sutton020

Once a startup has released the first version of its product, raised some funding, started to get the word out and is getting some traction, the biggest challenge almost always becomes hiring. No matter how great the founders are and how much good advice they get from investors and advisors: You need people to get shit things done. And before long, you need more people (AKA managers) to help other people get shit things done, too. Recruiting great people can be extremely time-consuming and difficult, but if you don’t manage to build a great team, you are guaranteed to fail. Or, as Michael Wolfe put it in his awesome talk at our 4th annual SaaS Founder Meetup last week: All companies start differently but end up the same: Success depends on hiring and managing a great leadership team. Given that hiring is the #1 challenge for almost all of our portfolio companies, it has always bugged me that we’re not better at helping our founders find great people. It’s not like we haven’t been tr...

[This article first appeared as a guest post on VentureBeat . Thank you for publishing it, VentureBeat. I'm re-posting it here with a few small edits.] Of all posts that I’ve written so far, the one in which I asked what kind of animals you’re hunting was one of the most popular ones. That begs the question: What kind of animals are we hunting? Paul Graham wants to farm black swans. Dave McClure likes ugly ducklings, little ponies and centaurs. Almost all large VC funds are looking for unicorns, while some people argue that investors should hunt dragons and others talk about decacorns. If you have no idea WTF I’m talking about, here’s a quick refresher. The term unicorn was coined by Aileen Lee about two years ago to describe those rare and magical tech startups that have reached a valuation of $1 billion or more. Since then, $1B valuations have become somewhat less rare and there are now several private tech companies valued at $10 billion or more, for which the industry has c...