Paige Finn DohertyFounding Partner, Behind Genius · Founding Partner at Behind Genius Ventures

what is one of the most useful tips for hiring?

23 Dec 2023 · 1 min

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In a brief interview, Speaker B advises early-stage founders on hiring strategy. They argue that hiring specialists is ineffective and recommend focusing on execution‑focused generalists who can adapt quickly. The first critical hire after achieving product‑market fit is a demand‑generation generalist, followed by a marketing‑operations specialist. Additionally, founders should bring on a chief of staff early to handle operational grunt work and a strong finance professional who can use data to guide growth. The overall message emphasizes hiring versatile talent at the right stage to avoid wasteful spending and to support scaling.

Chapters

You said you should have hired marketing ops. Is there any other positions that you wish you would have hired earlier for?
Hiring specialists is useless. Hire generalists, super generalists, execution-focused, who can figure things out and pivot on the fly. That's the kind of people you want. One of the first people you need to hire, like a demand gen person, once you have product market fit, that is, because investing in growth without product market fit is throwing fuel on, like it's literally burning money because customers are going to churn. Mm-hmm. And so once you have product market fit, hire a demand gen person, a demand gen generalist who is execution focused, and hire a marketing operations person. As a founder, at some point early on, you need a chief of staff that can take off all these grunt work things off your plate and hire a really good finance person who can help you realize the future with data.