How to build a commercial team
Gil Dibner

Because Angular typically invests really early (day zero) into highly technical teams, we’re often party to very early conversations with founders on how to go about building a commercial team. Founders, trying to gradually evolve from founder-led everything to a more scalable setup with some imported DNA and skillsets, are understandably worried about the costs and risks of bringing on new people, but also highly motivated to do so. The right early hires and some evidence that a team is scaling beyond the first few pirates can go a long way towards driving real business growth as well as the perception from follow-on investors that a company is going places.

Perhaps because we are so consistent in the types of teams we back, the menu of choices they face as they scale is strikingly consistent across companies. Companies rarely have the resources (or opportunity) to hire all the functions they conceivably could, so they end up facing tough questions:

• Do we focus on scaling up the marketing operation or the sales operation?

• Do we hire strategists or hands-on executors?

• Do we hire senior or junior? C-level? VP-level? Head of? Director?

• Do we hire someone who has “done it before” or someone “hungry to prove they can do it?”

• Do we hire domain experts who know our GTM motion cold? Or do we hire highly motivated all-around athletes who can evolve with us as we figure it out?

What’s also striking is the highly opinionated approach that most people take in these conversations. Founders typically seek advice from other founders or operators (or even, gasp, other VCs) and they often get some pretty pointed advice:

• “Company XYZ did it this way, so do it that way.”

• “You should hire this guy I know.”

• “You will never attract a high-quality C-level person so don’t look for one.”

• “You need to hire a C-level person to add the right skill set to the team.”

You get the idea.

The right stuff. My view increasingly is that while these early commercial team hires are probably the most important decisions a founding team will make, there is no single “right” way to go about this. Every company is a unique mix of existing team personalities and DNA, innovation and invention, borrowing from pre-existing playbooks, risk and reward, and potential for personal growth. Encouraging founders to believe that the answer can be knowable by an outsider is — I think — simply to lead them astray.

What advice I can offer is this:

• A person’s entrepreneurial DNA matters more than their previous titles, previous successes, or experience. This DNA consists of personal qualities, motivations, experiences, network, and values — all of which are important.

• The responsibility of a founding team making critical early hiring decisions is to try to get this DNA mix right on a company-wide level. Each new hire slightly changes the mix and, therefore, changes the mix you are hiring the next person into. It’s ever-changing.

• The good news is that there are many formulas for success — but none of them can be known in advance of actually meeting and assessing candidates and thinking about how they can help with specific business objectives.

• Hire for the next 18 months of milestones with an eye to how the person can fit into your broader 5-year plan.

• Hire ambitiously and decisively, and understand that firing decisively is equally important. Your own confidence that you will be able to dismiss the person if it’s not working out should free you to take some smart risks in making hires.

• Think very carefully about comp. What sort of compensation would the people you want (in terms of DNA) be motivated by?

• Think not just about people and roles but also about organizational goals and capabilities. Who is doing what today? What is being done sub-optimally? Are titles and roles interfering with getting things done in the best way possible?

• Given all of this, the best practice in my mind is probably to map out the org chart you imagine you will need over the next 24 months, map your existing team against that org chart, and write up job specs for all the critical roles you might conceivably hire over the next 24 months. That’s probably 3–5x the number of roles that you might actually want to hire in the immediate term, but it allows you to widen your net and experience some serendipity as you meet candidates. Perhaps you suspect you need a VP Marketing, but you end up meeting a great head of content who can think strategically and has great entrepreneurial DNA for your org. She might be a better hire than a “VP Marketing” with an inferior DNA match. Allow yourself to be positively surprised by the people you meet.

In this market especially, a lot of very good people may suddenly become dislodged and open for new opportunities. Be flexible and ambitious as you think about hiring — but focus on the deeper DNA you are bringing into the organization. There is no single “right” hire or pre-ordained hiring strategy — there is just the right DNA — and you should create as many options to bring that DNA into your organization as possible.

Good luck.

EVENTS

Jun 22 / The Importance of Culture and Values As You Scale a Business
Oren Kaniel, Co-Founder & CEO, AppsFlyer

Sep 7 / The Evolution of Collibra’s Product Positioning & How They Created a Category
Stan Christiaens, Co-Founder & Chief Data Citizen, Collibra

FROM THE BLOG

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Leaving users feeling empowered and energized, rather than managed and disconnected.

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Success Can be About Less Than You Think
Don’t fall victim to unfocused ambition.

EUROPE & ISRAEL FUNDING NEWS

Sweden/Financial Services. Juni raised $206M for its financial services platform for e-commerce businesses.
Israel/DevOps. Vayyar closed $108M for its mobile 4D imaging sensors for detecting breast cancer.
UK/SME Finance. Codat raised $100M for its SMB financial data platform used to help companies gain insights into their customer base.
France/Ecommerce. nfinite raised $100M for its cloud AI-based 3D visualisation software for product merchandising.
Israel/Security. Perimeter 81 raised $100M for its Security Service Edge and Zero Trust Network Access solutions.
Spain/Fashion Materials. Recover raised $100M for its recyclable cotton material used in the textiles and the apparel industry.
UK/Financial API. Bud raised $80M for its open banking API to help financial companies to access and make sense of messy financial data.
Israel/SW Development. Elementor raised $50M for its WordPress page builder platform.
UK/Health Software. Peptone raised $40M for its AI-based protein analysis platform.
France/SW Development. Maze raised $40M for its cloud-based usability and remote testing solutions to help software product research.
UK/Security. CybSafe raised $28M for its cloud-based threat intelligence platform.
UK/Health Software. Relation Therapeutics raised $25M for its drug discovery platform using active-graph machine learning (ML) combined with single-cell analysis and deep clinical insights.
Austria/SW Development. Stellate (previous GraphCDN) raised $25M to build a global CDN network based on GraphQL.
France/Data Tooling. Castor raised $25M for its cloud-based collaborative data discovery tool for companies.
UK/Marketing. Papercup raised $20M for its AI-enabled video translation platform.
France/Financial Services. Defacto raised $15.5M for its API cloud-based solution for invoice financing.
France/Crypto Accounting. Cryptio raised $10M for its back-office platform for crypto management.

WORTH READING

ENTERPRISE/TECH NEWS

Is AI already alive? Google has suspended an engineer after he said the AI chatbot he was working on has become sentient. “If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” Lemoine told the Washington Post. The engineer compiled a transcript of the conversations, in which at one point he asks the AI system what it’s afraid of.

How smarter AI will change creativity. The Economist has a solid summary of foundational AI models. This is the notion that high-performance, complex neural network models (e.g Google or OpenAI) will be the baseline building blocks of many future AI applications. There are risks, of course: of the concentration of power, challenges of inclusion and problems of access.

Another crypto blow. Celsius Network, a significant player in crypto lending, announced on Sunday that they have frozen withdrawals because of “extreme market conditions”. Celsius Network offers interest-bearing products to customers who deposit their cryptocurrencies with the company, and lends out crypto currencies to earn a return.

HOW TO STARTUP

Lessons from the operating seat. Sam Gerstenzang, Co-Founder of Umbrella and ex-a16z, shares highlights from his time at Stripe. “Operating well is a state, not an outcome. Peak performance doesn’t mean everything is working all the time — it’s a constant process of tweaking, iterating, tuning. And good operating doesn’t ever feel smooth to the folks on the inside — because that’s a moment to invest in expansion. It’s dynamic, adaptive, stressful, and fun.”

HOW TO VENTURE

Startup boards during a downturn. A terrific Strictly VC podcast episode with Brad Feld discusses building effective boards and why they are especially important when times are tough.

PORTFOLIO NEWS

Vault Platform’s CEO, Neta Meidav, was selected as one of London’s 25 most impressive and successful founders in the compliance space.

Levity’s CTO, Thilo Huellmann, discussed using no-code AI for workflow automation.

Aspecto’s CTO, Michael Haberman, will be leading a talk at StatsCraft on trace-based testing with OpenTelemetry. on July 7th. Register here to join live in Tel Aviv.

Januar selected Tuum as its core banking platform to power its pan-European goals.