on your CMO and CTO hiring first. Then when you move to Series A you need to look at your Head of Talent, CRO, Head of Product, and COO.
But what are you looking for? Culture or skill set? Experience or adaptability? In reality it’s not an either / or option, but there are questions any good founder needs to answer before they start the hiring process.
Here’s your guide to getting that process right…
Before we look at hiring a CMO and CTO for your Seed stage start-up, let’s set the scene…
12 months ago your start-up was at an early stage with 10 employees but now you’re growing and things are changing quickly.
Your product doesn’t look anything like your MVP. Your customer base has grown 10x. And you’ve still got so much to do. You need to hire good leaders but that’s incredibly hard in a growing start-up.
You may be asking yourself:
How do I assess a Head of Marketing candidate when I’m not even sure what one does?
How can I be confident someone with a fancy title from a large corporate will cut it in the chaotic world of entrepreneurship?
How can I attract the best talent when I don’t have a big budget?
For starters, look for executives who have the experience and background that would make them a good fit for at least the next 12–18 months. Anything shorter and they will not be able to scale quickly enough (relative to the time it takes you to hire them). Anything longer and you will over-hire, ending up with someone who is a bad fit for the job.
Of course equity and compensation comes into play here, but both change as you grow. You quickly realise you can’t give 50 people 1% of your business. Right from the start you need to structure your compensation so it remains balanced both now and in the future.
Having helped tech start-ups to scale-up since 2015 we know all about making that crucial first marketing hire. What we’ve found is that all too often start-ups, founders, and investors don’t actually know what they want from a Head of Marketing or CMO.
Start-ups have a horrible habit of trying to find marketers who can do everything – a sort of modern-day renaissance man/women. Yet marketing is an enormous undertaking. In its simplest terms it encompasses skills and experiences at entirely different ends of the spectrum.
On one side you have the modern day Mad Men type ad creatives. On the other you have the techie digital analysts.
Your dream marketing team will cover the full spectrum and boast a mix of both left-brain and right-brain talent. But that’s your team, not an individual hire.
In reality you should look for t-shaped marketers: generalists with some specialties. A senior marketer who has a deep expertise in one or two core marketing functions, and a broad savviness of the others.
You need to ask yourself: what are those one or two core functions that we simply must have?
CMOs tend to have the highest turnover of everyone in the C-suite.
Why? Because start-ups and scale-ups keep getting their hiring wrong. It’s a hard task that looks easy… There’s normally an abundance of candidates, and the skills you’re looking for aren’t incomprehensible. It feels like a quick-win.
In practice, the abundance of candidates makes hiring harder, as does the vast range of skills you might be looking for (and that candidates might claim they have).
If in doubt, pause. There is plenty of good interim marketing support out there: consultants, agencies, freelancers etc. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s not fixed. Unlike your bad CMO hire.
Typically, a start-up’s CTO is the co-founder with the best technology background and the one leading the development of the initial product.
Understanding the business is what differentiates a CTO from a senior software engineer. A CTO sets up the technology team and processes to iterate quickly based on feedback from commercial interactions with early customers.
The early-stage CTO must:
1. Be comfortable with technical debt and inefficient processes.
2. Be able to make the trade-off between building the perfect technical architecture and creating something good enough.
3. Understand that what is built in the early months is unlikely to survive for long (in fact most of the codebase will be rewritten at some point!).
At Seed stage the CTO only focuses on the one or two elements that truly differentiate the company and outsource everything else to SaaS or cloud products.
This means using cloud services, not building your own. Creating a monolithic codebase rather than hundreds of micro-services. And tying together third-party services. A good CTO has to figure this out for the business.
Further down the line you may hire a VP of Engineering who focuses on people not just practices. This person should be a great manager and team builder (communication and problem-solving skills are key).
There are circumstances in which it may be better to hire a contractor rather than a C-level technology expert. This will largely depend on the culture you want to create, and what your start-up’s product development needs are.
Interim support is usually easier to find as a contractor only needs to possess hard skills (such as a certain programming language required to complete specific tasks). It’s less important for them to be a perfect personality match, but really this all comes down to culture.
Want to know the essential leadership hires for Series A stat-ups?
Head to part II of this article to find out the top senior roles Series A start-ups should focus us.