My first ever HackerNoon post attempts to broadly make sense of my journey over the last year; the challenges and opportunities I faced of leaving Google, becoming a solo founder; and from idea and a $50k investment from my roommate, to completing Techstars and raising $3.3m in funding from Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures. Our company is currently headquartered in London with a newly opened San Fran office. There are now 18 of us, living the dream and working hard. Caveat: I took great enjoyment from badly weaving Star Wars references into this article. ‘Never tell me the odds!’ I first met Jon Bradford, the Managing Director of Techstars London in a cafe in Clerkenwell in October 2014. I had an idea, and this was the man that was going to help me. Jon was upfront, saying he’d only taken that the meeting because I had been introduced by Google Ventures (a lesson in the power of serendipity that I have never forgotten). He went on, blankly pointing out that the odds of me getting into Techstars, as a solo founder, with no product, no team, no business plan, and looking, as I did, about 12 years old, were about the same as Northern Ireland winning the Euros in 2016. I loved his humour but quickly realised that any chance of using our Northern Irish connection was, more than likely, out the window. I knew it was going to be a tough sell after reading a Wall Street Journal article that quoted David Cohen, CEO of Techstars, and a number of the Y-Combinator guys saying that they did accept solo founders. In fact Paul Graham, puts being a ‘solo founder’ as the number one factor that will kill a startup. And there I was, alone except for a big idea and less than a year of computer science under my belt. not I was all about out of hope, and wanted to crawl back to my warm, cosy, Google team of designers, creatives and engineers. It was there that I was in my element, doing what I did best, solving problems, designing UI, and eating three free lunches a day. But despite the rocky start, the meeting lasted lasted 45 minutes, something I considered an achievement given what I’d heard about Jon. And just as the meeting ended, Jon threw me a bone. He said he loved it. I looked at him like he was from another planet. He said getting me onto the program would be a challenge, but pending a few other chats with his colleagues, he would endorse me, on one condition. That I leave the warmth of the Google mothership and the bubble I had been raised in for the last couple of years. Tatooine So there I was, out in the cold reality of the startup world without a wingman. I had nothing more than a place on the Techstars programme and a generous cheque from my housemate, Courtney Grant. (One of the conditions we wrote into the term sheet; I wasn’t allowed to introduce him as his banker friend anymore). It was then that the hardest part of my journey as a solo founder began. Aside from the fact that it was a huge personal challenge, financially and culturally, going through the accelerator programme put me completely out of my depth professionally and exposed me in a way I had not been for many years. Despite yearning for a bigger challenge during my entire tenure at Google, the months at Techstars that followed my departure were brutal, and I hated it. During the Techstars process, they have a fortnight they called ‘mentor madness’. It’s like speed dating for mentors — with people who are successful in some field related to tech startups (or not). Unlike others, I didn’t have a co-founder there to back me up, support me while these ‘experts’ tore my idea apart, but more importantly, to be there to put the idea back together, to foster and improve it. For the first two months I felt like i was throwing a tennis ball against a wall, with idea after idea smacking me right back in my face. I felt like Luke, abandoned on Tatooine with not a glimmer of hope in sight. I needed a co-founder, someone to be there to support me, encourage me to try new things and push boundaries. Without this partner in crime, I was never even going to ‘show up’ as Tak Lo, a director of Techstars put it. And so, I didn’t, literally. After two weeks of the mentors ripping my idea (not even a product) to shreds, I’d had enough and I ran away. I spent the next two weeks at home, researching and reading, more about how to survive an accelerator than how to run a company. Lesson number one: And I can’t stress this hard enough, never do a fucking startup without a co-founder. Ever. Never ever let it be about the equity. There’s a reason why these incubators don’t accept solo founders. Because it’s brutal and it’s way too easy to give up when there’s no one else to let down. Jedi Knights Luckily, I didn’t give up completely. Before long, I found myself back in the room and began to see the silver lining of being a lone ranger. Being on my own, I ended up naturally relying heavily on the network of mentors around me, much more than others. The mentors I had managed to persuade to help me, people like Matt Webb (Berg.com),Scott Dodson (Gamesys), Adam Ross (Goldcrest Capital), Guy Podjarny (Snyk.io) and Richard Fearn (Friday Club London) would become a lifeline for me in the first six months of the company. Likewise Mark Evans, of Balderton Capital, who around this time, I can make a good guess, was spending considerably more time with me than some of his much larger investments. I would definitely not be in the position I am today if I hadn’t listened to those around me and taken their advice, mainly encouraging me to make a conscious effort to forget what I thought I knew and acknowledge that I was nowhere near as smart as I thought I was. Because, for all my complaining and initial resistance of the program, I would never be where I am without it. As a solo founder, you will need an ecosystem like this around you. Lesson number two: Build a network around you. Forget everything you know about the world of working, accept that your way is not the right way and embrace the people who can help in light of not having a co-founder. Fueling the battleship Keeping the lights on was a constant worry for me the whole time and has been until we started getting some serious traction and subsequent funding. The first fundraise was the hardest. I had left Google, with a $50k cheque in my pocket from my flatmate who invested in Kalo, with the only certainty in my life being that I knew the money wasn’t going to last me very long. Like many start-ups, I had rejection after rejection, going door to door at VC firms, trying to get intros to any angel investors I could find online but it wasn’t working. I quickly came to the conclusion that unless you are coming out of an environment in which you are already immersed in that world, with that network of capital at your disposal, finding funding as a solo founder is next to impossible without an accelerator program like Techstars. It was Techstars that introduced me to investors, both directly and indirectly, and ultimately led to our most well known round of funding, led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, which has since catapulted us into a Silicon Valley network of ex-Stanford, ex-Paypal / Palantir power players we could have only dreamed of having access to 12 months ago. One of things that was key to landing our second funding round (totalled $2.75m) was that I wasn’t selling myself anymore. I was selling a dream team of passionate hungry and experienced professionals, demonstrating that we not only knew what we wanted to achieve but had a firm grasp on how we were going to that. At seed stage of a startup, the investors have in the majority of cases, nothing to go on but your team and your idea. So if you’re on your own, you need talented people — any form of serious fundraising requires a founding team. Lesson number 3: You won’t get big funding alone. Use your network and build a team of people that angels and VC funds can believe in. Strength in numbers. Taking on the Empire The main thing above all else that still baffles me is how I persuaded two of the most dedicated, talented (and patient) people to join Kalo, and irrevocably change the future of the company. When Kalo was just me and one junior engineer, with no Peter Thiel involved, no $3.5m in funding and no headline stage opportunities at TechCrunch Disrupt we made two game-changing hires. Fergus Doyle, previously the Head of Platform engineering at OneFineStay and Akosa Melifonwu, an enterprise account executive from Salesforce decided to join me on my journey, but it took a very long time to get to that point. Hiring talent as a solo founder is tough. I had no idea if I could trust them or if they would share the same passion or vision as I did. I interviewed over 30 candidates in total for their positions (CTO and Head of Sales respectively) and without a co-founder it was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make, as the buck literally stopped with me. As a young startup, with an inexperienced founder, investing in the wrong people at the beginning given we had a limited roadmap/funding to prove our concept, would ultimately determine whether Kalo sank or swam. Persuading candidates to even have a chat with me, let alone leave their secure jobs and join me on my mad, solo journey was a challenge in itself. During this period, I relied even further on my now slightly larger network, having investors that hadn’t even put cash in Kalo yet interview the final few candidates for me. These candidates took five months to find. Lesson number four: if going to be a solo founder, you better be bloody good with people and you better trust your instincts as you’re the one who can build your founding team. only Master and Apprentice Finally, back to the man that helped start it all, someone that despite the lambasting during Techstars, couldn’t have been a better person for me to be mentored by. Jon Bradford constantly gave me a hard time, questioned everything — from the way I spoke, how I dress, to how I answered questions, to almost every step I made along the way. It is my adoption of what he taught and preached at Techstars and his work ethic that still influences me and my team, everyday at Kalo. Jon is still on standby when I need him, giving me hiring advice, funding strategy help and is always someone I can vent to. Finding a mentor that is not only a great fit for you as a solo founder, but as a human is something I can’t ever really put into words how grateful I am for the people I had around me. The fact that with mine I landed Jon and a group of individuals that were not only compatible with me but willing to be patient, teach me, push me and spend late nights with me, is well, now how would I put it, as about as likely as Northern Ireland winning the Euros in 2016.

Google

Salesforce

Techcrunch

TechStars

Wall Street Journal

Han Solo — my journey from Google to founding Kalo

Five Reasons To Have A Sales Job While In University 1. Time The most valuable asset during your undergrad is TIME. The more hours you work at your part time job, the less time you have to study. At a sales job, you can earn base pay AND commission. Once you’ve passed the curve, you probably earn the same if not more pay working 15–20 hours a week than your friends working 30–40hours at a regular part time job. This means your bills get paid and you have more time to study! learning 2. Money As mentioned in reason number one, you earn above average pay compared to your typical part time job. This is both a gift and curse. The gift is more freedom to pay your bills and possibly even a self-awarded treat. The curse is also the money. I’ve seen it many times, were employees jump from part time status to full time status because they enjoy the pay cheque so much. As a result, school gets put on the back burner. 3. Confidence At a sales job, you acquire intangible soft skills. Since you are forced to interact with tons of people on a weekly basis, you develop confidence speaking in public. The cool part about this is that you can grow your network. Depending on the company your work for, you will meet many clients that have a lot of money. I recommend you get to know these clients well and provide them with exceptional service. I’ve seen it many times where the client offers the sales consultant a job opportunity. Furthermore, this new found confidence will pay dividends during the recruitment process in your final year of University. 4. Ability To Read I am not referring to reading a . Instead, I am referring to reading people. You can differentiate between what a client needs and what they want. You can also detect whether they are going to buy today or if they are just browsing. This will come in handy when it’s been a long day and you are trying to decide if you are going to attempt a sales pitch or not. It also comes in handy when the store is overwhelmed with people and you need decide which client(s) you should spend the most time with. book 5. Ethics You may not realize it but you are faced with many ethical dilemmas at a sales job. Sales can be cut throat, so are you going to be the co-worker that always steals sales? In addition, once trust is established between the client and the sales consultant, are you going to sell them something they don’t need just so you can earn a quick commission? Having strong ethics will lead to a prosperous career later in life. Never sacrifice your ethics for a short-term gain. In conclusion, I am a strong believer in acquiring a sales job while completing your undergrad. It has made me grow as a person to develop intangible soft skills that employers look for in potential grad candidates. is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising &sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories

Facebook

Five Reasons To Have A Sales Job While In University

Recently I was working at a university, helping students prepare for their summer internship interviews. We were going through a series of standard fit questions that often come up in finance interviews, when one of the students’ answers caught me off-guard and really made me think. I asked the student to tell me about the toughest decision he ever made. He asked me if it could be anything and I told him to go for it. He then told me that the hardest decision he ever made was staying with his girlfriend. I was a little shocked with the initial answer, but as he continued his answer really hit home. He elaborated that he and his girlfriend had gone through a rough patch and had debated ending things. After intense thought he decided that he wanted to work it out. It ended up being one of his best decisions and now he and his girlfriend are in a great place. Now, every time he faces a difficult decision, he thinks back to his and it reminds him to Never Give Up. relationship Eight years ago, I was living in a multilevel house in Dundas, Ontario. At the time, I lived in the top 2 floors of the house with my girlfriend. Below us on the main floor was a widowed woman that I would often have long conversations with when I was coming home or heading out. She would often talk about her husband that had passed away and how much she missed him. One day during our conversation she mentioned something about her husband and I said that she and her husband seemed like a perfect match and that they were lucky to have such a great relationship. She replied sternly that they weren’t lucky and that there is no such thing as a perfect match. She told me that for at least a decade she hated her husband and didn’t want to be with him for another minute and it was work everyday to stay together. My widowed neighbour went on to warn me that life was only going to get harder. “Right now you are young and in love, but that will all change in time and the only thing that will keep your relationship together is work.” She said that in her 70 years of life, she had worked for over 40 years and raised two kids, but the hardest thing she ever did was stay married. She promised me that it would also be the hardest thing I would ever have to do as well. Like anything great in your life, successful relationships take time and work. According to my neighbour, the problem with most people is that they give up before they ever know what a great relationship is. We often hear that what separates most successful people in business is that the unsuccessful ones give up before they have the opportunity to achieve something great. Surviving the everyday challenges of life can be a grind and it will often be easier to give up than to forge ahead, but true will be awarded to those who stay the course even in the hardest of moments. success “In the middle of difficult lies opportunity” — Albert Einstein

Keep

What my 70 Year Old Neighbour Taught me About Relationships & Investment Banking

The startups that focus on the future Every year there are a lot of new startups, coming up with more and more creative ideas. All of this is kind of trending right now…so there are a LOT of startups every year. A majority of them are useless (eg. Fresh Banana’s delivered to your house!) On the other hand, some are really useful and…well, futuristic! Startups are doing a lot of things that are changing the . Some improve communication, some are figuring out what to do because of climate change. The point is, these startups are really doing an awesome job! world Here is a roundup of startups that are useful to us humans 1. : Tesla home battery. Tesla Powerball 2. : Create Artificial Intelligence to do almost anything! Motion AI 3. : Helps you find all the emails related to a domain. Email Hunter 4. : Better shower, 70% less water. Nubia Shower 5. : A drone with a camera that follows you. Lily 6. : Be less busy. Real-time messaging, archiving & search. Slack 7. : Yes, Medium is gaining a lot of attention. Medium 8. : Real-time information discovery. Dataminr 9. : Explore the world through someone else’s eyes. Periscope 10. : On demand delivery. Postmates 11. : The new sticky note. Paper 12. : The fastest way to schedule a one-to-one meeting. Sunrise Meet 13. : Get shares in the products you use & love. RocketClub startup 14. : Smart keyboard with built-in search engine. Slash Keyboard 2.0 15. : Shipping on demand. Shyp 16. : Lend your eyes to the blind. Be My Eyes 17. : Free stock trading. Robinhood 18. : A platform for all your HR needs. Zenefits 19. : Collaboration tool built for teams. Dropbox Paper 20. : Hire a development team in 5 minutes. Gigster 21. : Clara is a virtual employee that schedules meetings for you. Clara 22. : A smart, fast and free email client for iPhone. Spark 23. : A hoverboard by Lexus. Slide 24. : A smart shopping list that learns as you use it. Capitan 25. : A camera that automatically edits its own video. Graava 26. : A daily leaderboard of the best new products. Product Hunt 27. : Image processing for any drone. DroneDeploy 28. : Combines visual ability with mobile computing. Magic Leap 28. AI Powered email manager/butler Reginald: 30. Teaching You how To Play Piano…in your browser Pianu: 31. Nest: Smart home heating system Learn to code…with an app Lrn: 33. Make Music with AI Jukedeck: 34. : Control stuff with your HANDS Leap Motion 35. : Make a Nameplate About.me 36. : Make a website…for free Weld 37. : Get smarter by spending 5 minutes a day…reading an email Highbrow 38. : Sell Things Easily Sell It Easy 39. : All of your inspiration in one place Panda 40. : AI powered robot that helps you invest in stuff iAllocate 41. : AI Powered Personal Assistant to plan meetings x.ai 42. : AI Powered…friend? Alice/Alex

Discovery

Dropbox

Robinhood

Slack

Tesla

42 Startups Changing the World

If you’re anything like me, you’re the managing director of your company and also the marketing assistant (and cleaner and receptionist). Running my small I do a lot with a little, but I’ve seen opportunities swoop past me because I don’t have the headspace to consistently do the things I know I should be doing. copy writing business It’s why over the last few years I’ve started gathering apps that make and business development a bit more automated and easy for a like mine. You’ll see many of them are really more about great customer service or — that’s not a mistake. In our business, our existing customers are our best, fastest and cheapest source of new business. It’s probably the same for you too. marketing small business management Here goes. Ask Nicely — make customers love you If you’ve never heard of Net Promoter Score, brace yourself. It’s a super simple way of measuring the most important business metric ever — how much your clients love you. If they score you 1, you’ve got an issue; 10 and they’re actively recruiting clients on your behalf. It’s all based on one question: “how likely are you to recommend us?” The value in that is immense. But… NPS software is generally heavy and dull, wrapped up in all sorts of add-ons that make people not want to answer — and it’s slow. You often have to wait until the end of the month to get your scores sends that simple little questions to your clients and lets them answer You also get real-time data, so you hear about the haters immediately. That can hurt your heart, but by god it’s useful — if you can get in touch with haters really quickly you have a pretty excellent shot at turning them into lovers. If a true lover crops up, that’s your cue to make them extra love you with a phone call or a gift. Ask Nicely in the email. An extra bonus is that Ask Nicely is NZ-made. Clever clogs. Gmail canned messages — make a robot do the typing If you’re anything like me, you feel like you’re writing the same email over and over again. I have stock text to go with proposals, first drafts, chase ups — you name it. Somewhere in my system I have a document called “standard wording” which I thought was a bit of revelation when I wrote. Sending a proposal? Open, cut and paste, send. Easy! Imagine my joy when I stumbled across Gmail’s canned messages. Now I have that standard text stored in my system, so the next time I need one, there’s no searching, cutting or pasting. I just click the arrow button in the lower right-hand corner of window, choose the message, personalise and hit send. You can set responses to go out automatically, based on things like who sent it, and if they’ve used a keyword, label or subject. It goes without saying that if you’d like help penning these stock responses, we’re your copy writers. Boomerang — email super powers is another Gmail add-on, and I love it. I use it like an ad-hoc CRM system. Boomerang It does two things: Sends emails at a set time Boomerangs emails back to you if your recipient hasn’t responded. Here are some of the ways I use it: Automatic proposal follow-ups I Boomerang every proposal email, with a specific set of keywords. If they don’t respond in a day, I get the email back, which triggers an automatic Canned Message to follow them up. Genius! If that sounds too hard, a Boomeranged email will at least remind you not to let a hot lead get cold Managing delivery I schedule emails a lot. Here’s a secret: mostly things take me a while to write. But if I hit a stroke of inspiration, I get stuff done really, really quickly. When that happens, I don’t just send it back to the client. Why? Because people start to get used to turn around times that simply aren’t always achievable. So I schedule emails to go out later — still ahead of time, but not so much that I’m shooting future me in the foot. That way, I can get that project out of my head for a while. Keeping warm leads on the burner I also used scheduled emails to keep track of warm leads. If a client tells me they’ll be ready to talk in a week or two, I’ll say “great!” and then It’s a genius move, I know. I used to put reminders in my diary. Now I write the email immediately and just schedule it in. You’ll be surprised at how many people genuinely do want to work with you. actually email them again in a week or two. Pxlr — stop stealing images These days social media is visual. I’ve seen it in action. A post with a powerful, beautiful image will always outperform one with no image or a low-quality image. So mostly people steal them from the net. Let me tell you now: you should stop doing that. Not only is it ethically questionable, it’s also bad for business. Creating your own images is often faster because you avoid those lost hours clicking through a search result. It will also give you the chance to start building a visual style so that people connect all your images together. OK! You’re sold! But oh. Have you seen how expensive Photoshop is? Well, never fear, is basically Photoshop for free. As long as you’re not trying to retouch Michael Jackson into your family photo, it’ll do everything you need: adjust colours, add stickers and type, free-hand draw, rotate, crop and resize, get rid of red-eye — you name it. Pxlr Squarespace — get a great website, free Stop asking web developers to build you a single page website. It’s not worth their time and it’s not worth your money. Instead, roll up your sleeves and get onto . So easy to use, so beautiful and free to design — you just pay them to host your site. As a side note, if you feel like you need a bit of hand-holding to help you set up the site, that’s what Squarespace this company does. My bag of tricks has made business development way easier, and simpler. Share them with your friends(or keep them secret so you look extra amazing). Originally published at www.wordsforbreakfast.co.nz .

Super

Five tools to make you a small business marketing genius.

As a founder I found many facets of the venture capital system frustrating: the lack of accessibility of investors, the difficulty of knowing which ones my company was a strategic fit for, and the general unwillingness to invest in the unfamiliar. Of the three, that last bothered me the most. Investors disproportionately placed their bets on people with more experience, who knew the right buzzwords to say at the right time. Perhaps even more frustratingly, they were far more likely to invest in who had gone through the startup journey before. I understood that experience is a way to mitigate risk, but why should I be punished just because I was young and hadn’t started a company before? That didn’t detract at all from the quality of my company. startup founders I wouldn’t go so far as to call my founder self naive, but my perspective has certainly shifted as I’ve settled into the venture capitalist role. I still believe many of the things I did as a founder: many VC’s really do make themselves too hard to access for entrepreneurs and are too scared of getting outside of their comfort zone. However, on the matter of first-time vs. repeat founders — at least — I have a much better understanding of the investor bias. I spent a fair amount of time on Quora this weekend answering questions. Here are some of them from seemingly prospective or new startup founders: How can I create a successful start up in Silicon Valley with $100,000 initial capital? Why do many tech founders need funding from venture capital? How do I convince investors that my startup is worthy if I really believe in it? These are all reasonable questions on some level. But none of them instill a whole lot of confidence in an investor. They’re just not the types of questions that an experience founder would ask, because that founder has learned the answers to them the hard way: by knowing that $100K will barely buy you ramen in Silicon Valley, that getting anything done in the business world takes money, and that your own faith in your startup is nowhere near all it takes to convince investors to place their bets. My founder self didn’t fully appreciate how scary a first time founder can be to an investor. The first time founder is an unknown quantity… sure, they can be the next Zuckerberg; but they’re far more likely to burn through every dime they’re given with nothing to show for it. So how much does being a repeat founder matter? I could point you to some of the good data hiring around the internet on that advantage: it’s stark. But you can certainly argue that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: investors like repeat founders and give them money, which makes them more likely to be successful. So instead, let me tell you what it looks like from a VC’s perspective in three different scenarios: A reaches out to my firm via e-mail with a pitch deck. These decks are often ignored, but I try to do my best to at least look at each one. Even if I see a good one, I know it’s an uphill battle to try to get any of my fellow investment professionals interested in a cold lead. It would take 2–3 hours of good work on my part to get a VP or Partner to even hop on a call with them. Unless your pitch is incredibly compelling I’m going to reply quickly with an apology and a firm “no”. first time founder An decides to start their own company. They’ve never founded one before, but they’ve at least worked at a couple of good ones and have good connections in the community. When it comes time to get some funding, they reach out to their connections at my firm. The connection (often a VP or Partner) is happy to hop on the phone and hear the pitch. If it’s a good one, the investment professional will tee up the investment to the broader team, happy to have an experienced founder from the community to bet on. experienced startup operator An decides to start a company. They let a few of their friends know, including a partner or two at my firm. Excited and knowing that they don’t have long, the partners quickly work to understand if the founder is looking to raise money and how much. Hoping to preempt the other investors they know will want in on the deal, the partners make sure the rest of the group is on board and ready to cut a check as soon as the founder has figured out what they want to do. experienced founder with a previous multi hundred million dollar exit That last case might be a little hyperbolic, but it’s not far from the mark. Venture capitalists like experienced founders with previous successful exits under their belts. They have their reasons, some of which are good and others of which might not be. At the end of the day, those reasons don’t matter to you as a founder. You just have to be aware of what’s happening on the other side of the closed door so that you can make the most of your situation. really is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising &sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories

Funding

A thought on why VC’s invest in experienced founders

Much talk has been thrown around regarding the importance of diversity; however, as Dave McClure of 500 Startups noted, In general, that means statistically more “white male nerds” get hired and receive funding Dave said, “There’s a soft bias towards doing things that are familiar.” “ — I think we are making progress,” “Now it’s brown and yellow nerds that get funding.” As a small , your first hire can make or break your team, and as teams grow, there is a tendency to bring on people who remind you of yourself. What are actual ways to make sure you are hiring a diverse team in backgrounds as well as skillsets? startup natural I recently attended the x Women in Tech event with Alexandra Wilkis Wilson (Co-Founder of Glamsquad, previously Co-Founder of Gilt), Sutian Dong (Partner at Female Founders Fund), Kate Shillo (Director at Galvanize Ventures), and Ana Mahoney (Uber General Manager). Here are my actionable takeaways from the event: Uber Vettery Your core attracts your applicants. Take a hard look at your core team The core of your team will inevitably attract similar applicants. People are drawn to people who remind them of themselves. Sutian retells the story of two male co-founders, sons of immigrants who were adamant about ensuring diversity in hiring. Only when they took a company picture at the end of the year, did they realize there were no women in the picture — they had resort to pulling random women to stand in the picture. The lesson? When people look for jobs and think about fit, they’re going to look at the current makeup of the team, and it’s easier to ensure there is diversity early on when there are five people rather than when there are 50. It is difficult to “hire for diversity” when your core itself is not diverse. Adding in a simple sentence at the end of job descriptions that underscores your commitment to diversity, e.g. “we encourage people of all backgrounds, and all experiences to apply,” will change the makeup of applicants. Actionable tip: Consider bringing on a “bar-raiser” for your hiring process The bar raiser is an objective party that does not work for the company and is tasked to ask the questions that the hiring team doesn’t think to ask in order to prevent assumptions or biases that otherwise might be overlooked. The bar raiser should effectively moderate interview debriefs, making sure all concerns are aired and At Uber, Anna stresses, “We hire for teams, and when you have a diverse group of people as part of that process, then you naturally attract diverse applicants, and that mindset is reflected in those we hire.” be able to candidly say, “Here are the criteria we have for hiring, here is what we have, and here is what we’re missing.” Use an assessment test like Myers Briggs to measure diversity of strengths Early on at Gilt, Alexandra brought on an executive coach to build out a highly functional team. At the time a team of seven, they used the Myers Briggs test to assess their profiles. The result? When all team members were mapped out on 16 quadrants, they discovered they were all very similar in how they thought and how they processed information. It’s human tendency to hire people that remind you of yourself, and “It’s important to think about diversity not only in how people look, but also in how they think.” entrepreneurs tend to be “idea people, glass half-full optimists. Make sure to balance this out with others who are are analytical, realistic, and metrics-driven. Test for skills rather than for previous experiences first There’s a natural inclination to ask about someone’s past work experiences. However, at Uber, they test for skills first by administering real life case studies that reflect what you would actually be working on in the role. If you’ve enjoyed doing those assignments — whether that’s structuring a marketing campaign, writing a blog post, organizing operational flow — then both sides actually get a sense of if you would thrive in that role. If you’re on the hiring side, ask these questions: Ask questions about a puzzle you are trying to figure out, and see how they analyze the pieces. “Are they structured in their thinking? Are they articulate? Are they creative? Can they pick up on a hint and build upon it?” Finally, conduct a thorough background check Think you’ve found your dream candidate? Make sure you don’t overlook reference checks. To make sure you are unbiased in hiring, Sutian recommends having your company’s board members meet any executive team hires. Reference check who they’ve worked with before, even check with people on LinkedIn that you are mutually connected with. One challenging question that Alexandra always asks references is References tend to err on reviewing candidates positively, but this question can shed light on potential red flags such as, “x tends to be impatient and had some difficulty working in our small team.” Kate encourages people to “check [the candidate’s] credit, especially if they’re managing your money.” “What’s the worst thing you can say about this person?” At SheWorx , we believe you need to be authentic about your reasoning behind why you believe diversity is important to you. Make sure that if it is a priority, you are clear about that during your interactions with the candidate. If you fundamentally don’t know what your reasoning is behind supporting diversity, then take the time learn the facts, read the stories, and analyze different viewpoints, so you can formulate an opinion that aligns with your values and beliefs. The worst thing you can do is to say you are committed to diversity and not be able to articulate why it’s important to you. When you share your reasoning, cite a story that makes you believe that improving diversity is important. People can smell inauthenticity and that’s the last thing you want to project to a potential hire. SheWorx is a collective of ambitious female entrepreneurs and changemakers redefining the next wave of leadership. RSVP for our next SheWorx Breakfast Wednesday 2/3 with Owen Davis , Founder of Overlap, NYC Seed, and Alpha Ventures. He’ll be providing actionable strategies for how to raise capital efficiently.

Flow

Founders Fund

Uber

Yellow

How to Build a [Strong and Diverse] Winning Team

“All businesses like people have a life cycle; start-up, high-growth, decline and death. “ So says Mr Farrell has been teaching how to make a business tick for over 25 years. “ The entrepreneurial life cycle of a firm usually hits a major test at 30. It’s a critical time for an established three decade-old business. What do firms usually do when the entrepreneur who started the business retires? The biggest mistake is they hire a professional manager.” entrepreneurship expert and author Larry Farrell. Mr Farrell recommends that an entrepreneur always needs to be at the helm of any business. “We’ve reviewed and researched entrepreneurs extensively. We believe there are 4 key fundamentals that entrepreneurs practise. It’s not an innate ability you inherit from your parents. If you apply it to a business you can extend the natural life cycle of a company, in particular if there are the right people driving it forward.” You have to be interested in what you’re doing. You have to focus on it a lot. If you love it, ultimately it will give you a competitive advantage. 1. There has to be a sense of mission within the business: . Customer and product are the two most important words in any business. If you don’t have those two things you don’t have a business. An entrepreneur lives in the customer and product space. 2. Customer and Product Vision : Innovation doesn’t have to have a narrow focus. Sure you need to innovate to create new products, but it can apply to building fresh systems in your payroll and personnel departments. 3. High Speed Innovation . That goes back to a sense of mission. Entrepreneurs like what they do, so they’re motivated by work. More than that, short-term consequences are very real to an entrepreneur. To the entrepreneur every day, every week, every month is critical. If you work in a big company and you are not performing, nobody might notice for a while. 4 Self-inspired behaviour You can listen to Larry’s interview on . our podcast here Larry also got us thinking about a business in Northern Ireland that’s come through the critical 30 year mark and is going from strength to strength. Step forward Gareth Loye from Mr Loye took over the business from his father, and it has grown rapidly in the past couple of years. M&M Contractors. M&M build and maintain utility networks. The company has had success in winning contracts with big global operators that normally only partner alongside firms with a turnover in excess of £100million. How? Their track record, and the old-fashioned personal touch. The firm is predicting staff numbers will swell to 150 over the next year and turnover will grow from £12million to between £16 and £17million. The boss Gareth Loye explains “I’m only one phone call away. It’s the whole firm that delivers, but if there’s anything our customers need I personally still go out to sites. Knowing what our customers need, today, tomorrow or next year is the key objective. We build relationships with clients and use video testimonials. Video testimonials bring a lever-arch file full of paper to reality.” Gareth is also focused on moving the business forward “When you’re growing as a business, your structure changes; it involves bringing in new processes, tracking jobs, tracking costs and you need every structure to work to maximise performance.” You can hear more from Gareth and his plans for the business here. We’re also talking on our podcast about the which includes a company that’s developing an app to help calm down children by using their heart rate and breathing. NI Tech Mission to the USA, This photo was actually taken in Belfast! is already in over 100 schools. The company is also working with clinicians to help children and their families deal with a diagnosis of cancer and understand the treatments available. TakeTen Plus our start-up pitch this week is Pocket Buddy from . It’s a new way to approach a tourism app. We’ll let them explain the secret in their pitch. (We should point out that i3Digital is behind some of the most downloaded apps on the island of Ireland.) i3Digital You can also join us on Twitter @theprofitmargin and on Facebook @TheProfitMargin. If there’s topic you’d like covered, let us know. Or if your business is doing interesting work and you’d like to talk to us about it, get in touch. You can email us at Jim@theprofitmargin.co.uk or Naomi@theprofitmargin.co.uk. The Profit Margin is supported by First Trust Bank and produced in association with the Ulster Business School.

Alongside

Twitter

The Entrepreneurial life cycle

Excerpted from DEEP WORK by Cal Newport The relationship between deep work and collaboration is tricky. It’s worth taking the time to untangle, however, because properly leveraging collaboration can increase the quality of deep work in your professional life. It’s helpful to start our discussion of this topic by taking a step back to consider what at first seems to be an unresolvable conflict. In Part 1 of this book I criticized Facebook for the design of its new headquarters. In particular, I noted that the company’s goal to create the world’s largest open office space — a giant room that will reportedly hold twenty-​eight hundred workers — represents an absurd attack on concentration. Both intuition and a growing body of research underscore the reality that sharing a workspace with a large number of coworkers is incredibly distracting — creating an environment that thwarts attempts to think seriously. In a 2013 article summarizing recent research on this topic, went so far as to call for an end to the “tyranny of the open-​plan office.” Bloomberg Businessweek And yet, these open office designs are not embraced haphazardly. As Maria Konnikova reports in , when this concept first emerged, its goal was to “facilitate communication and idea flow.” This claim resonated with American businesses looking to embrace an aura of start‑up unconventionality. Josh Tyrangiel, the editor of , for example, explained the lack of offices in Bloomberg’s headquarters as follows: The New Yorker Bloomberg Businessweek “Open plan is pretty spectacular; it ensures that everyone is attuned to the broad mission, and . . . it encourages curiosity between people who work in different disciplines.” Jack Dorsey justified the open layout of the Square headquarters by explaining: “We encourage people to stay out in the open because we believe in serendipity — and people walking by each other teaching new things.” For the sake of discussion, let’s call this principle — that when you allow people to bump into each other smart collaborations and new ideas emerge — . When Mark Zuckerberg decided to build the world’s largest office, we can reasonably conjecture, this theory helped drive his decision, just as it has driven many of the moves toward open workspaces elsewhere in Silicon Valley and beyond. (Other less-​exalted factors, like saving money and increasing supervision, also play a role, but they’re not as sexy and are therefore less emphasized.) the theory of serendipitous creativity This decision between promoting concentration and promoting serendipity seems to indicate that deep work (an individual endeavor) is incompatible with generating creative insights (a collaborative endeavor). This conclusion, however, is flawed. It’s based, I argue, on an incomplete understanding of the theory of serendipitous creativity. To support this claim, let’s consider the origins of this particular understanding of what spurs breakthroughs. The theory in question has many sources, but I happen to have a personal connection to one of the more well-known. During my seven years at MIT, I worked on the site of the institute’s famed Building 20. This structure, located at the intersection of Main and Vassar Streets in East Cambridge, and eventually demolished in 1998, was thrown together as a temporary shelter during World War II, meant to house the overflow from the school’s bustling Radiation Laboratory. As noted by a 2012 article, the building was initially seen as a failure: “Ventilation was poor and hallways were dim. The walls were thin, the roof leaked, and the building was broiling in the summer and freezing in the winter.” New Yorker When the war ended, however, the influx of scientists to Cambridge continued. MIT needed space, so instead of immediately demolishing Building 20 as they had promised local officials (in exchange for lax permitting), they continued using it as overflow space. The result was that a mismatch of different departments — from nuclear science to linguistics to electronics — shared the low-slung building alongside more esoteric tenants such as a machine shop and a piano repair facility. Because the building was cheaply constructed, these groups felt free to rearrange space as needed. Walls and floors could be shifted and equipment bolted to the beams. In recounting the story of Jerrold Zacharias’s work on the first atomic clock, the abovementioned article points to the importance of his ability to remove two floors from his Building 20 lab so he could install the three-story cylinder needed for his experimental apparatus. New Yorker In MIT lore, it’s generally believed that this haphazard combination of different disciplines, thrown together in a large reconfigurable building, led to chance encounters and a spirit of inventiveness that generated breakthroughs at a fast pace, innovating topics as diverse as Chomsky grammars, Loran navigational radars, and video games, all within the same productive postwar decades. When the building was finally demolished to make way for the $300 million Frank Gehry–designed Stata Center (where I spent my time), its loss was mourned. In tribute to the “plywood palace” it replaced, the interior design of the Stata Center includes boards of unfinished plywood and exposed concrete with construction markings left intact. Around the same time that Building 20 was hastily constructed, a more systematic pursuit of serendipitous creativity was under way two hundred miles to the southwest in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was here that Bell Labs director Mervin Kelly guided the construction of a new home for the lab that would purposefully encourage interaction between its diverse mix of scientists and engineers. Kelly dismissed the standard university-​style approach of housing different departments in different buildings, and instead connected the spaces into one contiguous structure joined by long hallways — some so long that when you stood at one end it would appear to converge to a vanishing point. As Bell Labs chronicler Jon Gertner notes about this design: “Traveling the hall’s length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions and ideas was almost impossible. A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.” This strategy, mixed with Kelly’s aggressive recruitment of some of the world’s best minds, yielded some of the most concentrated innovation in the history of modern civilization. In the decades following the Second World War, the lab produced, among other achievements: the first solar cell, laser, communication satellite, cellular communication system, and fiber optic networking. At the same time, their theorists formulated both information theory and coding theory, their astronomers won the Nobel Prize for empirically validating the Big Bang Theory, and perhaps most important of all, their physicists invented the transistor. The theory of serendipitous creativity, in other words, seems well justified by the historical record. The transistor, we can argue with some confidence, probably required Bell Labs and its ability to put solid-​state physicists, quantum theorists, and world-​class experimentalists in one building where they could serendipitously encounter one another and learn from their varied expertise. This was an invention unlikely to come from a lone scientist thinking deeply in the academic equivalent of Carl Jung’s stone tower. But it’s here that we must embrace more nuance in understanding what generated innovation in sites such as Building 20 and Bell Labs. To do so, let’s return once again to my own experience at MIT. When I arrived as a new PhD student in the fall of 2004, I was a member of the first incoming class to be housed in the new Stata Center, which, as mentioned, replaced Building 20. Because the center was new, incoming students were given tours that touted its features. Frank Gehry, we learned, arranged the offices around common spaces and introduced open stairwells between adjacent floors, all in an effort to support the type of serendipitous encounters that had defined its predecessor. But what struck me at the time was a feature that hadn’t occurred to Gehry but had been recently added at the faculty’s insistence: special gaskets installed into the office doorjambs to improve soundproofing. The professors at MIT — some of the most innovative technologists in the world — wanted nothing to do with an open-​office-​style workspace. They instead demanded the ability to close themselves off. really This combination of soundproofed offices connected to large common areas yields a architecture of innovation in which both serendipitous encounter and isolated deep thinking are supported. It’s a setup that straddles a spectrum where on one extreme we find the solo thinker, isolated from inspiration but free from distraction, and on the other extreme, we find the fully collaborative thinker in an open office, flush with inspiration but struggling to support the deep thinking needed to build on it.* hub-and-spoke If we turn our attention back to Building 20 and Bell Labs, we see that this is the architecture they deployed as well. Neither building offered anything resembling a modern open office plan. They were instead constructed using the standard layout of private offices connected to shared hallways. Their creative mojo had more to do with the fact that these offices shared a small number of long connecting spaces — forcing researchers to interact whenever they needed to travel from one location to another. These mega-​hallways, in other words, provided highly effective hubs. We can, therefore, still dismiss the depth-​destroying open office concept without dismissing the innovation-​producing theory of serendipitous creativity. The key is to maintain both in a hub-​and-​spoke-​style arrangement: Expose yourself to ideas in hubs on a regular basis, but maintain a spoke in which to work deeply on what you encounter. This division of efforts, however, is not the full story, as even when one returns to a spoke, solo work is still not necessarily the best strategy. Consider, for example, the previously mentioned invention of the (point-​contact) transistor at Bell Labs. This breakthrough was supported by a large group of researchers, all with separate specialties, who came together to form the — a team dedicated to inventing a smaller and more reliable alternative to the vacuum tube. This group’s collaborative conversations were necessary preconditions to the transistor: a clear example of the usefulness of hub behavior. solid-state physics research group Once the research group laid the intellectual groundwork for the component, the innovation process shifted to a spoke. What makes this particular innovation process an interesting case, however, is that even when it shifted to a spoke it remained collaborative. It was two researchers in particular — the experimentalist Walter Brattain and the quantum theorist John Bardeen — who over a period of one month in 1947 made the series of breakthroughs that led to the first working solid-​state transistor. Brattain and Bardeen worked together during this period in a small lab, often side by side, pushing each other toward better and more effective designs. These efforts consisted primarily of deep work — but a type of deep work we haven’t yet encountered. Brattain would concentrate intensely to engineer an experimental design that could exploit Bardeen’s latest theoretical insight; then Bardeen would concentrate intensely to make sense of what Brattain’s latest experiments revealed, trying to expand his theoretical framework to match the observations. This back-​and-​forth represents a collaborative form of deep work (common in academic circles) that leverages what I call the . whiteboard effect For some types of problems, working with someone else at the proverbial shared whiteboard can push you deeper than if you were working alone. The presence of the other party waiting for your next insight — be it someone physically in the same room or collaborating with you virtually — can short-​circuit the natural instinct to avoid depth. We can now step back and draw some practical conclusions about the role of collaboration in deep work. The success of Building 20 and Bell Labs indicates that isolation is not required for productive deep work. Indeed, their example indicates that for many types of work — especially when pursuing innovation — collaborative deep work can yield better results. This strategy, therefore, asks that you consider this option in contemplating how best to integrate depth into your professional life. In doing so, however, keep the following two guidelines in mind. , distraction remains a destroyer of depth. Therefore, the hub-​and-​spoke model provides a crucial template. Separate your pursuit of serendipitous encounters from your efforts to think deeply and build on these inspirations. You should try to optimize each effort separately, as opposed to mixing them together into a sludge that impedes both goals. First , even when you retreat to a spoke to think deeply, when it’s reasonable to leverage the whiteboard effect, do so. By working side by side with someone on a problem, you can push each other toward deeper levels of depth, and therefore toward the generation of more and more valuable output as compared to working alone. Second When it comes to deep work, in other words, consider the use of collaboration when appropriate, as it can push your results to a new level. At the same time, don’t lionize this quest for interaction and positive randomness to the point where it crowds out the unbroken concentration ultimately required to wring something useful out of the swirl of ideas all around us. *Supporters of open office plans might claim that they’re approximating this mix of depth and interaction by making available conference rooms that people can use as needed to dive deeper into an idea. This conceit, however, trivializes the role of deep work in innovation. These efforts are not an occasional accompaniment to inspirational chance encounters; they instead represent the bulk of the effort involved in most real breakthroughs. Excerpted from DEEP WORK by Cal Newport, published by Grand Central Publishing . Copyright © 2016 Cal Newport. Available for purchase from Barnes & Noble , Amazon , IndieBound , iBooks , Kobo

Amazon

Apple

Don’t Work Alone

If you are starting your own company, work for a , or simply don’t have budget to pay for a conference badge, read on. It’s important to attend industry events to meet customers, partners, potential hires, learn best practices, and expand your . At the very least, it’s an opportunity to meet a lot of people. In one city. At one time. Super efficient. Of course, you want to develop a good intuition about which events are worth the time so you don’t become a conference roadie. startup network Conferences typically charge thousands of dollars to register. I’ve seen Jason Calcanis astutely point this out on Twitter in reference to some of the large events that prey on startups. Startups are the ones often charged the most to attend relative to their assets. No one at a large company would complain about a $3,000 ticket. I spent the last 12 years as the 1st employee of a medical device/digital health startup that we grew from 5 to 500+, so I learned some best practices: Let’s face it, conference content can easily be found following along on Twitter or doing a quick Google search. What can’t be replaced are the personal connections. You never know who you will meet. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve flown to a city to attend an event WITHOUT registering and met great people that made the trip more than worth it. 1. Don’t assume you need to buy a badge. Do you remember some of the speakers or panels you’ve heard? The bar is low. I’ve found it effective to personally reach out to the event chair or head of content with several topic ideas that would interest their audience and fit into their agenda. Stuff that is memorable and Tweetable. Do the work for them so it’s super easy for them to say yes. 2. Speak. Oh — and generally speakers get a free conference badge. Think about how can you help the conference and staff instead of the other way around. At my last company, I wanted to attend a high profile event, but we didn’t have the budget to buy a badge. I offered to provide SWAG to the speakers — which I mostly procured for free. Conference entrance arbitrage. 3. Barter. Hustle and find out where the end-of-day conference networking is happening. Many times it’s hosted offsite or elsewhere where no badge is required. Score. 4. “Excuse me, I can’t seem to find the details of the VIP cocktail hour in my e-mail.” Many conferences want to encourage younger, exciting start-ups to attend and will provide free passes. Sell yourself to the conference organizer. From my experience, many will say yes and only request you won’t tell anyone. 5. Just ask. Other tricks of the trade: The more contacts you have in an industry, the more people you can ask nicely for a badge. Exhibitors are often given unlimited or many passes, so get to know those exhibiting. Or just find friends who are attending for only a day and can give you their badge when they leave. People may call you Julie when your name is Sarah, but just tell them the printer messed up. 6. Beg, borrow, or steal to get a badge (well, don’t steal — it’s just an expression). When your company gets larger and has a budget, pay to attend (or sponsor) to give back to the ecosystem — as my last company grew to a larger, self-sustaining company, I made sure to pay full price to attend. I also went out of my way to offer my badge to friends doing startups when I left. Paying it forward is essential. 7. GIVE BACK. Industry events can be a very efficient way to meet and develop personal relationships with great people. Just don’t be dissuaded by the price tag.

How To Replicate a $3,000 Conference Experience For Free

Throughout history, middleman and facilitators have always made the most money / provide the greatest value. No bank starts out owning assets, rather they provide a service that facilitates global trade — whether that is by M&A, sourcing investors for debt financing or otherwise they have always played the role of the middleman / facilitator. Same goes for Uber, Facebook, AirBnb and other players in the field. Neither of these companies own any physical assets, what they do is provide a service that aggregates these assets and provide a stamp of credibility through quality control. In summary, be the middleman. That is where the money / value is. is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the family. We are now and happy to opportunities. Hacker Noon @AMI accepting submissions discuss advertising &sponsorship To learn more, , , or simply, read our about page like/message us on Facebook tweet/DM @HackerNoon. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our and . Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted! latest tech stories trending tech stories

AirBnB

Throughout history, middleman and facilitators have always made the most money / provide the…

I have been in many discussions on the best way to interview and hire engineering managers. Here are my thoughts, having done this both successfully and less successfully, including some things that I have looked for in the past when being interviewed. : Be thoughtful about what you are looking for. There are people out there who are looking for the opportunity to go into management. Lots of them, in my experience. These are good people to hire, because many of them will turn out to be good, thoughtful managers. Most of the time I hired this sort of person into a senior engineering role that quickly became a tech lead role. I was explicit at hiring that we didn’t have a team to give them immediately but that I would be expecting that as the overall team grew they would move into such a role when it became available. First Now, I should be clear, this exchange requires a lot of trust on both parties, as well as the possibly unspoken assumption that they still have to prove themselves capable of doing the job once on the team. I have turned down jobs that asked me to make this bet, and I would not hold it against anyone who felt that it was too risky. But on the flip side, if you really want to grow your management from within, hiring people who both want to be eventually moving to leadership roles but are comfortable coming in as individual contributors first is pretty essential to making that work. If you want to grow management from within but don’t bother to look for people who want to grow into management roles when you’re hiring, you may end up with mostly people who just want to code, and that is not good for anyone. OK, so you’re hiring a specific management position. What do you look for? There are two camps here. The first camp is that you look for incredibly smart tech lead-level developers who may have had limited management experience and put them in the role. They will easily pass whatever technical screens you put in front of them, but hiring is a risk because they may not really be good managers. If this is the way you want to go about hiring managers, you need to spend a good deal of time focused on screening for management potential. Screening for is different than screening for . Right now, I’m going to talk about screening for potential; in part 2, I’ll talk about experience. potential experience Questions to tease out potential: Tell me about a project where you have acted as the tech lead. What was your role like, as tech lead? What were things you did that were different from the rest of the team? How did you ensure that the project was successful? What you are looking for: Someone who answers with more than just “I designed the architecture, chose the libraries, and wrote the most technically challenging pieces of the code.” They should have taken an active role in the project management, even if there was another person explicitly or implicitly in that role. They should have contributed to predicting problems with the delivery and working with the people on the team or cross-team to ensure success. When you bring a new team member onto your team, what kinds of things do you personally do as part of their onboarding? Have you ever been a mentor to a new hire or intern? What was that like, what did you learn from it? What you are looking for: Someone who is actively engaged in the work of bringing on new people, and thoughtful about making that process better. Someone who respected the work of mentoring, who isn’t just trying to shed human interactions quickly to get back to code. Tell me about some things you have done to make the process of writing or delivering code in your organization better. What you are looking for: Some strong examples of seeing process/people/systems problems and raising their hand to suggest improvements. One suggestion I have heard, but not tried, is to do a role-playing exercise with the candidate. Set up a circumstance that might happen, such as, an employee is unhappy that they did not get promoted. Provide an overview to the candidate and give the interviewer some details that may include information that the manager doesn’t necessarily know. Have a third party observe the interaction, and then at the end of the role play all three talk about what went well and didn’t. This could be an interesting tool for hiring either the experienced manager or the potential-driven manager, but I also suspect it is easy on the flip side for it to go poorly if the interviewer isn’t good at guiding the roleplay and knowing what to look for. (Credit to for this idea!) Marc Hedlund Finally, when hiring this type of candidate, you are probably going to get (and maybe even should be intentionally seeking out) someone who is going to not only manage people but drive technical decision-making. Make sure that the people who currently drive technical direction (if they exist) are aligned on that front with the candidate. If the candidate is gung-ho about functional programming and microservices and you are happy in a more conservative technical space, you may end up with someone who wants to make big technical changes that you might not agree with. The team should feel a general alignment to their technical perspective, and ideally people are excited about working for this person because they feel that they will learn something, but don’t just hire them as a manager because people are excited about their technical chops. when screening for look for signs of stepping up, caring about the people on the team, and thoughtfulness about the processes. In general you should also be looking for excellent communication skills, and everyone who interviews the person should feel pretty comfortable with the idea of working for them. Be wise to potential bias here. The best managers are often overlooked because they don’t pattern match to certain characteristics, whether they are “tall and male” or “forceful personality” or whatever. Talk to the team before the interview and give them examples of great managers who sit outside of those stereotypes to reset their stereotype bias a little bit. , Overall potential, When you mishire on potential, it tends to come from overvaluing technical skills + pattern matching on “what a leader looks like”, and the failure mode is managers who just don’t deliver coherent teams and/or can’t deliver projects effectively. Never ever hire a person you feel is overly ego-driven. One final word on this candidate: If you hire someone for potential, be prepared to train them. They are going to need help. Whether it is formal training or a lot of mentorship from you or a mix of both, no one is born knowing how to manage. I think it is worth sometimes taking a risk on people like this (I’m glad someone did that for me once!) but they will struggle if they have to do it all alone. Originally posted on elided branches

Hiring Engineering Managers: Screening For Potential

The Snap Ghost. Don’t ghost me and watch my snaps everyday Unlike many other social networks, Snapchat is special to me. It is a place for me to share things with people who I like, without fear of judgement. I directly snap pictures of my breakfast, Uber/Lyft singing videos and silly faces to a group of maybe 10 people. They are comprised of my close friends, my siblings and my stay-at-home mom friends. As more people became my Snapchat ‘friends,’ I was distracted from thinking about my long term privacy because it was so fun in the moment. Snapqueen, Halloween 2015 Over the course of time, and especially in San Francisco, people will come in and out of your life. You get used to it. There are times where you do message someone, and they never message you back. It does get annoying when you see that they are alive and well, checking in at the restaurant next to your house. Most people take note, realize these ‘ghosts’ suck and move on. On Facebook, it is considered mean to unfriend people, so you just unfollow and they are out of your newsfeed. Problem solved. You don’t have to watch their snaps, but they can watch yours. Snapchat is a different story. I didn’t notice it at first, but I started to see these ‘ghost watchers’ popping up in my Snapchat story. I wasn’t upset, but something felt troubling. You want to voyeuristically watch my snaps, but you don’t want to respond to an email or text message? Do you know I can see you watching me? Types of Ghost Watchers: The Ex-Coworker Ghoster #1: We aren’t friends because we shared an office. You weren’t even that nice to me and ghosted me when I was looking for a new job. BLOCK. The Bad Date Ghoster #2: Just because we went on two dates a year ago and you ghosted me doesn’t mean you deserve to see me and my boyfriend’s trip to Sonoma. BLOCK. The Stranger Ghoster #3: We see each other socially but have never actually had a conversation because you disappear. You just know me from my Snaps. BLOCK. So, the equivalent of ‘unfriending’ on Facebook is ‘removing a friend’ on Snapchat. It sounds a lot meaner, but according to my tech bro, it is less intense: Figuring out how to use Snapchat because it’s so damn difficult. Even if I remove them, I may just be thinking about this all wrong. DJ Khaled, an infamous snapchatter reminds us on a daily basis, “They don’t want you to [insert anything].” He’s right. No matter what social media you are on, the haters are going to hate. But at least on Snapchat, I know who my haters are and cut them out. Maybe it all does make sense, considering the Snapchat logo is a ghost. If you’re picking up what I’m putting down, recommend. If not, tell me what you think in the comments section.

Lyft

The Snapchat Dilemma

We chose Django programming framework for building web and mobile applications for a number of reasons — fitst of all, because we believe that it gives our clients the best solutions and results. Here are just 10 of the points that make Django so good. Continue reading in our blog Django was developed by an online news operation with the aim to quickly create reliable web applications using the Python programming language. The framework has templates, libraries and API designed to work together for natural growth and connectivity. In practice this means that apps built in Django may be grown with minimal costs of upgrades, changes and additions. In general, Django makes lots of things easier. Django suits projects of any size, from small to the biggest ones. Due to its scalability, it’s perfect for startups. But it also serves great for web sites with hundreds of visitors a second, such as Disqus or Washington Post. Django uses Python which was one of the most popular programming languages of 2015, and is now the most popular language for those learning to code. And the framework itself is more and more widely used, and because it’s open source, it is built and kept updated by the developers who use it. This means that you can easily find answers to your questions arising from your project created in Django/Python. A programming framework is a toolkit of components needed to create a web or mobile application. Django is a more fully featured kit than most of other frameworks, it contains everything you need to build an app. If something is missing in the kit, Django may be extended with numerous ‘app’ plugins. The packages let you add google maps, create complex permissions, or connect to stripe for payment processing. Django adheres to D.R.Y. — Don’t Repeat Yourself — philosophy. That means that the framework places a premium on getting the absolute most out of very little code. As a result, it supposes less hours to get it working, less code to break, and less to change when you need re-orientation. Django/Python runs on every platform, be it Mac, PC or Linux. Moreover, Django includes a layer between the developer and the database called an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) which makes it possible to move your whole project between most major databases by changing just 1 line of a code. Django is a big, well established web application framework that are supported by cloud providers doing their best to ensure that Django apps are easily and quickly deployed to their platform. In practice it means that once set up, your Django app be managed in a cloud with a single command from any authorized developer. Django is very well documented. This allows avoiding of hours of trial and errors or effortless implementation. Every specific release of Django is supported by all necessary documentation and code examples. On top of that, the code is all publicly available on github for direct investigation. Since we keep working in the same development environment for a long time, we are growing more and more expertise that crosses over from one our project to another. That means that applications and websites created by our team are constantly getting better, more functional, efficient and reliable. Originally published at blog.djangostars.com on January 25, 2016.

Stripe

Read My Stories

Why we use Django framework

As parents we all want to help our children, and as business people we are hard wired to find answers. In founding Gluten Free Therapeutics I did both. Every new business starts with a purpose. That purpose is often the heartbeat, the mission, the very soul of the company. However, the purpose can easily be forgotten in the daily challenges of running a business. This was brought home very recently when a friend sent me a Wall Street Journal article called “When parents start companies to cure their children”. I read the article and immediately thought, this is me! I am a parent who started a company to help my child too!’ I identified with the purpose behind the featured companies. Not long ago, a doctor contacted us to discuss our products. He was on a quest to find the right supplementation for his adult celiac child. I shared with him how I too felt helpless and was initially overwhelmed by my anxiety and even guilt over my daughter’s diagnosis. In those early days, I felt paralyzed and knew I needed to find a practical way to help. Because it was my daughter, I felt as if it was my responsibility to find a solution. I was totally surprised by his answer. “The difference between you and me,” he said, “is that you are doing something about it.” His comment was a reminder of why I founded Gluten Free Therapeutics. **How it all began**Like many parents with celiac children, I was thrown into the wild world of celiac disease when my daughter was diagnosed with the condition. This was about ten years ago and we were not familiar with the disease at all at the time. It all came as a surprise, as my daughter’s symptoms, while they would be a red flag for us now, did not suggest celiac disease. It seems crazy now that we are so knowledgeable about CD to think of how much we missed. However, ten years ago gluten free diets were not the rage they are now and celiac disease was unfamiliar to the general public. In the flurry to educate ourselves about CD we did what most people would do: we learned as much as we could about the gluten free diet and focused on how to manage her day-to-day life. Fast forward several years, and by then I was working as the COO of a rapidly growing the pharmaceutical company. Managing the research and development teams was part of my job. Despite her condition, my daughter had completed her doctorate in pathology and was working towards a PhD in immunology at a prestigious medical school. One day, she called me with a problem: it was getting harder to manage her nutritional intake with diet alone. Her nutritional profiles were not in the normal range for many of her vitamin and mineral levels, including persistently low iron stores. It concerned us that after so many years of a strictly gluten free diet, her overall health was still compromised. Diet supplementation was the obvious option, but she didn’t trust that the dietary supplements available were truly gluten free. As a highly sensitive patient, her body cannot cope with even trace amounts of gluten. As a result, she was constantly calling manufactures looking for safe, effective and above all reliable vitamins she could use. The supplements she eventually found may have been safe, but on the downside, she needed to take multiple pills each day to get all of the nutrients. Our frustration over her lack of success only grew as time went on. Finally one day, as the same subject came up in conversation once again, a light bulb went off in my head and I said “I can do that!” To my surprise, my daughter answered “I know, that is why I keep bringing it up!” From day one, I knew we could not compromise on quality or safety. This is why I opted to develop our supplements though the lens of drug development. This is a very different process from conventional supplement development and I was not sure it would work. But it did. Perfectly. We spent our first year immersed in research and massive amounts of medical information on nutrition and celiac disease. From that jungle of data, we developed , nutritional supplements designed for people with celiac disease to help them heal, restore and repair their bodies. This is the mission we still live by today. CeliVites . It is our belief that everyone with celiac disease can lead a healthy life Besides our supplement line, we also produce a reference library within our website. We write to educate and inform our readers about the many facets of celiac disease. CD is a serious and complex autoimmune disease, and knowledge is power! We have written over 100 inspiring medical articles to date. With easy access to research data, we make it our job to find the studies that our readers should know about. Our team of scientists and writers sift through hundreds of scientific studies, carefully selecting the best ones, and write about their discoveries in easy to understand articles. It is our way of giving back to the celiac community. original articles But, the GFT story is so much more than just a mother wanting to help her child. We knew many other people with CD were facing the same challenge of choosing the right supplementation. To give them a solution, we combined our expertise in science and drug development to produce high quality supplements, safe from gluten exposure and ideal to help people heal and restore their health. The story of my daughter’s health has a happy ending. She eliminated gluten, eats a well-balanced diet and takes Blood and Body health every day. It was not easy, she was ill for many years. We celebrated with champagne and gluten free brownies the day we got her perfect blood test results. We clinked our glasses with tears in our eyes and toasted to her good health. We felt an obligation to start GFT far beyond our own personal needs. We really genuinely care about our customers and the celiac community. We talk to our customers often and we are grateful for their continued support. We became sponsors of the celiac disease foundation this year to join them in supporting our celiac community. As a part of the celiac community ourselves, we are passionate about helping to improve the lives of those with this . We know we have a shared experience with them and we live the lives of our customers every day. This original article is made possible by Gluten Free Therapeutics . Our mission is to educate, inform, and provide the most effective nutritional products possible to allow those with celiac disease and serious gluten intolerance to heal their bodies.

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive January 25th, 2016

Han Solo — my journey from Google to founding Kalo

@peterljohnston
Peter Louis Johnston

Five Reasons To Have A Sales Job While In University

@marcminicucci
Marc Minicucci

What my 70 Year Old Neighbour Taught me About Relationships & Investment Banking

@josh.emberson
Josh Emberson

42 Startups Changing the World

@kbrsh
Kabir Shah

Five tools to make you a small business marketing genius.

@HelenSteemson
Helen Steemson

A thought on why VC’s invest in experienced founders

@DavidVandegrift
David Vandegrift

How to Build a [Strong and Diverse] Winning Team

@lwang7
Lisa Wang

The Entrepreneurial life cycle

@naomi_48697
The Profit Margin

Don’t Work Alone

@GrandCentralPub
Grand Central Publishing

How To Replicate a $3,000 Conference Experience For Free

@StuartBlitz
Stuart Blitz

Throughout history, middleman and facilitators have always made the most money / provide the…

@jiantastic
Wei Jian Wong

Hiring Engineering Managers: Screening For Potential

@skamille
Camille Fournier

The Snapchat Dilemma

@hautehackr
Melissa Eisenberg

Why we use Django framework

@djangostars
Django Stars

A mother’s love led to a cause based business

@lreynolds
Leigh Reynolds

HackerNoon Tech Stories Archive January 25th, 2016

@peterljohnstonPeter Louis Johnston

@marcminicucciMarc Minicucci

@josh.embersonJosh Emberson

@kbrshKabir Shah

@HelenSteemsonHelen Steemson

@DavidVandegriftDavid Vandegrift

@lwang7Lisa Wang

@naomi_48697The Profit Margin

@GrandCentralPubGrand Central Publishing

@StuartBlitzStuart Blitz

@jiantasticWei Jian Wong

@skamilleCamille Fournier

@hautehackrMelissa Eisenberg

@djangostarsDjango Stars

@lreynoldsLeigh Reynolds