Startup Roles and Responsibilities + Share Structure
1. Roles & Responsibilities
+
Share Structure
April 2017, AvaTech
Ali and Hassan Khajeh-Hosseini - AbarCloud
Mandana Abolfathi - AvaTech
2. Who are we?
- Hassan & Ali Khajeh-Hosseini
- Before our first startup: Hassan consultant in Accenture. Ali PhD in Cloud Computing.
- First startup 5 years ago: PlanForCloud
- Acquired by RightScale in California
- Hassan lead Product Management. Ali lead Engineering.
- Started AbarCloud with Alistair in October
- Mandana Abolfathi
- BSc and then MSc in Financial Management
- Financial analysis of public companies, valuations and investments
- Now: Avatech negotiation with investors! (and knows everything to do with terms sheets,
investors in Iran, what to do and what not to do!)
3. This talk is based on our experience
We don’t know much, but have learnt a few things in our journey so far:
● Software development
● Product management
● Growing from 2 people to 5 teams across 3 timezones
● Shrinking from 200 down to 120
● Pivoting a medium-sized company
● Marketing to SMEs to Enterprises
● Launching 3 products
● Selling a company
5. Starting up
● You are between 2 to ~5 people
● Focus on learning things quickly and growing
● You want 100 users who love you, not 1000 users who like you
○ Let us show you what we mean...
● Why? Because you want to grow faster. Compounding effect
So, how do you do this? Who does what?
6. Starting up
● We both did a bit of everything, but each person focused on either:
○ Building it
○ Getting users
● Keep each other focused
● PMA: Positive Mental Attitude - encourage each other to keep going
● Don’t grow the team early
○ You want to move fast and change
○ It’s easier to convince one other person than 10 other people
○ Don’t get distracted by hiring, it is not easy
7. Building it - responsibilities
● Work closely with the person getting users to define what needs to be built
○ It’s a partnership, don’t ask them to tell you what you need to build
● Estimate how long it’ll take to build
○ Without estimates, it’s hard to prioritise
● Test the software before you ship it
○ Does it work on the main browsers/platforms that your users use?
● Monitor the software once it’s in production
○ Review exceptions that occur
○ Review basic performance metrics like average response times
● Security is important
○ Do basic security testing, try to hack your own application
○ Keep your code/servers up-to-date
8. ● Product management
○ Feature requests, prioritising, understand the users, market and product
● Marketing
○ Writing blogs, website content, social media, SEO
● Product marketing
○ Positioning, understanding competition (so you can sell), pricing
● Sales and pipeline
○ Tracking customers through the pipeline and spending your time wisely
● Customer care / customer success
○ Keep them happy! Make sure they love you
Getting users - responsibilities
9. Good tools + lightweight processes
● It’s your responsibility to find good tools + lightweight processes for your
role
● Invest in good tools
● You have seed money so use it to buy time
○ e.g. instead of wiring servers, we rented VMs so we could get the product to market faster
● Keep it simple, task management: Todo, In progress, Done
○ e.g. Trello
● Only introduce new processes when you feel some pain, not upfront
11. As you start to grow the team
Your most important responsibility becomes hiring, training and integrating
new team members
You also need to start thinking ahead more, e.g. roadmap
12. Growing the team
● Look for people who complement your skill-sets, not someone like you
● It can be difficult to hire the first few people
● Be super-selective
● Do role-specific and general interviews - one red card and you’re out
● You’re building core team, look for passion, quick learners, experience
● If it doesn’t work out, act quickly as an empty seat is better than a seat
filled with the wrong person
14. Your responsibilities will change as you grow
Our roles changed from describing what should be done next to explaining the problem
and setting the context
Look for cross team communication issues and conflicts
Empower your teams to change things
Use retros to gather feedback on what roles/responsibilities should be added/changed
CEO
Product Engineering Sales / Success Marketing
16. Once you have grown
SDRs
Account Execs
Sales support
...
CEO
CTO Engineering Sales Marketing
Board of Directors
Product F & ACustomer Success
PM
Design
...
Operations
Development
Prod Support
Tools
….
Docs
Technical Account Mngr
Professional Services
...
Inbound
Outbound
Website
...
CFO
Accounts
HR
...
18. ● There are many ways:
○ Excel spreadsheets
○ Negotiations
○ Equal split amongst all
● The best answer for how to split the cake that I have heard:
Splitting the cake
THERE IS NO ANSWER!
but...
19. Splitting the cake
Some advice:
● The cake is worth 0 right now, so it doesn’t really matter.
● If the cake gets big, you will be richer than you are now, so it matters, but
not massively.
● Just because you own 10% or 90%, it is not an indicator of how much work
you have to put in! Your job is to grow the cake!
● Start with whatever everyone is happy with. Make sure it is not a
contention point, because it will distract everyone!
● Once decided. Set it and move onto focus!
● We have seen examples in the past where this issue splits the team!
20. ● Employee stock pool is between 5 to 15%
● Early employees might get 1-3%
● After AvaTech, you will give away another 10-35%
● Mandana has tips!!
Splitting the cake: Examples
21. Some articles that influenced our thinking
● Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love - Marty Cagan
● The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz
● High Output Management - Andrew Grove
● How Google Works - Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg
● Engineering Management:
http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management.html
● Netflix Culture: https://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664
