• • Entrepreneurship, KV CEO Summit, Team building Yelp COO, Geoff Donaker, explains how a startup CEO should approach the tricky decision of whether or not to hire a COO and when. Geoff discusses how he and CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman manage Yelp, and sheds light on the ideal attributes of a COO candidate. Read More
• • Standard operating procedures, Team building • • Team building Congratulations, you are now an executive at a venture-backed company! You survived the presentations, the term sheet shuffle and the due-diligence. Everyone is calling you the Founder (which is true), yet you are actually a technologist, an engineer or just a “great ideas person” with an instinct for the market. But now you have to recruit a team; perhaps, for example, a VP Marketing (maybe you have never been in a room with a real VP Marketing and don't really know what one does or how to assess his or her capabilities!) Worse still, you might be recruiting a CEO but have never really understood what a CEO does or how to appraise one. How do you evaluate a candidate, especially for a management role that you do not have great familiarity with? Read More
• • Design, Team building User experience design is a multidisciplinary field. A well-designed product must be visually appealing and simple, and easy to understand, learn and use. Creating a well-designed product is an endeavor that requires technical skills — an understanding of computer science, human computer interaction and visual perception and cognition — and tremendous creativity. Read More
• • Design, Team building The best thing you can do for your company as founder/CEO is to hire a great team, so it’s worth investing a lot of time and energy into writing a good job description. Even if you are relying mostly on your network to source candidates, you’re likely to need at least a description of your company to circulate to elicit interest from candidates. Read More
• • Design, Team building “Where do you find designers to hire?” Now that you understand what UX skills you need to have for your team and have written a job description that describes these needs, it’s time to get the word out and start recruiting. Read More
• • Design, Team building The phone screen is an opportunity to make sure the designer and opportunity are potentially a good fit for each other, based on obvious criteria: salary expectations, role and responsibilities, skills required, potential interest, and communication skills. Read More
• • Design, Team building These 5 C’s are essential ingredients for making your company attractive designers, based on my own experience of recruiting hundreds of UX people to join companies that were not originally obvious places for designers to join, and based on the experience and advice of two of the best and well-known UX recruiters in our industry. Read More
• • Design, Team building “How much does a designer typically make?” The answer to this question varies widely, based on a number of factors: Current comp, Comp history, Competing offers, How long has the company been looking, How important is the role to fill, How much do you want the person, Quality of the candidate’s skills and experience. Read More
• • KV CEO Summit, Leadership, Team building In this video, Vinod Khosla explains how thinks about building a billion dollar company. Read More