The case for a “BizOps” person in an early stage start-up
tl;dr: most highly technical start-ups are all engineers through the Series A, when they hire their first sales/ commercial leads. MBAs/ consultants/ jacks-of-all-trades are often treated with suspicion. I think that’s a mistake, and many technical start-ups would benefit from someone who has great flexibility in strategy, operations and partnerships.
If that sounds interesting, read on…
I’ve had some huge strokes of luck in my career.
Among the biggest was that I got to start my stint at Google in the “Strategy and BizOps” org. The group was led by Shona Brown, who was one of the members of Google’s “OC” (“Operating Committee” — the group of ~10 executives who ran Google); she ensured that the BizOps team was working on many of Google’s most pressing problems, and that the group did not become glorified powerpoint monkeys.
This was among the best jobs I’ve ever had: my colleagues were fantastic (I was reporting to Francoise Brougher, who went on to lead the business side of both Square and Pinterest; she’s become a good friend and mentor. The rest of the team had a great mix of smarts and “get it done” practicality– we were super “Googley”. I was a director in the group for ~2 years, and worked on ~8–10 projects– every single one of them was fascinating. I moved from BizOps to the Google product org, and felt that the prior experience in BizOps had served me well.
I left Google for a start-up (Drawbridge), and immediately I got sucked into the start-up vortex of constantly fighting fires, and rarely having the space for strategy deep dives. Fortunately, we were led by the indomitable Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, who is very deep in domain knowledge, technical innovation and pure entrepreneurial doggedness, so the company was generally moving up and to the right, through a very successful acquisition by LinkedIn. Compared to Google, we shipped product at least 10x faster, and we hustled like crazy and could turn on a dime. But, like all start-ups, there was a fair amount of chaos.
I went to Palantir after Drawbridge. At Palantir, there was also a BizOps group, led by Kurt Schwarz. In classic Palantir fashion, the job title was “Droid” (the real job title was actually “R2”), which was named after the unobtrusive droids in Star Wars that would boop and beep in the background, constantly repairing machines and making sure that the trash compactor doesn’t crush the heroes. In fact, the Palantirians doing these jobs were actually a great combination of low-ego/ high capability. They would throw themselves at any task that needed to be done, and attack the problem. (side note/ pro-tip: if you ever have a chance to hire an ex-R2 from Palantir, do it. It’s an eerily effective group).
After Palantir, I joined Foothill Ventures as a partner. I’ve gotten to use a lot of my experience as an ex-strategist and product manager to help many of the companies that we’ve invested in.
Our typical founder is very technical– around 75% of our companies are led by a PhD degree holder. These founders have typically spent most of their careers moving up the engineering ladder. They often don’t have a great sense for what the various business functions do (for example, the differences between sales and BD are not always well understood). In the early days of a technical start-up, that’s *mostly* okay. Most of the work is engineering-centric, and they won’t need to hire their first business people for a while.
However, I think that having a jack-of-all-trades BizOps type of person can be incredibly valuable, even at that early stage. They can be a force multiplier for other executives, for the board, and for external partners.
A couple of recent examples may be helpful.
I am a seed investor in a solvent-free electrode manufacturing technology company called AM Batteries. Chances are that you won’t have heard of them, but I think that you will soon enough (I believe that they will become one of the most important companies in the world for making battery manufacturing less expensive and more sustainable). The founder, Dr. Yan Wang, is one of the best entrepreneurs I’ve ever encountered. He is a tenured professor at WPI, was just recognized as one of the most important academic innovators in America, and has built AM Batteries to be a leader in this important field. Oh, and he also co-founded battery recycling unicorn Ascend Elements.
We are very fortunate to have Anzu Partners and TDK Ventures as fellow investors. They recognized that there are dozens of important “businessy” issues that need to be tackled in concert with the engineering and scientific leadership of the company: nailing down our business model/ pricing model; examining potential ancillary revenue opportunities; thinking through our patent strategy; interfacing with external PR/ Marketing/ Design firms for some major press releases and website upgrades; building our full staffing plan and compensation ladder.
In many early stage companies, this work all falls on the CEO’s shoulders, and many CEOs gladly do these jobs. Dr. Wang is certainly able to take on all of these responsibilities, but he is also one of the world’s top experts in his scientific domain: an hour of his time coordinating with our PR agency is not nearly as valuable as an hour of his time working with the R&D team.
Anzu injected Josh Stiling into the company on a semi-full-time basis, and TDK Ventures injected Katherine He as a temporary resource. They are essentially fulfilling that “BizOps role”, jumping on whatever needs attention, from corp strategy work, HR planning, PR/ marketing management, pipeline analysis, new business strategy, partnership discussions, etc. It’s important to note that neither of them are actually the ex-consultant/ MBA profile that I mentioned; they are both technical and have domain expertise. But they are fulfilling the jack-of-all-trades/ accelerator role that is familiar to a BizOps person.
The change in the atmosphere was immediate: soon after injecting the direct time of Josh and Katherine, the ability of the company to think big and execute on the details completely changed.
(a side note in this discussion: I think that Anzu Partners and TDK Ventures are among the very best deep tech investors in the world; part of this is the quality of their people, and their willingness to roll up their sleeves to pull their portfolio companies to the next level. Any entrepreneur reading this who is starting an early stage company: they should be on your very short list of investors to call).
A second example is another portfolio company, HyperLight– the inventor of a disruptive networking technology (based on thin film lithium niobate photonics). In a nutshell, they will enable data to be transferred orders of magnitude faster, while using far less energy vs. the current state of the art.
Their CEO, Mian Zhang, is also extraordinary. He is one of the most “complete” CEOs we have in our stable– he’s incredibly deep technically; he’s got great sales presence and instincts; he’s a relentless negotiator; he enjoys thinking strategically. In short, he can do it all. However, as we all learned in Econ101 class about comparative advantage, that doesn’t mean he should do it all. The board had been pressuring Mian to build a deeper talent bench, to increase BD capacity to handle the dozens of high quality partners that the company was accumulating, and to nail down the product/ pricing strategy with more depth. Mian agreed with all of this, but was just so darn busy.
I had been pushing to hire a Chief of Staff/ BizOps person (and even tried to get one of our summer interns to agree to do this job after she completed HBS), but Mian wasn’t super clear on the concept of what exactly would this person’s job be. And, I have to admit, trying to explain what a jack-of-all-trades bizops person does to a strong tech leader does sound a bit hollow.
There was a big shift when HyperLight hired Linda Sun (a brilliant IP lawyer/ engineer who is their Head of Legal). When Linda saw that things needed to get done, she just went and did them, and quickly gained Mian’s trust. I had an update call with Mian, and he was singing her praises: “I feel like I have so much extra time available now. I can finally really do a deep dive on our strategy, and devote more time to a couple of our key partners; everything I give her I just know will get handled well”.
It was at that moment that the lightbulb went off on what a bizops person does: they do whatever it takes. And they generally do it completely and aggressively.
Linda and Mian then turned around and led a recruitment process that led to Jodie-Marie Fernandes (ex-BCG, MIT EE grad, and opera singer) being hired as “Chief of Staff”.
Here’s to more little (and big) things getting done, and allowing HyperLight to continue their steep rise.
A few caveats and conclusions:
- Mis-hires (esp. the charming MBA who doesn’t actually do anything): unfortunately, there are a ton of people with sterling resumes who look great for the job, but who are just MBA “slide producers”. It is sometimes difficult to tell them apart from the actual stars, especially for technical founders who have little experience with the profile. The two examples I gave above were both cases where the founder got to know the bizops person before they were injected into the role.
- ==>The VC can play an important role here: many VCs came from this role themselves (ie., have had experience in a management consulting or strategic operations role), and can be an important part of the hiring committee
- ==> As noted above, both Palantir and Google hired extraordinarily effective bizops people– it can definitely be done. The key trait (IMHO) is bias for action combined with a true humility. The ideal candidate is willing to do almost anything, and just gets a lot of sh*t done.
- Mis-trust/ mis-alignment: sometimes, we may find the right candidate, but the CEO has no idea how to use them, or doesn’t trust them enough to let them do anything meaningful. This is also a distinct possibility for founders who are used to being in the details for almost everything– they are suddenly being asked to let go and let someone with far less domain knowledge start handling important pieces of business
- ==> We are big believers in founder-to-founder discussions. Founders will listen to and trust the experience of other founders far more easily than they will listen to their VC. VCs live in an idealized world, while other founders are also dealing with the messy reality of running a small start-up
- Ultimately, though, despite the caveats above, I think that this experiment would be worth it for a lot of companies. Bet on the technologist, but inject the relentless, get sh*t done jack-of-all-trades bizops droid to help them scale!
