Making SMEs Run Smoothly: René Lacerte’s Cashview (Part 9)

SM: Any other takeaways you would like to share?

RL: I think getting the team right is really important.

SM: Do you have an executive team in place now?

RL: I hired a woman early on to be the VP of Operations and Customer Service. She is from PayPal and worked on payments. She had been there for seven years, so getting an expert in payments was really important in this business. My CTO is someone I hired from SalesForce, who was rather senior there.

SM: Which will help leverage the SaaS expertise.

RL: Yes, they have great expertise. We also have a software architect who was employee number 5 at SalesForce, and was there until last year, so we now know what works and does not. I hired a VP of Product Development that has run product management and product development for startups and taken them through IPO, all in the on-demand space; companies like Genesis, GetThere, and others. I think the next hire will be a marketing hire. I have a couple of folks I am working on right now. I think that is one of the more fun parts of building a company – building the team. You are better able see what your needs are and how to fill them the second time around.

SM: One of the things I learned is that in my earlier companies I was bootstrapping more and did not raise Venture Capital early. I never had much of an executive team, and brought on the executive team later. Even though I have in between hired executive teams early on, today I have gone back to the early principle of building the product / business to a point first and get some execution pieces together, before hiring executive teams because executives do not produce anything.

RL: I only hire executives who are wiling to roll up their sleeves, especially at this point. That is true at PayCycle as well; all of the executives on the team there do the dirty work as well. We all answered phones. I think you are right and I have to be careful. I am not hiring people who can’t contribute.

This segment is part 9 in the series : Making SMEs Run Smoothly: René Lacerte’s Cashview
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