Cover of Hiring

So I decided to try to change this a bit and create a series of blog posts on hiring. “Hiring for startups 101″ plans to cover everything from finding great leads to running a smooth interview process to making an offer and converting a candidate.

I am hoping to get input from as many people as possible in this process and looking forward to your feed-back. Watch out for the first post in the upcoming days.

• I found that one of the strongest indicators of a founder’s / CEO’s talent is his ability to attract top-notch talent very early on. So if you are considering joining or investing in a start-up, I would do a lot of due diligence on the quality of the team, especially its key members.
• Same holds for advisors that are associated with the company you are looking at – do they have really smart, respected and committed advisors or is it the same list of advisors you have seen at many other start-ups who are lending their name for a few percent?
• And what other start-ups is the CEO / founder close with and being considered a respected peer?

So the next time you have to evaluate a person, focus less on university degrees and past professional experiences and rather on the quality of people that this person is surrounding himself with – it might be the much more valuable signal!

Related articles

• Land a Big Name to Advise Your Company (inc.com)
• Advisors Stop Screwing Startups (learntoduck.net)

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is a PayPal mafia, a Facebook mafia and a Twitter mafia, all powerful networks of entrepreneurs and investors based in the Valley. And now there is a really strong “Canadian mafia” emerging. It started to formalize with the launch of the C100 a few years ago. The organization is comprised of a select group of mostly Silicon Valley-based Canadian entrepreneurs, technology executives and VC’s and has launched some amazing programs like “48 Hours in the Valley” or the “Canada CEO tech summit“. But even more importantly, the Canadian angle is starting to open doors in all sorts of places.

I spent the past month in the Bay Area and found that one of the most successful ways to get into a specific organization is to find out if there is any Canadian connection. And interestingly enough, there are Canadians (or people with a connection to Canada) sitting almost everywhere. You can find them in the big Internet companies like Google, Apple or Facebook; you can find them in major tech blogs and among conference organizers; you can find them among VC’s or super-angels. And Canadians are actually starting to talk about a Canadian mafia and feeling proud about being part of this emerging community.

So the next time you are trying to get that important meeting, try the Canadian angle – it might be the most powerful way to break into the Valley.

Related articles

• ‘PayPal Mafia’ Gets Richer (businessweek.com)
• The “Twitter Mafia” Poised to be Silicon Valley’s Next Great Network (techcrunch.com)
• Whither the Facebook Mafia? (betabeat.com)

While figuring out a scalable maketing and sales approach is important, most start-ups forget that there is the much larger opportunity to have passionate users do the distribution for your company. This usually requires 3 things:

• A simple product that provides value to a single user within a larger organization
• A price point for the product that is low enough that a user would be willing to expense this on his personal credit card (the best scenario would be that the product is free)
• A viral loop built into the product that ideally creates network effects

1. Be aggressive about filling the funnel:

One of the most important elements of running a successful hiring process is a company’s ability to feed the top of the funnel. Posting on job boards, offering internship programs, leveraging your existing team for referrals, networking and targeted PR are some of the basic strategies but the most successful is still to actively go after potential candidates. Identifying, contacting and qualifying them is a lot of manual work and unless you put serious resources against it, you will not make enough progress. Those resources can either be internal or contractors with the latter group having worked very well for Google.

Who are Google’s recruiters? They’re young, highly paid and, often, on a six month contract. “They’re probably the company that I’ve seen that uses the most [contractors],” says Michael A. Morell, co-founder and managing partner of Silicon Valley recruiting firm Riviera Partners. “There’s a lot to be said for new people trying to prove themselves in the first six to 12 months.” It’s difficult to find an accurate or exact employee-to-recruiter ratio at the company, the number of recruiters varies dramatically. At any given time, Sullivan says, 70% of the recruiting staff might be on contract.

2. Qualifying the leads

The other important element of the hiring process is to qualify the leads by using a systematic, data-driven approach. You can either look at past performance (e.g. GPA and standardized testing scores if a candidate has recently graduated) or have your candidates perform internal tests (like coding, writing or even Excel tests, depending on the position you try to fill). A really good example for an unique quantitative approach is Hubspot’s hiring process for inside sales.

There are many other important elements of a successful hiring process but aggressively thinking about the top of the funnel and using more data in the qualification of leads are probably the two areas where most start-ups can make an immediate difference to their hiring success rate.

Related articles

• Inside Google’s recruiting machine (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
• My Google Interview Experience (news.ycombinator.com)
• Hiring Tips for First-Time Entrepreneurs (inc.com)

Jobber was founded by Sam Pillar and Forrest Zeisler, two super-talented engineers from Edmonton who have been building a great product over the past year by bootstrapping the company with very little money. Co-lead in the investment is Christoph Janz from Point Nine, a co-investor in Unbounce and Clio and one of the best SaaS investor out there. Really excited to be part of the Jobber story going forward!

Related articles

• Canada – land of SaaS? (wmediaventures.com)

Interestingly enough most sites have focused their efforts of applying the concepts of urgency and confidence only to their homepage and / or specific landing pages but not to the whole purchase funnel. One of the sites you can probably learn the most from is Booking.com. Booking is a division of Priceline and one of the fastest growing hotel reservation websites. You should take the time and look at their UI in detail but you will find urgency and confidence messages at every step of the booking process (see also the example screenshot below): “Last chance – only 1 room left”; “Best price guarantee”; “Free cancellation”; “recent bookings” are all messages that help to convert users on the spot.

So the next time you are thinking about UI and conversion rates, keep the concepts of urgency and confidence in mind – they are very powerful concepts.

Venture Partners are not full partners of a VC firm (who can write cheques for investments) but are usually brought in by a partnership to find new investment opportunities and manage portfolio companies. This is exactly my role with Acton Capital – while the fund is primarily focused on European investments, my role is to help with North-American deal flow. At the beginning of the week we announced our first deal on this side of the pond, a $6 million Series B investment in cloud-based legal management platform Clio. I am very excited to join the board of the company and work with the two founders Jack Newton and Rian Gauvreau to help build their company.

So as an entrepreneur, if you work with a venture partner of a VC firm, you need to understand his/her role. One the upside, venture partners are usually seasoned entrepreneurs and executives that have generally a deep understanding of your space and your company. At the same time, they are not the ones writing the cheques which might lead to complications in the investment process as they have to build internal support for the deal.

Related articles

• Clio focuses on legal space that’s ‘ripe for disruption’ (blogs.vancouversun.com)
• Vancouver’s Clio secures US$6-million venture capital investment (business.financialpost.com)

But more importantly, it was an amazing year for Canada’s start-up ecosystem – there is a new generation of angels and VC’s emerging in this country, more and more US VC’s are leading large financings rounds in Canadian start-ups, local start-ups are nailing it in SaaS, a few wordclass incubators have sprung up, organizations like the C100 are starting to make a real impact, and we have had a very healthy M&A activity this past year. What we still don’t have – and are probably many years away – are enough anchor companies.

2012 will most likely be a much tougher year for start-ups worldwide. We might have seen the end of the easy access to early-stage money and a recession might be around the corner in Europe and North-America. But despite these short-term challenges, I remain extremely bullish on the opportunities for Internet companies. We are still only at the very beginning of the Internet cycle so keep your heads down, focus on your long-term vision, build product, listen to your customers – and build those missing anchor companies!

Happy holidays to all of you and to an even better 2012!

Image via CrunchBase

Unbounce makes building, publishing and A/B testing of landing pages super-easy. It does not require any IT involvement and puts the marketer into the driver seat. This makes the product so successful and is the basic SaaS value proposition: let the user be the buyer and offer him a risk-free monthly subscription plan.

I have watched the team over the years bootstrapping their business – heads-down building product, listening to customers and building a great reputation in the marketplace. Now they felt it was the right time to raise money to scale the business even faster and they assembled a top notch group of investors led by Mark MacLeod from Real Ventures.

I really hope that many other start-ups look at Unbounce as a role model for their focus on solving a real problem, understanding customer needs and building a great product. Congrats, Unbounce team, well done – excited to be aboard!

P.S.: Funding announcement happened 2 weeks ago but only got around to blogging about it now.

Related articles

• Canada – land of SaaS? (wmediaventures.com)