Venwise

Building the right technical team is a key focus for tech leaders. Our members often discuss it and we wanted to bring folks together to identify best practices around building the right team.

In a moderated, Venwise-style roundtable discussion, executives tackled Technical Hiring. The diverse group included 12 CEOs, CTOs, and recruiters, including Stride CEO and Venwise Leader Debbie Madden.

Topics included:

- Branding the technical organization

- Prospecting and building a pipeline of the right candidates

- How to target Senior Engineers

- Evaluating Internal vs. External Recruiters

and more...

At our AWS Roadmap summit, Venwise members got to look into some of what's in store for AWS products. In-depth discussion and feedback with AWS Product Managers and Solutions Architects.

As your team grows, you face new challenges.

Last week, we brought in 8 Venwise executives to talk shop about scaling an engineering team. Also joining us at the table, to provide some personal insight, was Derek Parham, the first engineer to work on Google Apps for Business. Derek served as a technical lead for nearly six years, and helped grow the team of one to over one hundred engineers serving over 30 million customers today. 

The key topics discussed were effective delegation, team makeup/structure, communication, and managing accountability. Our executives were able to reflect upon their past experiences and highlight the current problems that they are facing.

Much of the discussion revolved around setting up the necessary systems and processes to allow a tech team to succeed in the future as it scales.

For more information about the content discussed at the Tech Lead Summit, please email [email protected]

Venwise is excited to announce a new partnership with the Kaplan EdTech Accelerator powered by Techstars. The Kaplan EdTech Accelerator is a three-month intensive, mentor-driven, deep immersion program for twelve education technology startups. Erik Schreter and Tali Kurt-Galai, two of our New York Leaders, will be supporting the newest class as mentors. Over the next three months, Erik and Tali will be working with the teams selected to help them build leadership and culture within their companies.

This is the second year that Kaplan is working with Techstars to run an EdTech Accelerator, and over 500 startups applied to be a part of this year’s class. Collectively, the 10 startups from the inaugural class have raised more than $15 million to date. The educational technology sector is growing and startups have raised over $500 million in the first quarter of 2014, marking the single biggest quarter for capital committed to the sector in the past five years.

At Venwise, we bring together executives of high-growth startups to work through critical business issues with peers who understand their challenges. Throughout the accelerator program we will be bringing the teams together to help them excel through our peer-to-peer learning process, just as our members do.

We look forward to working with the Kaplan EdTech Accelerator Class of 2014. See you at Demo Day on October 22!

This past Friday, the Venwise team came together for our third Chapter Dinner at the Dream Hotel. Fifty Venwise members were joined by our great partners at Amazon Web Services, Citrin Cooperman, Silicon Valley Bank, Liquidnet, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati for a night full of networking, drinks, music, and amazing food.

During cocktail hour, attendees were encouraged to learn something new and meet somebody new.

The night was highlighted by two Venwise members that offered firsthand advice to the other attendees. Neil Capel, CEO and Founder of Sailthru, discussed the obstacles and lessons learned from rapidly scaling a company. Neil emphasized the importance of taking care of yourself, and building a great team around you.

Umang Dua, COO at Handybook, spoke about the decision process behind making strategic acquisitions, as Handybook acquired Exec earlier this year. Umang chooses to go about acquisitions as if they were any other business decision.

A big thank you to all of our partners and Venwise members that joined us for an awesome evening. We look forward to hosting events in the future that allow the entire Venwise community to come together.

Amazon Web Services provides what may seem like a dizzying array of products and services for all your cloud computing needs. So, we invited Venwise CTOs to meet with AWS Pros to talk about how they can better use AWS. We discussed a variety of topics including:

Optimizing apps for fast delivery

Data lifecycle management

Cost optimization

This highly detailed roundtable offered Venwise CTOs the opportunity to work with each other and AWS experts to determine the most effective ways to optimize AWS usage, as well as the storage and content delivery method best suited for their company's needs.

We hope to continue to provide content for our members. Keep an eye out for upcoming Venwise Summits.

For more information about the content discussed at the AWS Summit, please email [email protected]

How does a company define success?

At our most recent summit the roundtable covered how to approach findng top-down KPIs that drive your team toward company goals.

The discussion highlighted what KPIs to use hinge heavily upon your company's definition of success.

We explored pairing KPIs with OKRs, some examples of KPIs that members have found useful, and how to use KPIs in different areas of the company to drive towards specific team goals.

The roundtable also touched on how too many KPIs may be cumbersome, how too few may motivate undesirable behavior, and when it's right to change KPIs and company goals.

Venwise CTO pod member Matt Story has been developing tools to help Axial forecast. On January 17th, Matt introduced us to some of these tools and how he has used predictability to optimize the performance of his team.

“Predictability is a choice”

- Matt Story

Matt’s presentation centered around optimizing for predictability rather than speed.

StackPM is a tool that Matt developed to passively collect and organize forecasting data. The software creates reliable confidence intervals for when a given item is likely be completed. These estimations are divided into categories based on the size of the project, unique to individual employees based on their history, and can adjust for various factors that might affect the time it takes to complete the task at hand.

By setting clear and attainable goals, allowing employees to estimate the amount of time their own work will take, using value and effort estimations to prioritize tasks, and rewarding consistency rather than accuracy, Matt showed us how StackPM has helped Axial increase both predictability and speed.

Venwise members then shared some of their thoughts about the topic and talked about some of the practices they employ in their own organizations to increase predictability.

see Matt’s full powerpoint presentation here.

related:

Tomasz Tunguz, partner at Redpoint Ventures also discusses Matt's presentation here.

What is organization design?

Organization design is the pattern of relationships and procedures that define how an organization functions. When thinking about organization design, there are two aspects to concentrate on: the architecture, which formally defines authority and the division of labor (often represented by an org chart); and operational processes, which define how shit gets done (often called Standard Operating Procedures or SOPs).

Formal vs. Informal Design

Formal architecture comes from a need for clarity around decision making, roles, responsibility, and authority; creating too much formality in the architecture can lead to less flexibility and a reliance on titles and positional power, as opposed to ideas and knowledge, in decision making. The need for clarity around problem solving, collaboration, and communication leads to formal operational processes which can reduce ambiguity and create more predictable results. Operational processes that are too formal, however, can erect barriers to creativity, create bureaucracy, and lead to less coordination across the organization.

A Model for Organization Design (MODes)

Crossing (standardized and ad hoc) process with (static and fluid) architecture creates a grid of four MODes of organizations I’ve named the Hive, the Forest, the Fractal, and the Sandbox. Curious where your organization fits in? Take this assessment.

Organization Design for Startups

Startups begin in the sandbox. As they grow and feel the need for more structure, they often formalize their architecture instead of clarifying their process; by creating titles and reporting structures in the hopes of clarifying how shit gets done, they move towards the forest. While their need is greater clarity with regards to decision making, role authority, and responsibilities, they create titles titles and reporting structures in the hope that architecture will clarify process. This is a mistake and leads to prematurely hierarchical organizations.

An alternative is to do what we did at SumAll. Instead of moving toward the forest, move toward the fractal: clarify processes while keeping the architecture lightweight. You can achieve this by clearly delineating individual authority, roles, and responsibilities without assigning titles or creating reporting relationships. In this way processes help structure how work gets done while the architecture remains fairly fluid. Fractal designs keep organizations relatively flat and free of artificial power structures. Creating a flatter organization empowers people throughout the organization to make decisions based on their expertise, experience, and the strength of their ideas, not their hierarchical position.

Organization Design at Scale

I had a really interesting conversation about culture the other day with a successful CEO in the NY tech community. We were talking about the difficulty certain companies might have in recruiting because of their culture.

For instance, SumAll exposes your salary to everyone in the organization. This is all about creating a radically transparent culture. NBC News asked a bunch of NYers how they’d feel about this policy and many, if not the majority, said they wouldn’t want to work for a company that was structured that way.. Turns out, those people wouldn’t be a good cultural fit.

Imagine an organization that said teamwork was their highest value and were building a culture that supported teamwork. That organization might decide to have a large part of sales commission to be team based, and a smaller part based on individual contribution. That would make total sense for the culture. It would also mean you would miss out on hiring many talented salespeople. And that’s okay. Culture is more important than any one sales person. Hiring that superstar individual contributor might be the start of cultural decay.

That isn't a bug of culture, it’s a feature.

Help People Understand the Value One thing I’ve learned over the last few years working with startups is that those of us working in People Operations have to integrate with the core business functions better than we currently do. That means understanding the entire business, not just the people side, and learning how to communicate our value better. I’ve been chewing on this for quite some time and I’m starting to create a thesis. We need to use the same metrics our businesses do to track our success. I’ve mainly  been working with SaaS companies and SaaS metrics fit nicely onto People Ops work, so I’ve started to talk about tracking the work I do in the same way.

The organization’s employees are the customers of People Ops, which, in turn, is a service provider. People Ops should be concerned with the same things the business is concerned with: acquisition, retention, and engagement.

Measure Your Impact The products People Ops sells are culture, structure, opportunity, and the benefits of working at an organization. The customer, in this case that’s the employees, pay for the product with their labor. Google employees (the customers of their People Ops function) have a yearly ARPU of $1,000,000, with an average COGS of $800,000 for a net profit of $200,000 per customer per year. To manage the bottom line, People Ops has to function like a finance department and track CAC, LTV, COGS, and ARPU. People Ops is a high touch service and revenue comes from high prices on a low volume of transactions. However, in organizations where employees are both the biggest asset and cost, People Ops is no luxury; we are a necessity to remain competitive and drive real business value.

Create Negative Churn and Expansion Revenue Above all, People Ops should be obsessed with churn. Specifically, finding ways of creating negative churn. Your People Ops group should closely track why customers (the employees) churn (quit), which customers are about to churn, and upsell like crazy to create negative churn (by increasing employee and organizational capability, the People Ops version of expansion revenue). The upsell is where we excel. We create culture, structure, and systems that enable innovation, communication, and engagement, and we also promote and develop employees. These activities can vastly increase our current customers’ LTV (by enhancing the value of their labor), to create expansion revenue from existing customers and, thus, negative churn. Some churn is desirable though, because certain customers will have very low or even net-negative value. People Ops has to identify these customers and help them churn to avoid misallocating resources. This type of thinking leads you to see employee engagement as a way to build community (similar to the way you’re desperately trying to create a community for your SaaS product) and People Ops has to function like marketing. Onboarding new employees becomes just as important as onboarding new customers and partners, so People Ops functions as business development. Organizational structure is like the UI and organization design is like coding the front end, while culture has clear parallels to UX; in this way, the People Ops function is also responsible for design, engineering, and product management.

Love the Problem, Not the Solution The last thought I’ll leave you with today is that, just like any entrepreneur, you’ve got to be obsessed with the problem you’re solving, not the solution. Understanding the organization’s values is like knowing your business’s value proposition.  It’s your elevator pitch and your guiding star. You have to understand the problem you are solving so you can build solutions. The values define the problem you are solving because they define your culture, and in the end that is in large part the service you are providing your customers. Trying to make culture haphazardly without the focus of values is like building a product out of cool stuff you’ve heard about from other services. Drag-and-drop upload here, share button there, connection-to-a-shopping-cart API here – you end up with a franken-product driven by solutions to an unknown problem your customer probably doesn’t even have. Policies (20% time, free lunch, etc.) are the services People Ops provides to our customers in order to fulfill our value proposition. These are the solutions that have been created to enact and live the values, the problem we are solving. Be obsessed with the problem, not the solutions. Experiment and learn and pivot with respect to the solutions. Measure relentlessly. Use cohort analysis to figure out how you’re doing. Pursue the problem doggedly.

Simply put, run People Ops like a business.

If you're currently running People Ops at a startup and would like to join a Venwise pod, you're in luck: I'm putting together a group right now. If you'd like to apply for one of the open slots (there are only 10 right now), email me here and tell me a little about your company and your role.

This week Alyson Shontell of Business Insider published a great article about the loneliness of being a sole founder. She interviewed a good friend, Venwise member, and founder of SinglePlatform, Wiley Cerilli.

Wiley referenced 4 pieces of advice to sole founders:

Find your purpose,

Find a support group (Thanks for the shout out!),

Celebrate your wins before moving on to the next milestone, and

Focus on company culture.

Alyson and Wiley did a nice job capturing some critical pieces to focus on - especially as you consider the notion that being a CEO, not to mention a sole-founder, can be a lonely job. Who can we bounce ideas around with? Who can we brainstorm with? How can we avoid the pitfalls others in our spot have faced? How can we discover what works best for building team culture? What does "culture" even mean?

As a sole founder in a startup it’s really easy to feel lonely, but we ultimately have control over how “lonely” we are....The startup community is filled with amazing entrepreneurs and resources. The thing is that we have to open up and expose ourselves to fill the empty spots.  There are a lot of people who can give that to you, but you need to find a mechanism to trust them with your secrets.  One way or another, there are others in the same boat who have already or are experiencing similar pains and challenges scaling businesses. Wiley was a master of seeking out those resources. He is a model for what it takes to escape the loneliness of being a sole founder by being clear on what he wanted to achieve, how he was going to do it, and finding the right people to learn from.

Learning from your peers can be a powerful experience. We structure Venwise to focus on just that. We believe that the most effective way to structure a "peer learning" experience is to:

Build a network of peers that include folks with a variety of different experiences and skill sets,

Identify and learn from best practices,

Understand the type of organization you have and implement best practices accordingly,

Get feedback from others on specific initiatives you are undertaking at your company.

We're excited to welcome Joaquin Roca to Team Venwise! Joaquin has been helping NY startups grapple with the sticky issues of how to scale their culture and people operations: He's definitely the right person to help build our business.

Joaquin has worked with many companies that are very familiar to our community, including SumAll and Eyeview. You can read more about Joaquin here.

Joaquin is joining Venwise as our Chief Organization Officer. A unique role where he will be leading groups in New York, creating original content and programming for our community around culture, leadership, and organization development, and also taking an active role in building the Venwise business. It's exciting for us to bring on a thought leader like Joaquin. He makes an excellent addition to our community.

The People Side is a New York Meet-up group for discussing the people side of startups. This month’s talk, Technology and the People Side: Building a Tech Team, was with Liz Crawford, CTO of Birchbox. The event was hosted atAppNexus’s auditorium, and organized by Joaquin V. Roca.

The conversation was centered around how to build a tech team in a high-growth startup. One of the most important pieces to this question lies in the importance of building a company culture and being willing to put in communication times with all members of the team. The interview was thoughtfully put together and it was wonderful to hear how much care Liz puts into creating a satisfying working environment for her tech team.

As a leader, it is important to think about culture, scaling, communication, conflict, feedback and stress as the startup starts, grows and begins to thrive. If you are interested in learning the best practices out there, we definitely recommend checking out more of the Meet-ups that The People Side put together!