

Job Titles That Can Sink Your Startup - amirmc
http://steveblank.com/2010/09/13/job-titles-that-can-sink-your-startup/

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JabavuAdams
Interesting points, but it reads like a parable, rather than something that
actually happened.

This is something that irritates me about business writing. Parable !=
evidence, since I construct a parable after the fact, to make a specific
point.

Also, like witty aphorisms, it's just as easy to support either side of an
argument. E.g. "the early bird gets the worm" v.s "the second mouse gets the
cheese".

~~~
arethuza
I've been in that exact position - we kept hiring high powered sales guys and
expected them to sell a product that was _close_ , but not close enough, to
what customers actually wanted.

It's the classic mistake of confusing sales (selling an existing product) and
marketing (finding out what people really want).

~~~
krschultz
That's a great point. There is a third branch in the trifecta, which is
advertising/PR to tell people about what you have.

Be wary of someone great at advertising/PR but not at market fit. Those are
two distinct questions. Often the founder needs to "own" market fit, probably
with the help of others, and advertising/PR can be somewhat delegated. However
since market fit drives every decision, it can be hard for that person to be
anyone else but the founder.

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nlavezzo
Excellent article. This was something we learned at our last company,
especially early on. Sales people that had previously excelled at large tech
companies with a full suite of presentation, training, marketing, and support
materials, with a mature and relatively stable product, did not do well in a
fast moving environment that required more thought and digging into detail. In
the end, our consulting organization (which was much more familiar with our
product and customer requirements) ended up being our best pool of sales
talent. I'd suggest considering technical consulting types who are working on
actual implementations for sales roles.

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rhooper
I think it's less "job titles that", and more "job titles can". The hiring
model for employees in the tech industry has shifted from "I'm hiring a
(insert position here)" to "I'm hiring someone who can (skills x, y, and z)".
Old industry HR practice is to look for a title, but new industry needs to
focus on skillsets. Especially in the fluid world of startups, flexibility is
core.

~~~
some1else
I think you're correct. In this case though, the VP said he could, but proved
he couldn't.

~~~
Goladus
Actually he says that the specific conditions did _not_ come up in the
interview. They used the terms customer validation and pivot, but did not
specifically say "we don't have a well-understood group of customers" or "we
don't have a scalable and repeatable business model."

------
melissamiranda
Steve Blank is a writer and knows that wrapping his point in a story makes it
more enticing to read. And I agree that this post has less to do with job
titles, than hiring people who have the right kind of experience.

Having worked in big companies, (Gap, Wells Fargo, Guess) I know that they all
have their time tested processes and you walk in and there are step by step
instructions on how to do your job (any job, all the way up). Even at IDEO
there's a tried and true methodology, design thinking. You dont know what you
will come up with, but you know each step to take.

Startups change day to day, which makes them exciting. But hiring a seasoned
big company employee is suicidal if they come in trying to execute a time
tested routine.

It's not about titles per se, but about hiring someone with the right
mentality.

------
batasrki
I might be coming off as naive here, but the minute I saw this: "searching for
a business model", I got my skepticism on.

Why is this startup searching for a business model? Shouldn't you start with
that and build your company around it?

Again, apologies if this is a naive POV.

~~~
Sukotto
Steve Blanks' "Building A Business Model" is the idea that you iteratively
develop your startup based on what you discover about your customer's needs.
Ie. your first attempt at a project is almost never what your potential
customers will actually end up paying for.

He espouses that you should build a minimal product based on your idea. Then
iterate over the following points seeking traction and revenue

1) "Get out of the building" and go talk to a lot of your potential customers

2) Based on what you learn from those people: Reevaluate your idea and decide
if you should iterate more, or start a new direction

3) Develop #2

4) goto #1

Think of it as the scientific hypothesis/experiment cycle for startups

[edited to add the below]

As usual, Steve says it more succinctly and powerfully than I. I guess that's
one reason why he gets to teach at Stanford :)

Here's how he puts it [1]

    
    
      Your startup is essentially an organization built to 
      search for a repeatable and scalable business model.  As 
      a founder you start out with:
      
      1) a vision of a product with a set of features,
    
      2) a series of hypotheses about all the pieces of the 
         business model: Who are the customers/users? What’s 
         the distribution channel. How do we price and position 
         the product? How do we create end user demand? Who are 
         our partners? Where/how do we build the product? How 
         do we finance the company, etc.
      
      
      Your job as a founder is to quickly validate whether the 
      model is correct by seeing if customers behave as your 
      model predicts. Most of the time the darn customers 
      don’t  behave as you predicted.
    
      ...
    
      How do you know your business model is the right one? 
      When revenue, users, traffic, etc., start increasing in a 
      repeatable way 
    

[1] [http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-
princ...](http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-principles/)

~~~
alabut
" _He espouses that you should build a minimal product based on your idea.
Then iterate over the following points seeking traction and revenue._ "

No, he doesn't. He really _really_ doesn't. In fact, that's the _exact
opposite_ of what he advocates and what his customer development methodology
attacks - the old school product development approach of building the product
first and then collecting feedback to refine it, figuring out how to market
it, finding out who the target customer is, etc.

Developing your customer base (rather than developing your product) means that
you talk to customers and learn their existing pain points _before_ you design
or build a single thing. His Four Steps To The Epiphany MBA textbook calls it
Customer Discovery, or step one. Everything in the #1-4 loop you described is
step two - Customer Validation - where you then try to validate your
hypothesis about the customer pain points with your product ideas and/or
prototypes.

I'm ripping off this giant rant because for some reason, I see this on HN a
lot. _A lot_. It's really common for people to conflate MVP with customer
development and to also reverse the order that you do it. I think you see this
on HN in particular because it's filled with coders that prototype in code the
way designers prototype on paper, so they think "hmm, how hard could it be for
me to throw something together in a week or two and see if anyone will buy
it?" instead of "how hard could it be for me to go talk to people and see if
there's a potential customer base for this idea I have?" It's not just that
the second path is easier, it means that the product you build afterwards is
_way_ better informed. On the other hand, MVP seems to appeal to HNers because
it's like the Nike message of startups - Just Do It. Just go ahead and build
something already because all you need to do afterwards is refinement. A
little bit of a/b testing magic on landing pages here, a bit of keyword
research on Adwords there and then bam, your app is paying the rent while you
drink margaritas on the beach.

Off the top of my head, one of the more recent examples I can think of was
just this last month when Zach Burt (zackattack) unveiled Awesomeness
Reminders and someone asked him about all the stuff he's built this year, so
he wrote about his personal process for throwing tons of little MVP apps
against the wall and then why he'd ditch each one before moving on to the
next:

[http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/08/an-open-discussion-of-
my-...](http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/08/an-open-discussion-of-my-personal-
business-strategy/)

Not to pick on the guy, but this was a particularly egregious example.
Explaining why he abandoned one of his apps (CustomerFind), he wrote:

" _I did do some Customer Development meetings related to CustomerFind, and
pivots suggested room for a potential enterprise-y Social Media dashboard
product._ "

No, you didn't! You didn't do Customer Development - you did Customer
Validation, where you did a little bit of research _after you built the
product_ to see if the product you _already built_ solved the problems _that
you just plain guessed_ your customers had. In other words, you tried to skip
a step and validate your product against customer base that you didn't create
in advance and then surprise! There wasn't a fit and the app wasn't
monetizable. An interest list based on email signups is not the same as
purchase orders. Rinse and repeat for 4 or 5 apps and there went his 2010 so
far.

So when do you do MVP and when do you do Customer Development?

Easy - it depends on whether you're building something where you're also the
target audience, scratching your own itch, eating your own dogfood, Tim
O'Reilly's "fishing with strawberries", etc, or if you're building something
for other people.

Both approaches are still just different versions of PG's "make stuff people
want" but you need some kind of internal compass to guide the way. If you know
the phone in your pocket sucks and you can build a better experience, then
Apple can go make something that's clearly better without having to do a lot
of market research. So they do. And if you think you'd like to get a call
every once in a while and hear a real human being tell you that you're
awesome, then there you go. But if you're building something for other people
to use that have problems that you don't experience on a daily basis, like
say, an app for bloggers that get a good amount of traffic and are looking to
get into direct sales rather than relying solely on Adsense's anemic payouts,
then you better do your homework and get on the phone.

~~~
mkramlich
awesome contribution to the discussion, thank you! and i think you're right
about the problem with folks getting MVP confused.

------
fnazeeri
A great addition to this post is the "Sales Learning Curve" paper written by
Mark Leslie. What's great about the SLC is Mark gives some actual data and a
framework for how to think about who/when to hire sales people.
<http://altgate.com/blog/2007/07/sales-learning-curve.html> I recommend it to
every entrepreneur.

------
T_S_
All the great salespeople I have known were nervous control freaks hiding
inside a breezy exterior. The great ones are like painters who would never let
you touch their canvas. Of course they will freak if you keep changing the
product. Stability is a primal urge (for customers, not HN readers) and sales
people know that.

The solution: Hire crappy salesmen who will call anyone you want? Not exactly.

Find the smartest customers you can and practically pay them to work with you.
After all in the scenario outlined, you don't even have a product they want.
The salesperson needs to "get" that they are selling the team not the product.

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danielnicollet
Good post thanks. Besides optimists and pragmatists, boards also need skeptics
to remind everyone of where the company really is before it gets ahead of
itself.

The main underlying cause of the problem here is always (in my opinion) the
fact that boards and founders tend to build companies only by looking forward
at what they hope the company will be in X quarters. In this example: I
suspect they are really excited at having the big shot VP of Sales because
usually, where there is one, there is revenue. But they don't seem to face the
truth of where they really are at this stage: a company still struggling to
find its model.

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ojbyrne
The thing about titles, is that sometimes even though they don't reflect what
you really do on a day to day basis, they do help with career management -
i.e. finding the next job if the current one goes bust. So sometimes its ok to
give someone a high-falutin' title as long as they understand up front that
they have to earn it.

~~~
gaius
And the thing about salesmen is that in the interview they're selling
themselves. Of course he said what Rajiv wanted to hear! That's what he does
for a living!

~~~
forensic
This is why you can't tell an interviewee what you want in an employee. You
need to hold your cards close to your chest and get THEM to tell you what they
deliver.

If it doesn't fit then you need to consider finding someone else.

The worst thing you can do is bring in someone for an interview, tell them
what you want to hear, and then allow them to echo back to you what you want
to hear. Which is what most humans will do.

~~~
amirmc
_> "This is why you can't tell an interviewee what you want in an employee"_

I disagree. If a company cannot clearly state what is expected of an employee
then how can it expect to attract/retain great people? The interviewee should
also be assessing their potential employer so being reluctant to share
relevant information probably wouldn't come across well (at least not to me).

Interviewing is a skill and a good interviewer needs to be able to inform
applicants about the job requirements while also probing to ensure that the
candidate actually does possess the necessary skills. It is not easy.

Aside: There's an Ask HN thread on job descriptions which you might find
interesting. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1685258>

~~~
gaius
Easy. In the interview you present the candidate with scenarios and let them
run with them. In an interview you are rarely looking for specific facts;
rather you want to discern the candidates thought process.

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mcyger
I'll give anyone working with me any title they want, including CEO, just as
long as they do everything within their power -- and stretch out of their zone
-- to accomplish work and move the company forward.

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maukdaddy
I know Steve is a respected VC, but 4 mentions of "pivot" in a single entry?
Come on!

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whalesalad
I think any titles period will hurt your startup. Who has the biggest dick?
Who fucking cares? I can't stand titles... whoop-dee-doo you're an art
director.

