The Controversial First Role to Hire After Your “A Round” | Hacker News Reader

The Controversial First Role to Hire After Your “A Round”

bothsidesofthetable.com

64 pointsarash_milani37 comments

I'd say if you find an office manager / administrative type that fits all of the criteria mentioned you should pick that person up immediately as part of your first 5 hires. A person with those people skills and willingness to do the minutiae across the board is a force multiplier for everyone else on the team. The difficulty is finding someone with all of the qualities listed in the article.

If you can find a person with all these qualities then hire them whenever you come across them. I have met a lot of admin people over the years and I have yet to come across one - I am sure they exist, but they don't interact with the likes of me.

As a founder with ADD, I'd sell my soul for one. However, great organizers are rare.

The list of priorities at the top is just mind blowing. 10-20 years ago you would invert it. Top priority would be a super-extroverted business type with sales/marketing experience. Any tech talent on the team at all would be optional, and the rest of the team makeup would be heavily tilted toward sales.

E.g. in dot.com 1.0 it was common for a 100% MBA and sales team to get funded and then outsource all tech. I saw this happening as recently as 2008-2009.

What an unbelievable change in the industry...

It's largely because the market decided that having actual technology was pretty important for a tech company and rewarded those companies that did. Their founders got rich and now get to decide where that money goes; the MBA types who outsourced their development went bankrupt and don't get to play in the next round.

Ah, the good ol' "You can't change that tech decision because we already promised them a perpetual motion machine" gag.

I see this typically in enterprise technology markets because sales relationships are a prerequisite for success. The idea of a long term growth strategy with strong technicals scaling later on with b2b sales is popular but most businesses outside tech view technology as something like a sales channel rather than an integral part of the business development process.

And yet, this is often the lowest paid position at a startup. Most important hire. Lowest paid. Let that sink in.

People talk about how market rates are fair, and it makes sense to stick to them because you can always hire someone else. But you don't get great people in key positions by paying them less than your other employees.

Can we get a less linkbaity title on this?

or less 'winky' faces in the article

No. ;)

This was our first hire, full stop. Before the seed round closed, and a long long time before the A.

But this is obvious! Hiring admin assistant is the first thing to help the business. Where is the controversy there?

This isn't directed solely at you, but it's extremely annoying to hear someone make a great argument for something, only to hear someone else put them down by saying something like "But it's so obvious! Why are you wasting your time and mine by writing this?"

Just because it's obvious to you, doesn't mean it's obvious to everyone else.

Just because it's obvious to you, doesn't mean it's not worth talking about.

In this case, I've seen plenty of startups postpone hiring any admins until 15-20+ headcount, in the interests of cutting costs to the bone and being scrappy. Clearly to these people, the author's recommendation is not obvious at all.

If you think that someone's advice is bad and want to call them out on it, go ahead. If you think that someone's advice is so obvious that it's not useful, then just ignore them or downvote them. But telling someone on a message board to shut up because you agree with everything they said, just comes across as both rude and not useful in any way.

But I was not telling anyone to shut up. I just been telling "a great idea, and quite obvious first thing to do — why it is controversial?" In no way it follows from my words that this post is redundant or should not be posted; in fact, I upvoted it.

Some (perhaps most) good ideas are obvious. Still worth repeating them.

Sorry if I misinterpreted your post. Glad to hear that we're on the same page.

Actually you didn't say "why is it controversial" - you said "where is the controversy", implying that it isn't controversial at all.

For me, it wasn't. But, as other fellow HN users have already enlightened me, apparently there exists some cult of heroic founders who sleep for 2 hours per day and doing everything themselves.

I wouldn't invest in that.

The myth of the heroic founder/CEO, staying up all day and all night, never spending a dime, pulling everything together, solving all problems, fueled by a limitless reserve of energy and a superhuman ability to get by on 2 hours of sleep every week, is potent. It's also ingrained in a lot of people's heads.

What are the (potentially toxic) implications of this myth? First, that the founder/CEO isn't a "true founder" unless he or she is entirely self-sufficient. Second, that hiring an office manager or personal admin early on signals weakness -- that it's the founder being precious or high maintenance. Unheroic.

You'd be surprised at how pervasive the myth is, and how many founders are either too self-conscious or too caught up in the scramble to even consider the benefits of hiring for this role. A solid office manager/admin is a really strong hire, and if anything, hiring one should signal maturity. It shows that the CEO knows how to segment the tasks into those he/she should be focused on, and those he/she should be delegating. It shows that the CEO knows how to value his/her time and energy appropriately.

This may seem obvious to many, but certainly not to all.

I am truly surprised.

The founder myth is that anything you can do you should do, and admitting otherwise is weakness.

Been there. Self-destructive. Bad idea.

It may be obvious to you but as someone currently working on launching their own company with a team of engineers/designer this was not on our roadmap at all as our first outside hires.

It would be during the first few months of operations :)

I think the point of the article is that you shouldn't wait till it is a problem, you should address it right away. Controversial may not be the right word, maybe "overlooked" is better to describe it?

I agree with you on the wording. "Overlooked" is a better word for this hire. "Controversial" would be hiring, I dunno, a VP of Sales before the product is built. (Not that that ever stopped anyone in the '90s, but hey.)

No. Most people would advising avoiding an office manager for awhile. The idea is that the company should only be doing important things and important things are worth doing by the key people.

That seems a pretty romantic view of running a business. An office manager provides leverage for key people to focus on doing their MOST important things, without spending as much time on the operational realities of running a company.

Office managers typically help with a mix of accounting, HR, coordination, and dozens of other operational tasks. In many cases doing a better job than key people who were overloaded with them before.

While I suspect that Suster is making an exaggerated conclusion to drive page views, it doesn't sound that off the mark to me. After raising an A round, you're going to want your key people spending as much time as possible on scaling the core business. An office manager is a great way to help them do that.

What typically happens is two-fold: the person is on staff and so make-work is created to keep the person busy. And important things formally handled by the CEO, like invoicing, get shifted to the manager.

> "what typically happens is..."

This is a very broad conclusion about what is typical. From where are you drawing this statement?

Also, why shouldn't the office manager be put in charge of important things? They're a paid employee with specific skills.

Lots of experience and a bit of intuition.

If the office/ops mgr can work on customer or product development, that's a different story.

All right, but who will be doing "less important" and perhaps boring things, which can lead to many problems in the future in case of neglecting them?

I got bitten by this pretty badly. But perhaps bureaucratic load in Europe is much harder than in the US. And for me, it was never a question of need — the need for designated operations/administration employee was obvious from day 1 after incorporation, I just thought I can't afford it.

Well, I was wrong. I couldn't afford not having such a person. Some people say the same about lawyers.

What are some examples of less important things that left undone/underdone can lead to many problems? (I'm not sure that something that can compromise your business can be considered "less important")

In practice, "only be doing important things" is a completely unrealistic principle. Administrative tasks and bureaucracy are caused by the mere existence of a business, so having someone that takes care of them is even more urgent than hiring productive employees and doing actual work. Administrative personnel should be treated as a sunken cost: one generic secretary allows many other employees, including the "key people" who would otherwise need to solve problems, to work without trouble and without non-business distractions.

What are some examples of such unimportant tasks that must get done?

Taxes, payroll, rent, buying all kinds of supplies, contracting and directing plumbers and the like, answering the phone, going to the bank and the post office, discussing invoices, daily accounting... by the way, I didn't say they are "unimportant" tasks: they are merely not profitable ones.

Completely agree. It took us to 15 people before we hired an Office Manager. Silly in hindsight, but not obvious at all, and we debated it quite a bit.

I believe an even scrappier idea is to start with a 'virtual assistant', like Zirtual, where you can start out with a small commitment and then ramp up as needed. When you need the full-time in-office admin, then you can go hire.

https://www.zirtual.com/plans-pricing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com