When and whom should you hire in a start up

When do you start hiring your initial set of people?

ASAP. You have to do it one day unless you plan to be doing everything on your own. Sooner you hire someone who can share joy and pain, better it is for you. You need someone, who can say yes and no to take some critical decisions. I have also heard people saying not enough domain expertise available in their product/services domain but in any case you have to give training to someone who can help you in implementation/testing/customer support. Take risk and start growing.

Whom should you hire in a start up as your initial team?

Can criteria be only technical knowledge or having just that would reduce your chances of success?

In my opinion number 1 thing should be the right mindset/attitude to work in a start up and understanding the joy, benefits/risk of working with a start up. Many people say yes when they attend the interview process but i don’t think they really understand what it takes to work in a startup or how easy/difficult to earn your monthly salary in a start up. In a typical start up environment working for 22 (or even 30) days in a month with doing some implementation is not equal to earning salary for you and your team. You really earn money for you and your team when someone purchase that product/service and pay for it.

Person has to be technically super fit in the company, no doubt on that but while making an offer you should let it pass for long term gain if a person is misfit in attitude. Most of the time we think about current task in hand and take decision but it’s more stressful to train someone and lose him after few months because of so called other reason.

For the candidates, if you are not willing to forgo your salary for couple of months in a year and help build that dream product, you are looking for regular job and not a high growth career. There is no harm in being upfront and expecting fixed  salary every month but you should firmly understand and take this as your regular job with right expectation from company in that case (biggest value comes in the form of great work experience and stock options in any successful start up). I’m no way suggesting that you would always end up in those situations but you should be mentally ready for it and not develop stress because of it.

-Sunil

Startup shoot-out at CTIA’s ‘Fund Fest’

On the final day of CTIA (premier wireless, IT and entertainment trade show in San Diego, CA). More information can be found at below link on Fierce Wireless site, it’ll also give some idea about kind of apps are getting attention in US market.

http://www.fiercewireless.com/ctialive/story/startup-shoot-out-ctias-fund-fest/2009-10-12

-Sunil

NASSCOM Product Conclave, 27th & 28th Oct09, Bangalore

Here is one more high profile event targeted towards entrepreneurship…

-Sunil

The NASSCOM Product Conclave on October 27-28,2009 at Bangalore has the most exciting line-up of speakers like Guy Kawasaki, Rajesh Hukku,Orna Berry etc. You can find event details at http://www.nasscom.in/productconclave2009.

The experience at the event goes beyond the star packed Keynotes and Panels to bring you 4 Hands-on Workshops! and an opportunity for product startups to showcase to the CIO community at the NASSCOM Product Conclave 2009 . These workshops are designed to enable you to succeed in your software product business. Each workshop is led by a world class practitioner who will use real-life case studies to bring key ideas to life and help you bring in your experience to the discussion.

Quick details of workshops:

1. “Evangelizing and Selling the Dream” -by the legendary Guy Kawasaki. Guy is a Managing Director of Garage Technology Ventures, a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine, a former Apple Fellow and an author of nine books including The Art of the Start and How to Drive Your Competition Crazy.

2. “The art of writing a business plan” – by veteran Naeem Zafar. Naeem – who teaches Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Haas Business School at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been at startups and has extensive experience with mentoring and coaching founders and CEOs.

3. “Marketing and branding strategies for product companies” – by Peter Yorke. Peter was till recently the Vice President – Marketing and Communications at Oracle Financial Services and built the I-flex brand.

4. “Go-To-Market strategies for product companies” – by Subinder Khurana, Co-founder marketRx , who grew it to one of the largest third-party analytics solutions providers in India, before it was acquired by Cognizant in a $135mill transaction.