Published in Zetta Venture Partners·Oct 10, 2019Aptology: The Science of Fit — Zetta Venture PartnersJocelyn Goldfein is a Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners, where she leads investments in AI-first startups with B2B business models. She was previously a technology executive with Facebook and VMware, and is an adjunct lecturer at Stanford University, her alma mater. Sign up for our newsletter here Aptology is…Recruiting4 min read
Published in jocelyngoldfein·Sep 5, 2019“Effective Leadership in High Tech” Syllabus and Reading ListEvery Fall quarter, Stanford kindly permits Mauria Finley and I to teach “CS 183E: Effective Leadership in High Tech.” (AKA: “Soft Skills for CS Majors.”) We try to pay forward the lessons we learned over many years working as technical leaders and entrepreneurs in engineering and product management. …3 min read
Published in Zetta Venture Partners·Jul 11, 2019Zetta Bytes AMA: Hiring a CTOSign up for our newsletter At Zetta Venture Partners, we back zettabyte pioneers: founders building companies enabled by AI and Big Data, the fourth generation of computing. As these modern companies start to scale, we hear similar questions across many startup founders and CEOs. …Startup8 min read
Published in jocelyngoldfein·Feb 23, 2017Culture is the Behavior You Reward and PunishSome lessons creep up on you gradually; others hit you over the head like an anvil. At the outset of 2008, VMware was flying high. We were a Silicon Valley rocket ship; we’d doubled revenue and headcount for four years in a row. We were an upstart disrupting the datacenter…Startup5 min read
Published in jocelyngoldfein·Jan 10, 2017New Year, New BeginningsLeaving Facebook felt like jumping out of a plane. At Facebook, I had the good fortune to work on software that touches the lives of inconceivable numbers of people, working side-by-side with colleagues who became dear friends. While there, I got to spearhead our mobile app revolution, help News Feed…Venture Capital3 min read
Published in jocelyngoldfein·Oct 4, 2016A Recipe for an Interviewor, Hiring Engineers part 4: Interview Assessment The tech industry is a bit in flux right now on how to deliver “a good comprehensive interview for a software engineer.” We jettisoned brainteasers in the 2000’s, and as I write this in 2016, we are jettisoning whiteboard coding interviews for about…Hiring8 min read
Published in jocelyngoldfein·Jun 6, 2016Screening: You’re Doing It WrongOr, Hiring Engineers Part 3: Screening Interviews — If you’re screwing up any part of your engineer interview and hiring process, it’s probably the screen. A screening interview is the first meeting with a prospective employee — the initial hurdle before proceeding to a full on-site hiring assessment. Small startups can run with a more informal process, but…Recruiting5 min read
Published in jocelyngoldfein·Nov 24, 2015Productivity HacksEngineers love nothing more than hacking on our own productivity. At its worst, it becomes its own form of procrastination (hence the term “yak shaving”) but at its finest, it allows us to tackle ever-larger and more complicated problems and streamlines our entrance to the exalted state of flow. I…Software Development5 min read
Published in jocelyngoldfein·Sep 1, 2015The Right Way to Ship SoftwareHead over to the First Round Review to check out my latest article: http://firstround.com/review/the-right-way-to-ship-software/Tech1 min read
Published in jocelyngoldfein·Jul 30, 2015Read Resumes Backwardsor, Hiring Engineers Step 2: Resume Filtering — Whether you’re embarking on the first engineering hires for your startup, or trying to double the size of your team at a post-series C rocket ship, it pays to learn to spot diamonds in the rough. When you’re hiring generalists and not a particular specialty, a pedigree is the first…6 min read
