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Comment by nickfromseattle

2 years ago

I met the CEO of a startup a local Hacker News meetup.

I joined his company as employee #8 in a (non-technical) role I wasn't qualified for, in an industry I didn't know existed, leveraging a technology I knew nothing about. I didn't have any accomplishments but a few failed startups, but he thought the hustle I demonstrated was all I needed to be successful in the role he was hiring for.

Fortunately he was right.

1. We scaled to 200 employees in 4 years bootstrapped.

2. I got to work on problems you only get access to 15 - 20 years into your career

3. Very cross functional role working on sales, biz dev, product, legal, support.

4. Raised a few rounds and got acquired for a lot of $.

5. The company was acquired 6 years after I left, but I had 10 year options that had less than 6 months left before the expiration date.

The company experienced a lot of growing pains around year 3/4 that caused me to leave (along with some mistakes I made along the way), but I only look back at the experience with fondness.

Absolutely incredible experience.

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nickfromseattle

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sarah_eu  2 years ago

What's a problem you get only after 15 years? Lower back pain? I've never heard of interesting problems being gate-kept by years of experience. PhDs have the best share of current interesting problems.

  • nickfromseattle  2 years ago

    Full lifecycle integration of our technology into F500 companies to deliver cloud services to their end-customers. Think Rackspace, GoDaddy, Sprint, Comcast, AT&T and two dozen of their peers across the EU and APAC.

    The average sales cycle was 9-18 months, and the average GTM was ~9 months. Technically I was in a partnerships role and I was supposed to work with our dept heads to align with our partner's dept heads for sales, support, product, legal, etc.

    But because I joined earlier than all of our department heads and worked with the CEO to develop the program, was closer to the requirements, and they weren't KPI'd on these partnerships / had their own problems, they were happy to let me do most of the work.

    I was 26 when I joined and the folks I worked with were 10 - 25 years older. I pitched SVPs, negotiated legal agreements, wrote API integration specs, did on-sites, repped us at industry conferences, product managed packages, trained sales and support teams, etc.