Skip to main content

Neo’s Ali Partovi on best practices for hiring early-stage startup engineers

On day one of TechCrunch’s Early Stage virtual conference, Ali Partovi joined us to discuss best practices for startups looking to hire engineers.

It’s a subject that’s near and dear to his heart: Partovi is co-founder and CEO of Neo, a venture aimed at including young engineers in a community alongside seasoned industry vets. The fund includes top executives from a slew of different industry titans, including Amazon, Airbnb, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Stripe.

Partovi is probably best known in the Valley for co-founding Code.org with twin brother, Hadi. The nonprofit launched in 2013 with a high-profile video featuring Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Jack Dorsey, along with a mission to make coding education more accessible to the masses.

It was a two-summer internship at Microsoft while studying at Harvard that gave Partovi an entrée into the world of tech. And while it was clearly a formative experience for the college student, he advises against prospective startup founders looking to large corporations as career launch pads.

“I spend a lot of time mentoring college students, that’s a big part of what I do at Neo,” Partovi said.

“And for anyone who wants to be a founder of a company, there’s a spectrum, from giant companies like Microsoft or Google to early-stage startups. And I would say, find the smallest point on that spectrum that you’re comfortable with, and start your career there. Maybe that’s a 100-person company or maybe for you, it’s a 500-person company. But if you start at Microsoft, it’ll be a long time before you feel comfortable doing your own startup. The skills you gain at a giant company are very valuable for getting promoted and succeeding in giant companies. They’re not often as translatable to being your own founder.”



from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2ZUJqrE
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thousands of cryptocurrency projects are already dead

Two sites that are actively cataloging failed crypto projects, Coinopsy and DeadCoins , have found that over a 1,000 projects have failed so far in 2018. The projects range from true abandonware to outright scams and include BRIG , a scam by two “brothers,” Jack and Jay Brig, and Titanium , a project that ended in an SEC investigation. Obviously any new set of institutions must create their own sets of rules and that is exactly what is happening in the blockchain world. But when faced with the potential for massive token fundraising, bigger problems arise. While everyone expects startups to fail, the sheer amount of cash flooding these projects is a big problem. When a startup has too much fuel too quickly the resulting conflagration ends up consuming both the company and the founders and there is little help for the investors. These conflagrations happen everywhere are a global phenomenon. Scam and dead ICOs raised $1 billion in 2017 with 297 questionable startups in the mix. The
Post a Comment
Read more

Dance launches its e-bike subscription service in Berlin

German startup Dance is launching its subscription service in its hometown Berlin. For a flat monthly fee of €79 (around $93 at today’s exchange rate), users will get a custom-designed electric bike as well as access to an on-demand repair and maintenance service. Founded by the former founders of SoundCloud and Jimdo , the company managed to raise some significant funding before launching its service. BlueYard led the startup’s seed round while HV Capital (formerly known as HV Holtzbrinck Ventures) led Dance’s €15 million Series A round, which represented $17.7 million at the time. E-bike subscription service Dance closes $17.7M Series A, led by HV Holtzbrinck Ventures The reason why Dance needed so much capital is that the company has designed its own e-bike internally. Called the Dance One, it features an aluminum frame and weighs around 22kg (48.5lb). It has a single speed and it relies on its electric motor to help you go from 0 to 25kmph. And the best part is that you
Post a Comment
Read more