article thumbnail

Hiring Developers Before Product/Market Fit?

SoCal CTO

Using my StartupRoar as a radar, I came across a great post by Gabriel Weinberg Do you really need a full-time hire for that? Hiring seems to be the preferred use of seed funds (by investors and founders), whereas I'd prefer a focus on customer acquisition. The startup founder is definitely not ready to hire a CTO.

CTO Hire 205
article thumbnail

The Audacious Plan to Make Electricity as Easy as WiFi

Both Sides of the Table

As I’ve written about recently, at Upfront Ventures we started talking a couple of years ago about wanting to fund stuff with more meaning. I think this is a combination of being realists as venture capitalists that outsized returns in our funds must come from taking on bigger, more impactful projects that can move markets.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

How Rolebot Wants To Eliminate The Resume, With Shane Bernstein

socalTECH

Anyone who hires anyone, or has ever looked for a jobs knows how important a resume is. The team is myself and my co-founder, Alex Mostafi, our CTO, and we also have a sales director and director of engineering up north in San Francisco. So what's the status of the company, and what kind of funding have you received?

Sites 240
article thumbnail

How Frost Venture Partners Is Incubating The Big Data Future

socalTECH

We now have seven companies, and have our own venture fund as well, and we'll be doing four or five for the next few years. We have our own small seed fund, which we trigger to fund that company and hire a team, a CEO and a CTO. It's been great. Why is Big Data taking off, and why the interest in this area?

Incubator 208
article thumbnail

How Chinese Startup Tradesparq Is Looking To Grow In SoCal

socalTECH

We''ll mostly be doing enterprise sales here, but also looking at the technology and design front, hiring better talent, taking design to a new level than maybe what we are in China. Michael Kleist: We''re seed funded, and have already raised money from twelve investors. Our CTO is mainland Chinese, but was educated here.

article thumbnail

Top 40 Startup Posts for August 2010

SoCal CTO

August was a slow month in terms of traffic and I was away for a lot of the month, but there were some really great posts at the intersection of startups, technology, product and being a Startup CTO. While I agree that many VCs are crummy seed investors, I think there are some that are excellent seed investors. The Dry Run.

Startup 191
article thumbnail

Frank Addantes FounderBlog: Startup 5.0 – I’m just going to chill out for a bit… (OK, for a month…)

Frank Addante

. – Digital Messaging Infrastructure Company (incubated by Addante and Associates, LLC) Age: 25 - 29 (present) Time Period: 2002 - present My Role: Founder High Point: TBD Here is a summary of my experiences to-date with StrongMail: 1. Venture Capital Funding 7. First-time Sequoia CEO Insecurity 10. Relaxing 2.

Startup 40