GV Library
Advice, lessons, and tips from GV partners and our community of entrepreneurs.
GV Library
Advice, lessons, and tips from GV partners and our community of entrepreneurs.
Followers
Does your startup need a designer co‑founder?
If you’re the stereotypical “technical” or “business” founder of a startup, partnering with a designer co-founder can give you an important…advantage and help you achieve early success. Let’s talk about the characteristics of designer founders, scenarios where design is particularly important, and how to spot designer founders in the wild. ¶ Characteristics of a great designer founder ¶ Designers come from diverse backgrounds and contribute to startups as employees, freelancers, and consultants. A rare few — highly skilled, driven, and equipped for uncertainty — are fit to be founders.
Enrique AllenJan 11, 2012
How to hire a product manager
It’s been a while since I was hiring at a startup, and recruiting at a startup is very different from hiring at a big company. At Yahoo…! Search, it seemed like we were constantly hiring. I did an average of 5–8 interviews a week. It was a never-ending drumbeat of resumes, interviews, and offer letters. Now, I wasn’t always the hiring manager. I only hired a handful of product managers in my time there. But somebody was always hiring a product manager and I was usually on the interview team. The first thing you notice at a big company is the amount of specialization.
Ken NortonFeb 22, 2013
The science of building a scalable sales team
Learn how Hubspot built out its sales team — from their first hire to a team of over 200 employees. Learn how to recruit the right…salespeople, provide consistent training, ramp up lead generation, and continuously improve your sales team. ¶ Mark Roberge is Chief Revenue Officer for Signals, HubSpot’s freemium sales tool. Under Mark’s leadership as SVP of Sales & Services prior to running Signals, HubSpot increased revenue over 6,000% and expanding the team from 1 to 200 employees in five years. Mark holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management where he was a semi-finalist in the 2005 MIT $50K Business Plan…GVDec 11, 2013
Design without a design team
In an ideal world, every company has a dedicated design team. There’s at least one expert in each of the many design disciplines that…Braden previously outlined and the team works together to create a consistently excellent product. ¶ Whoops, sorry! Daydreaming again. ¶ The reality for most startups and small companies is quite different. Fewer people take on multiple roles to make the company work. The business-development person organizes marketing events; the engineer draws the illustration for the funny 404 page; the office manager runs the mailing list.
Sean McBrideNov 23, 2011
How Google sets goals: OKRs
On the day Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner closed in 2007, it was also the first day of a new quarter at Google. My new manager at…Google asked me to draft my OKRs for him to review. I had no idea what he was talking about. ¶ I’ve now gone through the process of setting my Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) 24 times, and each time I marvel at what an effective mechanism they are for focusing my effort as well as aligning my work with the company’s objectives. Last fall, I led a workshop about OKRs at the Startup Lab, which we’re making public today.
Rick KlauOct 25, 2012
User research, quick and dirty
This is an intensive hands-on workshop that teaches everything you need to know to start conducting your own basic usability studies and…user interviews. GV partner Michael Margolis leads this workshop and answers questions you may have about how to get started doing user research at your company. ¶ Download a PDF of the presentation slides and helpful worksheets.
Michael MargolisFeb 19, 2013
Improve your startup’s surveys and get even better data
by Elizabeth Ferrall-NungeStartups frequently use surveys as a cheap and easy way to get feedback from users. But the resulting data will only be as good as the survey itself. I often see products with surveys that have easy-to-fix mistakes like misleading questions, improper sampling, and skewed rating scales. That’s a shame — these teams could be collecting better data and making better decisions if they just paid a bit more attention to survey design.GVApr 3, 2012