Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

Unveiling the Secret to Finding the Perfect VP for Your Business!

19 Oct 2023 · 1 min

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0:52

This is a short transcript excerpt of a YouTube discussion (speaker: Jason M. Lemkin) about hiring Vice Presidents for startups. Lemkin notes there are more experienced VPs available now, suggests sourcing a pool of candidates (e.g., 20–30) to find one great hire, and warns to trust an internal negative intuition about a candidate because hiring errors often repeat at later growth stages when new management levels are required.

Chapters

Are more. The good news is today there are more great VPs out there than ever before. Right? I mean Zoom Infos directors will become VPs out. You hope they all stay. But it will spawn 20 or 30 VPs of sales and they will. Some of them will talk to you. Right? There's more veterans. Yeah. So it's not impossible to find 20 or 30 that will talk to you and then find one great one. And then to Henry's point, if then you meet your candidate and something in your back your mind says they're not great. They're not. There is no chance they're great. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Especially if everyone else likes them. That voice never gets more quiet, it only gets louder. Now, interesting question as what I've learned is that often that error repeats itself at the next stage. Then maybe you get to 30 million like we talked about and you need a new level of management and you don't know what that level of management work. Did you solve it after the first set of management or did the error repeat itself? Yeah, no, that's a great question.