As a hiring manager for many high growth companies, I have conducted thousands of interviews. I consider it one of the most essential parts of my job since having the right people on the team is the fastest way to achieve your company’s desired outcomes. One of the things I am most protective of is my team’s time. They are making the magic happen and I want to make sure they maximize their productivity. While hiring is essential to the…
One of my responsibilities at Toast is to lead the internal teams responsible for enabling each of our Customer Success (CS) new hires. Given that we are hiring 50+ CS people a month – a majority of whom are in one of three roles – this is a key function for Toast as those employees will be the “names and faces” of Toast to our customers, interacting with them on a daily basis and will have a true impact on…
Buying new software is fun! I know a few of you just shuddered at that statement, but trust me, when done right, it really can be. Read on to see how. Whether it is to solving a challenging problem for your team, enabling scale, or just freeing up your team members’ time to drive more value-add tasks, the benefits of a new system can really impact your team and the business. However, the current process of vendor and tool selection…
I started at the Boston-based restaurant technology platform company/rocketship Toast, Inc., this month and was met with an initial surprise – one of the first things my boss told me was to not try to accomplish anything substantial any thing in the first 30 days!! As a dyed-in-the-wool member of the GSD team, I was a bit uncomfortable initially. What do you mean don’t do anything? Didn’t you hire me to get stuff done? As we explored what she meant,…
In a discussion I had with a CEO recently, he asked me about how I would build culture of the team, and the organization. “What’s your vision for what great culture should be, and how do we attain that?” In my Linked In profile, I state my business values immediately – “Put the Customer first. Deliver excellence. Value your people. Do what you say. Together we succeed.” These values are how I manage my work life and I hold my…
Renewals is a primary SaaS metric for good reason – it means your customer is continuing to recognize value from your product and service and is willing to continue to pay for it. Most understand that it is expensive to obtain a new customer – lead acquisition, sales expenses, and time and opportunity costs add up quickly. And after your team/company has done the expensive work of acquiring a customer, you certainly don’t want to waste that time and effort. That’s…
Having been through 4 different venture-backed, high-growth situations, there are a large number of lessons that I have learned (sometimes the hard way!). Here are five of them, in no particular order. Be disciplined in your hiring – Just about everyone acknowledges that hiring is the most important thing that you can do as a leader. One of the keys to success I have found is to make sure your internal team is coordinated and clear on their responsibilities, hiring…
Because I thought it was an appropriate lens through which to view my experiences throughout my tech career. Over the course of my adventures through the Boston technology scene, I have had an amazing opportunity to be part of four separate liquidity events – two IPOs (Brightcove and Eprise), and two buyouts (Endeca by Oracle, and most recently, Applause by Vista Equity Partners). At each of these, I have joined as employee somewhere between 75 to 125, and helped them grow…
I have been to lots of conferences – some good, some bad, most mindnumbingly long – but none great. That is until I went to Drift‘s Hypergrowth ’17 conference last week. Scheduled the day before Hubspot’s huge Inbound conference, Drift’s Hypergrowth17 conference attracted over 1,400 people – a pretty remarkable number given it was the first year of the conference. What made it fantastic was it’s balance. Sure, the conference had a Marketing theme – after all that is what…
Now that we have the obligatory “Hello World!” post out of the way, we can get down to business! I have created this site as a way for me to document the many things I have learned over years in the tech space, as well as share my insights and perspectives. Hopefully you will find it informative and useful and I look forward to sharing with you!