Category: Talent Management

The Entrepreneur is Foremost a Shareholder

Posted onAuthorStephany Tabet

In a startup’s early days, a founder, more often than not, is the “chief-of-everything.” She is the CEO, the HR, and the customer service all at once. She does not have the luxury of hiring top talent from day one, so she works with the limited resources she has to build her startup from the ground up. In a company’s earliest stages, this makes sense. Over time, the entrepreneur grows her team and scales her business. She hires top-level management and a reliable, well-performing team. Eventually, the founder will carry the “sole” responsibility of managing her company day-to-day as its Read More …

Integration Ain’t Easy

Posted onAuthorHenri Asseily

Integration is where most projects and companies fail. Whether it’s an M&A deal failing to live up to its promises of efficiency synergies or an endlessly-delayed project to integrate a key piece of technology, the main execution challenges reside in the integration of pieces, not in the creation of the units. In the software world of multi-tiered systems, project management generally has an inocuous line called “back-end integration”, when in fact it is the most costly and risky piece of all. What I like to stress to people is that the words “back end integration” seem pretty harmless, and only Read More …

Tech co-founder: CTO or VP Engineering?

Posted onAuthorHenri Asseily

As a startup grows from a few people into 30+, there is no role that is more prone to change than that of the tech co-founder. And managing that change correctly is key to the success of the company. The issue can be framed by first describing the early role of the tech co-founder (TCF): a jack of all trades, the guy/gal who gets the stuff made. The process goes as follows: the founding team brainstorms, the tech head says yeah ok we can do that but not this, and if we try that it would be cool, and it’ll Read More …

The difference between a CEO and a COO

Posted onAuthorHenri Asseily

The difference between a CEO and a COO is surprisingly easy to understand, but it is also surprisingly misunderstood by too many entrepreneurs who start as CEOs and devolve to COO roles. At Leap Ventures we have had to explain these roles enough times that I feel compelled to write about it, in the hope that we can simply point to this post in the future. So what is a CEO, how does she differ from a COO, and where’s the problem? A CEO does what he wants to do. A COO does what he has to do. — Hervé Read More …

Startups: Valuing equity, cash, and the team

Posted onAuthorHenri Asseily

Valuing equity can be very hard in startups, but so is valuing cash and the team. I gave a talk a few days ago at the TechWadi Roadshow powered by Google For Entrepreneurs, that took place in the UK Lebanon Tech Hub in Beirut. I was asked to discuss the importance of teams when launching a startup, so I decided to explain the relative importance in time of the triumvirate: teams, equity and cash. A major error by many first time entrepreneurs is to misprice the value of equity and cash, and generally assume they’re constant over the life of Read More …

Startup payroll: stay lean

Posted onAuthorHala Fadel

Back from a trip to Silicon Valley, I thought a few lessons from there on CEO and founder salary in a startup would be most beneficial to our middle eastern startups. I had the chance to interview a few CEOs and venture capitalist, and discussed with Quanergy founder Louay Eldada his 3-year without salary and then 50% salary cut in paycheck in year 3 when he started his company, despite a recent closing on a $30 million dollar-round. Louay left a position as CTO at SunEdison to found Quanergy. His effective salary the first 3 years was negative as he Read More …