January 2013 Data Summit
A large part of my role at Union Square Ventures is to work with our 50+ portfolio companies to make sure they are getting the resources they need. Through the USV Network and Summits, I’ve found a common theme among CEOs, data scientists, community managers, HR, marketing, business development, legal, engineering and more: they all want advice on scaling their organization.
- When should you bring on someone to manage People and HR?
- What channels work best for recruiting?
- How do you manage employee performance over time?
- What metrics do you use to gauge the health of your organization?
- How do you communicate bad news to your team?
From Etsy to Kitchensurfing, Foursquare to CircleUp, we have companies that range in size from 10 – 1000+ team members. There are different pain points companies face when growing from 10 to 30, 30 to 50, 50 to 75, 75 to 100+.
I’ve seen patterns in a few of our organizations going from 15 to 50 that lead me to believe that preempting problems with best practices can help companies overcome organizational challenges faster or bypass them altogether.
I plan to share stories and best practices here in an effort to distribute what we’ve learned. I also hope to learn more about challenges startups face outside of the USV network.
In the coming weeks, I’ll cover organizational topics that fall into the following categories:
- Setting the foundation for a healthy organization
- Creating culture
- Attracting talent
- Evaluating potential hires
- Onboarding new team members
- Management
- Part-time employees, consultants and interns
- Team structures
At USV, we share stories from our network to kickstart a conversation on a given topic. I hope to create that same back and forth here. If you have questions in these areas or have stories to add, please add to the comments, share on Twitter @br_ttany or ask through this blog.