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Comment by capkutay | Hacker News Reader

I think its more important to consider who startups should NOT hire and give large 'management' roles to. Namely middle managers who come from large bureaucratic, declining public companies.

they bring in all the baggage that startups are supposedly supposed to operate without.

of course there are exceptions (the individual is creative, very high IQ etc)...but if your sole reason for hiring them is 'oh they were the senior director of x at [fortune 500 company]'...just no.

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Funny thing about "declining companies", some of these will see more money in their bad times than the sexiest startups in their heyday. It's cruel, but true.

I wouldn't look down on a manager who comes from such a company; they bring a different set of experience that a startup has not gotten to yet. I also think having access to relatively more money allows these managers to develop different kinds of skills.

There's a stage in a startup's growth when that different set of experience is valuable, and at other stages it's often harmful.

I.e. the experience of a manager coming from a 500 person organization is valuable when the startup is scaling to 100 people and is building the structures and processes required for those 100 (and later on 200 and more) to work efficiently; there's a lot of organizational know-how and perspective that would be useful to take into account. The same experience/perspective from the same person are not that valuable and potentially wrong/misleading if you're currently scaling from 10 people to 20.

This assumes that the middle manager knows what they are doing. Sadly in my case I haven't been lucky enough to get someone who understands the job, nevermind the process and politics which has just resulted in a lot of firefighting, inconsistent policies, and then being blamed when we don't know what the policies actually are. No matter where you are having the right people for the actual problems seems to be the correct plan of action.

I think you're losing out. The types of middle/upper management that look to startups from the enterprise have seen how to operate their part of the business at scale, even if it did mean a lot of meetings and red tape, and they are usually looking to work in a startup environment for the challenge and the ability to "make a change."

They might not be a good fit at the very beginning of the business, but they're probably essential post-funding.

> startups should NOT hire and give large 'management' roles to. Namely middle managers who come from large bureaucratic, declining public companies.

Couldn't agree more, and the worst part is that they're unable to adapt and drink the "big company" kool aid.

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