Countless psychology studies have proven that we tend to like people who look and/or think like us. Peter Salovey, Dean of Yale College and a Professor of Psychology, taught my “Introduction to Psychology” class in college. On the first day of class, he asked, “Do you want to know whom you are going to...
[Continue Reading]Lessons from Facebook on Recruiting Elite Engineers
Following is a guest post from ff Venture Capital winter intern Max Segan, a Colgate senior majoring in computer science, who is starting at Facebook this summer as a software engineer. From our perspective, Facebook is both our friend (training hundreds of talented future entrepreneurs) and enemy (competing with our portfolio companies for top talent...
[Continue Reading]Best Job Boards for Recruiting Startup Engineers
One of our portfolio companies asked me this week, “Do you all have a list of job boards your portfolio companies have had great success with in recruiting high quality engineers?” The unemployment rate for quality computer scientists/engineers in the major cities right now is zero; everyone who’s not pursuing his/her own startup can easily...
[Continue Reading]Valuing Startup Employee Options
This is the third of three blog posts on financial modeling for startups. The first was on best practices in building financial models, and the second was a template financial model for a startup. I’ve often found it helpful to have on hand a simple model showing the impact of each financing stages on all...
[Continue Reading]How to ask your board for introductions
Venture capitalists and your other board members want to help you, and in fact are paid to help you. As T.A. McCann suggests, you want your VCs ideally to not just make an introduction, but as appropriate, help you close the deal. However, without some guidance from you, your board/VCs cannot provide you with maximum...
[Continue Reading]Underleveraged talent pool: the unemployed and underemployed
Lately, I have been thinking about the unemployed and underemployed as a pool of talent. I’d argue they are one of the most undertapped economic segments. Of the global working population, 6.3% is unemployed. In the US, the long-term unemployed are better educated, older, and more likely to be professional workers than the mean unemployed...
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