Category: Startups

Open salaries considered useful?

Buffer, the social sharing platform, released a blog post today detailing their employees’ pay scale and specific salaries. The approach of open salaries is very interesting to me, but I’m wondering about the public aspects of releasing it online.

Transparent vs. Public

In the article, Joel (Buffer’s CEO) refers to transparency as one of their core company values (which they’d previously released online as well). Transparency as a company value sounds noble, however reading their definition in the above link, I am feeling the real meaning is honesty instead.

I am of the opinion that not everything that goes on in the company needs to be shared as a default. I’m not talking about hiding or misleading information, rather not proactively sharing it. Mark Suster wrote a fantastic post on the topic of “How open should a startup CEO be with employees“, and it covers some instances where complete transparency might be a detriment.

Please remember that we’re all wired different to accept uncertainty, risk & stress. And remember the reason that most people aren’t startup CEOs is that deep down while they might want your job theoretically most of them don’t actually want the kind of life and pressures that come with your job.
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Getting Shit Done

Another startup culture bash was making the rounds, this time about a common term in the startup world – “getting shit done”, and what a terrible mentality it is to have. Disclaimer – I know the author personally, as him and I were at the same 500startups batch this summer, and I also consider him a good friend. But I think he’s completely off on this one.

What does “getting shit done” mean?

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Nobody cares what “Growth Hacking” means to marketers

Everybody and their grandma is now a “Growth Hacker”, a term originally coined to describe marketers who use unconventional approaches and measure their effectiveness with analytics instead of gut feelings. In fact, apparently everyone who uses multiple marketing channels is now a “growth hacker”.

As someone who is on the other side of the table, looking to hire someone to drive growth to his business, I have a newsflash for you – nobody cares about the exact classification and semantics of your title.

What Growth Hacking Means To Startups

Startups are designed for growth. Not every company needs to grow fast – most businesses don’t. Startups use technology to achieve scale rapidly – that is the most common definition of what a startup is.

As such, traditional marketing – while very important and required, is typically not enough. That means that in order for a startup to achieve its goals, a different distribution approach is often required. Enter, Growth Hacking.

As such, growth hacking is not

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Founder’s perspective on AngelList syndicates

AngelList recently launched a new feature called syndicates. In simple terms, it allows investors to get behind other investors and invest together as a group (termed a syndicate). The investor who facilitated the deal takes a carry of 15% (interest over a positive return – such as an exit or IPO) – not unlike VCs. In fact, this structure effectively turns angels into fund managers.

Many investors already chimed in, such as Jason Calacanis (The great venture capital rotation), as a syndicate “leader”, and Hunter Walk (Angel vs. Angel), Fred Wilson (Leading vs. Following) and Mark Suster (Is it a big deal?) as VCs. But what does it mean for startup founders?

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An Accent Can Be An Advantage

A recent interview with Ycombintator’s Paul Graham on Inc. created somewhat of a backlash online for his comments on using startup founders’ accent as a filtering criteria for future success.

(You should click over to the original tweet to see the long discussion thread that ensued)

The original quote was:

One quality that’s a really bad indication is a CEO with a strong foreign accent. I’m not sure why. It could be that there are a bunch of subtle things entrepreneurs have to communicate and can’t if you have a strong accent. Or, it could be that anyone with half a brain would realize you’re going to be more successful if you speak idiomatic English, so they must just be clueless if they haven’t gotten rid of their strong accent. I just know it’s a strong pattern we’ve seen.

(Emphasis mine)

Paul makes two points:
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