July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Nicholas Holland is founder of Populr. The following post is a rebuttal to Jon Soberg’s guest post “Why hiring B employees will kill your startup.”

Regardless of their level of experience or expertise, most entrepreneurs can agree that unicorns are majestic, magical creatures that absolutely do not exist — never have and never will.

So, it seems a little ridiculous when I hear people talk about stacking their startup’s roster with only unicorns — aka A Players — while completely dismissing anyone for employment that’s considered a ‘B player.’ Those people need a reality check when it comes to hiring.

I’m a three-time entrepreneur and I’ve hired over a hundred people — often under duress because my small company was light on work one day and overloaded the next. Moreover, I usually find myself looking for tech talent that is hotly pursued by companies much larger than mine. I don’t think this an uncommon practice for startup founders.

It’s also common to hear advice like “only hire the BEST!” and “seek only A Players” when looking for new employees — something that always makes me laugh. I wonder which entrepreneurs these sage advice-givers think they’re saving from failure. Is there someone out there who purposely chooses a sub-par team-mate? (The short answer is no.)

Worst, the cliché of ‘hiring A Players’ creates an atmosphere that lets the business always blame the employee if they don’t work out. “Ah snap! Jody didn’t work out… Guess she wasn’t an A Player”. This lets the entrepreneur off the hook and often keeps them from self-reflection.

Truth be told, it’s incredibly simplistic to define someone as “The BEST!” or as an “A Player.” I’ve had employees that are absolutely brilliant in one area, and terrible in another. What does that make them … a C? Or what about employees that do exactly what you say, but don’t take any initiative. Are they A Players for the leader that leads them, but F players for the entrepreneur who depends on ‘self starting’ as a crutch for their lack of management skills? What about A Players that are loaded up with B Player work and never get a chance to shine? Do they get downgraded?

Before you start looking for your sparkly horned beauties, consider some of these points:

The downsides to searching for the Unicorn employee:

• It greatly extends the search process, and in the meantime, the work is piling up. Consider finding someone who meets the minimum expectations and then get back to work. You’d be surprise how much more productive your startup will be if you aren’t waiting around for someone who matches your dedication and work ethic.

• Even the most skilled hiring techniques can’t guarantee you’ll hire a Unicorn, so be careful about analysis paralysis that leads to even more delays in your growth.

• If you have problems with someone after you’ve hired, writing them off as B-Players means you get all the joys of firing, losing money with turnover, and decreased team morale (which is terrible for your business). Instead, own the responsibility of helping that employee be successful. Forge them into “only the BEST!” or A Players.

• Last, avoid the trap of assuming that A Players are always leaders. Some of your best people will crave your leadership and will follow you to the ends of the earth. But, they won’t be leaders. And that’s OK.

Always seek the best employees you can get, but be mindful that you have limitations to balance. It makes people uncomfortable to accept a “good enough” version of anything, but that is often what you’ll get when you’re faced with other business factors. Plus, there are a million factors that go into making an employee successful — more than I can share in this post.

So take some personal responsibility and check yourself before you whip out the trusty “B Player” card when things don’t work out with one of your employees.

Top unicorn image via Sari ONeal/Shutterstock; Batmanicorn art via Unicorns Rock

Nicholas Holland is the founder of CentreSource interactive agency, mentor for Nashville, Tenn.-based startup incubator JumpStart Foundry and a seasoned entrepreneur. His latest startup Populr, a service that enables customers to easily create and publish POPs (published one pagers), recently made its public launch. Follow him on twitter @nicholasholland.

New York City Mayor Bloomberg describes himself as an “entrepreneur” first and foremost on Twitter, so it’s no surprise that he’s launching a new initiative to support local tech startups.

Dubbed “We are made in NY,” the program includes a new website to highlight the city’s resources for entrepreneurs, including subsidized office space and grants as well as job listings at 900 local startups. New Yorkers should expect to see a series of digital ads on subways and buses to highlight the campaign.

“Growing our local tech industry is an important part of our economic development strategy to bring new businesses to our city and more jobs opportunities to New Yorkers,” said Bloomberg in a statement. The mayor’s office recruited the city’s chief digital officer Rachel Haot and media and entertainment commissioner Katherine Olivia to lead the initiative.

Considering a career change? The site includes an extensive list of tech companies in New York — and many of them are hiring. Kickstarter, Etsy, ZocDoc and many other high-profile startups are based in the Big Apple.

The new website features an interactive map of New York City’s tech startups.

Local entrepreneur Matthew Hogan said the initiative evokes a “strong sense of pride in the NYC startup community.” Hogan is the founder of an early-stage startup called DataCoup; he said resources like these are a life-saver for entrepreneurs living in a fast-paced and expensive city like New York. “The sense of camaraderie is heightened when we recognize others that are fighting as hard as ourselves.”

According to Bloomberg Ventures’ Matt Turck, the initiative demonstrates that the administration “truly gets it” and is “driven by a mayor who’s himself an an extraordinarily successful tech entrepreneur.” He added that the city is now well on its way to “reinventing itself as major tech hub.”

Turck, who recently spoke with VentureBeat about the shortage of data scientists, said he hopes the ad campaign will build the public’s confidence in tech startups — a career path that is “at least as desirable as a job on Wall Street.”

Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian is one of many well-known tech entrepreneurs that have lent their support to the campaign. He said in a statement that he’s “thrilled be part of a vibrant industry that has not only been hiring New Yorkers, but hiring them to help change the world.”

For more info, check out the promo video below.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

This is a guest post by investor Jon Soberg.

B players and C players are far worse than D’s and F’s. In fact, in my experience, B players are the worst hires you can make.

Before getting into the details, it may be useful to level-set and explain what I mean by these employee stereotypes (although there have been some differences of opinion over the years.)

A player: Fully self-sufficient and takes initiative that positively impacts the company.
B player: Does some things well, but not fully self-sufficient, and not consistently strong.
C player: Just average, and does not excel in any area.
D player: Poor performer, and shouldn’t last long if you are a half-capable manager.
F player: Should be out…like yesterday.

Good Enough is the Enemy of Great

When you have someone on your team that you think is doing well enough, you will likely trust them with mission-critical tasks like hiring or pushing code. This will impact the entire evolution of your company. If you entrust important decisions to someone who is just “good enough,” you will watch the opportunities pass.

This is why hiring B players will kill your company. The work will be good, but not great. They will deliver on time most of the time, and hustle sometimes, but not always.

Let’s say you are in a startup, and you have a B player as your vice president of sales. The person will close a good account, but won’t consistently beat targets. If they go head-to-head against a competitor with better salespeople, this person (and potentially the whole startup) will lose. If you’re an early-stage startup, you are walking dead. Raising the next round will be like selling against a stronger competitor — you won’t ultimately win.

I have built multiple engineering teams from the ground up, and I always started with an anchor rock star.  The engineer that everyone wanted to work with, and whose work was so solid that he or she made everyone else more efficient and effective.  I’ve been asked before how many engineers it would take to replace someone like that, and the correct answer is that there is no way to replace a person like this.  Even if I could hire 10 B player engineers for the same price, I would never do it.  The product quality would suffer and the time-to-market would slow; you simply can’t replace skill with numbers.

Lessons learned

My opinions on hiring and people haven’t come by accident. I’ve got scars from my career (and I’ve seen it from many angles — founder, executive, consultant, investor). I’ve made some pretty bad hires along the way. The really bad hires are the easy ones — it is obvious when someone fails or is clearly the wrong fit. You wonder what you were thinking, but at the end of the day, you can reverse these mistakes quickly and efficiently.

I have needed to fire a fair number of people as well, and I will say this is one learning from my experience — I have never felt that I fired someone too soon.

At one of my startups, I fired my entire QA department and made the engineers do all their own QA. The result: better quality product, released faster. The QA department had become a bottleneck, and they weren’t doing quality work. The engineers weren’t happy, the product management team wasn’t happy, and the product suffered. I saw the release cycles slowing down, and saw some of the tension between the QA and Engineering departments. As I dug in, my conclusion was one I had not originally wanted to see — I had a B player at the top of the QA department, and the rest of the department was B and below. It was killing us. My biggest mistake was not recognizing it sooner.

When I was a little boy, my uncle used to tell me “he who hesitates is lost.” Those are words to live by.

I have plenty of individual examples as well, and the toughest ones are always the ones who are doing fine. Managers often blame themselves. Is the job not well-defined? Does the person have enough support? Maybe they just need more time, and they will improve. It isn’t easy to find great people, so why let the decent person go hoping to find someone better?

There is an opportunity cost to keeping someone when you could do better. At a startup, that opportunity cost may be the difference between success and failure. Do you give less than full effort to make your enterprise a success? As an entrepreneur, you sweat blood to succeed. Shouldn’t you have a team that performs like you do?

Every person you hire who is not a top player is like having a leak in the hull. Eventually you will sink.

Jon Soberg is a Managing Director at Blumberg Capital, where he invests in early stage companies, specializing in FinTech, SaaS, and eCommerce. Prior to joining Blumberg Capital, Jon has been a serial entrepreneur and senior executive in multiple companies including Ditech, Broadband Digital Group and Adforce, which had a highly successful IPO.  

A CFA Charterholder and adjunct faculty in the Wharton Marketing Department, Jon earned a B.S in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, an M.S. in Engineering from Northwestern University, and an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management and Marketing from the Wharton School, where he is a Palmer Scholar.

Top image via wavebreakmedia // Shutterstock

The New York-based flower-delivery company unveiled a university-like program today that offers business and leadership training to junior-level employees in three core areas: sales, operations, and management.

This program, which CEO Bryan Burkhart refers to as “H.Bloom University,” is an expansion of the company’s Start-up Education and Entrepreneurial Development (SEED — geddit?) training initiative.

Professional development programs like these are common within large corporations, but are a surprising move for an early-stage startup. It appears to be paying off. Zach Brown, a graduate of the SEED program who was tasked with running the Chicago brunch, is set to pull in over $1 million in revenue.

Education is broken up into six-month cycles. During that time, employees can expect interactive training modules covering business and leadership topics. Just like college, each module is led by an expert from within the organization and consists of case readings, class lectures, group discussions, and skills assessments. Employees will start the first training modules this December and will graduate next May.

With its focus on cutting-edge technology and talent development, H.Bloom is not your average flower-delivery company. It operates in five metro areas — New York City, Chicago, the District of Columbia, San Francisco, and Dallas — and plans to expand to 25 new markets in the next five years. Its users purchase the luxury floral arrangements on a one-time-only or subscription basis — the company is often described as the Netflix for flowers.

Since launching in 2010, it has raised over $18 million in angel and venture capital. It now serves approximately 500 corporate customers, which accounts for the lions share of its revenue. Burkhart is looking to local leaders who can run operations and manage staff as they expand into new markets. He said the program’s participants are college-educated but typically do not have much managerial experience. I followed up with questions about the new university:

Bryan Burkhart, H Bloom’s CEO

VentureBeat: How is this different from a training program at a large corporation, Goldman Sachs, for example?
Bryan Burkhart: It’s funny that you should use Goldman. One thing that makes it very different is that while formal training programs and leadership development classes have always been available at the largest firms that started 100 years ago, it really isn’t the case with young companies. Yes, we’re a startup, but we’re thinking long-term.

VentureBeat: Does this idea stem from personal experience?
Burkhart: Right out of college, I went to work for a company called Trilogy in Austin, Tx. The CEO, a Stanford dropout, had a similar focus on providing tremendous learning opportunities. I think back on that time fondly.

VentureBeat: You’re starting with sales and marketing training — what’s next?
Burkhart: Next year, we’ll expand it further to our floral designers. These are typically people that do not have a traditional four year college degrees. Before coming to H.Bloom, they didn’t have a full time salary and were typically paid an hourly wage. We pay them a full salary with benefits. There’s also an opportunity to move up the ladder.

VentureBeat: You launched a SEED program for training junior-level staff. What were your takeaways from that experience?
Burkhart: Well, one piece of feedback we got is that participants were surprised by the hours. I would schedule classroom trainings for 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning. The reason I did that isn’t because I scientifically thought that was the best time for people to retain information. Rather, it gave me the opportunity to assess commitment. We are developing the future leaders of H.Bloom. So there is an emotional and dedication grading too.

VentureBeat: How has this impacted the culture of the company?
Burkhart: It’s unusual for a startup to say on the first day of your new job that one of its goals is to help you develop skills so you can become the very best person you can be. We continue to grow fast, and we hope to keep your interest as a person and worker. What we realize is that at some point our interests might diverse and you do something else. My goal is that if employees leave, they will have more skills then they did when they started. That the company cares about every individual getting better has been a big deal.

Related: Read about how the company was able to outlast the U.S. postal service by delivering flowers during Hurricane Sandy.

Top image via Gina Smith // Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

What skills are startups looking for in a new hire? Duedil and Adzuna just analyzed 2,697 startup job vacancies in the UK to find out.

The top buzzwords were ”Big Data” (133 mentions), ”Augmented Reality” (106 mentions), ”OpenGraph” (88 mentions) and ”Social Discovery” (72 mentions). So if you are a Big Data developer who’s a dab hand at AR interfaces, you are golden.

In terms of job areas, 33 percent of vacancies are for developers followed by 25 percent marketeers. Product managers trail in at 13 percent implying that marketing your startup product is more important than designing it well.

Other findings were, unsurprisingly, that the average startup job salary is much lower than a banking IT salary, £36,344 as opposed to £51,158. In compensation, 27 percent of startups currently hiring in the UK are offering equity to new starters but given new data on how 3 out of 4 VC-backed startups fail, you might want to ask your potential new employer to show you the money.

Despite the apparent tech boom in the UK as elsewhere, 1 in 10 Computer Science graduates remain unemployed. They might want to look further afield to the Republic of Ireland. In spite of the country being in the IMF program, my sources there tell me that there’s more or less full employment in the tech sector. Go west young man.