This month’s NY Enterprise Tech Meetup offered something different. There were usual company presentations, but they were followed by a special keynote. Jason Lemkin gave a great talk on hiring (and firing) a good VP of sales for your company, with insights from his own experience.
CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW TO HIRE A GOOD VP OF SALES AND THE PRESENTING STARTUPS
Jason Lemkin, managing director of Storm Ventures and SaaStr.com, spelled it all out, in no uncertain terms. Some key tidbits:
1. You will be the first VP of sales for your startup, until you make a few hires to help with the work load.
2. Don’t hire a VP of sales too early – ideally after you achieve $1/$1.5 million in revenue, and you will need this person along with two reps you hired.
3. Reps can only have a negative impact on your company’s finances if they don’t perform.
4. The Sales VP’s main job should be to build a great team, and recruiting good hires takes time.
Great VPs will raise revenue per lead, closing deals smartly.
5. Make the hire once a repeatable process is established, because a bad hire can be worse than no hire at all.
Aorato
Founded by a security expert with experience working on online directories for banks, Aorato is a security solution focused on protecting active directories for the company infrastructure. The recent attacks on large corporations such as Target and the New York Times were achieved through the active directory, thus Aorato is presenting itself as a solution for a new problem.
The program “sits” alongside the active directory and analyzes traffic, watching for abnormal behavior and creating traps to mislead attackers. Users can view the event history through a timeline-style web interface, with explanations and recommended actions.
Hightower
Founded in Seattle but now located in NYC, Hightower presents itself as the future of commercial real estate.
The app streamlines the core data running commercial real estate, utilizing a slick interface for both web and mobile. Track your assets and portfolio using detailed statistics and dynamic collaboration between users, and filter your deals through multiple criteria in a dashboard interface.
X.ai
Definitely the unique highlight of the night, X.ai is a personal assistant of sorts, automatically scheduling meetings for you. Set parameters through an email you send to your desired meeting partner, and CC the personal assistant to automatically tell you when your next available spot will be.
