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one key criteria for any executive is their ability to attract and become a magnet for talent.
Does this person have a pool of amazing people that will want to join a company?
They can be bullet point-style, using the three Ps—plans, progress, problems—and shared in advance, so that people’s brains are chewing on what’s going on.
So the first thing is to actually identify the areas where you’re going to want a partner in helping you scale.
What are you really good at? What do you want to get better at? And what things aren’t going to be a competitive advantage for you to personally get good at? Because you can’t be great at everything.
Having some early wins is certainly helpful too. So somewhere in the 60- to 90-day time period, the new COO should implement a few things that make everybody go, “Oh wow, this is cool. This is helping. We now have this new process that makes us perform a lot better and has reduced wasted effort in the wrong areas.”
“What’s working well? How do you think you could accelerate the company’s efforts? And what are the one or two priorities you think need to be addressed immediately?”
We’ve also worked with companies that call this “culture add.” “Who’s going to bring what we most need?” rather than “Who fits in with what we already have?” The approach to assessing for this matters more than what it’s called, but words do matter, and the way that we talk about these things can have an impact as well.
Step one is articulating the relevant qualifications for every role, technical and non-technical (if there are non-technical qualifications). Step two is designing specific questions to assess for each qualification.
Step three is limiting the domains that each interviewer assesses. You shouldn’t have to go in and try to decide, “Should we hire this person?” as an interviewer. You should decide, “Does this person meet what we need on these two things?”
Then step four, and this one’s really critical, is creating rubrics to help interviewers evaluate answers to the questions that they’re asking, or to grade work samples that they’re getting.
Growth marketing is analytically driven marketing and includes all quantitative areas of marketing. This includes online advertising, email marketing (where conversion can be tightly measured), SEO/content marketing, viral marketing, and funnel optimization.
Product marketing (sometimes just “marketing” without a prefix word) is the canonical, old-school technology marketing discipline. This includes things like customer testimonials, feature requests, user testing and interviews, competitor analysis, collateral generation, and case studies.
Brand marketing is focused on the squishier side of marketing: brand awareness and perception, logos, and other design elements.
Public relations is focused on story development (your company’s narrative), press (proactive, reactive, contributed content), events (speaking engagements and also networking opportunities to some extent), as well as product-focused activity such as reviews and awards programs.
Think of PR as the ongoing telling of the company story to the press and broader world.
Internal communications and really getting your employees to be your best brand ambassadors was never in the forefront.
Once you get to a company size of 100 people, it’s one of the first hires you should think about making. A good rule of thumb is one internal comms person for every hundred people.
It’s important to make sure the brand message resonates internally with the same thing you’re saying externally.
During the recruiting process, the internal comms team should already be involved in what that experience looks and feels like—everything from the emails you get from the hiring manager or the recruiter to what kind of paperwork you get before you come in.
You want candidates to experience a consistent brand from the very beginning, whether you hire them or not.
The evolution is that internal comms is now helping people figure out what do I say online about my company? What do I say about my experience? How do I respond to negativity that I read about me or my founder?
And then knowing how to tell your company’s story. That narrative is incredibly critical because whatever you’re experiencing and creating on the ad side or on the demand gen side or the customer side or the events side, it also needs to dovetail with how you’re talking about the company to reporters or on Twitter or wherever you’re sharing your story.
Media training will include definition of key terms (What does “off the record” mean versus “on background?”), what you can expect during different types of interviews (broadcast, in-person, phone, video, etc.), as well as practice sessions primarily focused on answering tough questions. You should practice the storyline for your company and be able to answer questions about your products, your competitors, and yourself concisely.
Media training will also focus on things like how to answer a question other than the one you were asked (if needed).
Some companies like Amazon go through the exercise of writing the product “headline” at the stage of product conception. For example, when writing a design document, you might think through what the press story on the product will be when it launches.
Analyze the problem What went wrong? How will this impact the company, its customers, or other stakeholders? How is this likely to be portrayed by the press and by competitors? What are different things you could/should do about the situation?
the importance of PR and communications more broadly is that it gives the company a voice and helps create credibility, or build on their credibility. PR gives the company a way to communicate their purpose. It also helps humanize the company.
One is controlling the external narrative and how people perceive the company and potentially its founders or executives. Second is around recruiting, and third is around morale.
That’s why authentic communication, never lying, and transparency—to the extent that you can be transparent—are so important.
But I’ve been the most successful working with founders or leadership teams when they are on the same page about what PR can and cannot do and when there’s really respect for PR as a discipline.
PR is really about, again, helping a company communicate their purpose, generating awareness, helping build profiles of the company, the product, the leadership.
We should have some understanding of the industry that the client is in, and it’s our job to go really deep once we land the business.
And then the other thing that I would evaluate on if I was on the other side—and I actually was once and had to pick an agency—is whether agencies challenge you.
Reporters do want to have personal connections with founders and sometimes circumvent the PR person. But then it’s our job to help prep, whether it’s background on the reporter or figuring out what the right story angles are.
Often the biggest ways a product manager can help the team hit goals includes (a) lobbying for resources or attention from engineering, design, and other functions, (b) removing or prioritizing features and providing a clear road map for execution, (c) asking “stupid” questions to see if it is possible for each function to reduce timelines or remove unneeded features or work, and (d) pushing back on extraneous requests, whether those are internal (design, sales, etc.) or external (customers, partners).
What is the value of a proposed product feature versus the engineering work needed to accomplish it? What is more important—a new product for the sales team or a feature for customers?
While traditional VCs will be interested in underlying business metrics, they will often be more focused on macro market trends, unit economics, and broader company strategy and differentiation.
May send a “low quality” signal to later investors if a hedge fund comes in early
In a subset of cases some sovereign wealth funds may invest for strategic reasons—for example they want to understand or get closer to technology that may impact companies in their country, or to trade petro dollars for tech assets to diversify their economic holdings.
A “primary” investment in a company is when you give a company money in exchange for its shares. A “secondary” investment is when you buy shares from someone besides the company (basically a previously owned share).
