Bill Gallagher shares a hiring mistake at his startup Documentica: bringing in people with scaling experience from Microsoft who couldn't execute hands-on work. He explains why the early Bethesda team struggled and what he learned about hiring for go-to-market and global expansion.
I just came from Microsoft, so I had kind of hired actually the wrong team. I had hired a lot of people who were really good at scaling and less maybe at doing things. You know, when I started Documentica, we were in Bethesda based Regis, shared office, a couple of desks, a couple of people. I had no clue how to do that. Now luckily there were a couple of people who knew how to do things with like just duct tape and shoestring. Right. But I, I didn't. But I did know how to hire people that could kind of scale. So I hired early on hired a real product marketing manager and that's I think one of those things that in a marketing team usually isn't needed until you get 4 or 5, 6, 7 million. Thinking about product and in a strategic way. What is our go to market model really? When you think of partnerships, when you think about the licensing structure, when you think about global expansion and how you have to do business in different parts of the world or different market segments just in completely different ways. So those are things that you don't have to do to get to 4 or 5 million in revenue.
