hiring

In times of crisis, fintech startups should take the long view instead of hibernating • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Column, EC Column, EC Fintech, Fintech, hiring, Startups, Verified Expert - lawyerNo Comments

Vadym Synegin Contributor Vadym Synegin is a Ukrainian impact entrepreneur, philanthropist and investor in fintech and crypto projects with more than 15 years’ experience as an entrepreneur in Europe and the UAE. More posts by this contributor 5 reasons why Ukraine’s fintech sector is growing despite war The fintech industry is currently facing several macroeconomic problems, including global economic inflation, skyrocketing costs of living, companies reducing their workforce, and a possible recession on the horizon, not to mention the war in Ukraine. All of these factors have caused fintech M&A exits to decline 30% in Q2 2022, the lowest point since Q3 2020. This is not the first time the economic climate has worsened so quickly. But when we look at the industry’s overall performance compared to previous years, the current downturn is not that different. What can founders do to help their companies prosper during this period? Hire high-performing talent The worsening financial climate is causing leading fintech companies to suspend hiring or reduce their workforce to avoid cost overruns. The industry saw 1,619 job cuts in May, compared to 440 in the first four months of the year. Personnel losses have also affected the Ukrainian startup ecosystem. More than one in ten startup employees in the country has had to leave their firms since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, and since then, the number of enterprises with up to five team members has risen, while companies with bigger teams are dwindling. Nearly every founder would agree that layoffs are a hard but necessary decision to make in times of crisis, as payroll spend can be redirected towards growth or maintaining a runway. But if you take the long view and look past the current downturn, it’s likely your startup will have higher chances of survival if you hold on to specialized talent. And sometimes, hiring a new employee can bring in a new perspective that may help you detect problems within your firm. Ukraine has a huge pool of talent, and thousands of specialists are currently searching for an exciting project to join. So instead of battening down the hatches as you face this crisis, consider it an opportunity to strengthen your company with dispersed, high-performing talent. Develop and prove the quality of your product Crises are also times of opportunities — you just need to look carefully to spot a golden egg. Crises give founders a chance to focus on building robust products since times like these usually highlight problems that are in need of a viable, long-term solution, and startups can go heads-down on building rather than focusing on incessant growth. The brutal truth is that tough markets also clean up the hundreds of startups without a solid product cluttering the market. This gives top companies a chance to develop an even more extensive set of products and services. Develop a solid strategy To run a business sustainably, founders must direct business development and manage risk well. That’s why during times of crisis, startups that have focused on developing solid business strategies and products usually emerge to win the market from those that didn’t. I know it’s hard to focus on developing a strategy when there are so many external factors affecting your company. But the fact is that companies that focus on strengthening their business plan and solidifying their strategy have a higher chance of bouncing back and coming out stronger than before compared to those who hibernate. Individuals and businesses thrive in the face of crises by managing their resources, analyzing the situation they’re in, and recognizing potential opportunities regardless of the amount of noise and chaos around them. Tough times allow teams that set big goals to recharge and look at things from a different angle. For instance, you might as yourself: What is the unique proposition of the product? What can we do to make the most out of the current market? What can we do to catapult our product even farther when the market recovers? Despite all the setbacks, founders can excel in business by following three rules during a crisis: strengthen your staff, develop a better product, and work to solidify a business strategy. While these aren’t laws or panaceas for all problems, I’ve found them to be very effective during rough times.

Amazon exec confirms corporate hiring freeze through end of year • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Amazon, Andy Jassy, Enterprise, hiringNo Comments

Given the on-going economic headwinds and the company’s expensive belt-tightening under CEO Andy Jassy, it ought not come as a surprise that Amazon has instituted a corporate hiring freeze. The retail giant’s Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology, Beth Galetti, confirmed the move in a staff memo that has since been published on Amazon’s own blog. In the letter, Galetti notes that the company had already begun pausing or slowing hiring in various corporate departments in “recent weeks.” The move has since been applied to “new incremental hires” across its corporate business for “the next few months.” The “corporate” caveat here is likely meant to differentiate the roles from positions like those in Amazon fulfillment centers across the U.S., as the company ramps up for the holidays. There are other potential exceptions, as well, including replacements for employees who have vacated existing roles. The executive adds that the company plans to add “a meaningful number of people” next year. “We’re facing an unusual macro-economic environment, and want to balance our hiring and investments with being thoughtful about this economy,” writes Galetti. “This is not the first time that we’ve faced uncertain and challenging economies in our past. While we have had several years where we’ve expanded our headcount broadly, there have also been several years where we’ve tightened our belt and were more streamlined in how many people we added. With fewer people to hire this moment, this should give each team an opportunity to further prioritize what matters most to customers and the business, and to be more productive.” Jassy, the AWS head who took over Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ CEO role in July 2021, has been looking for meaningful ways to cut costs across the company. He reportedly noted in a corporate all-hands earlier this month, “Good companies that last a long period of time, who are thinking about the long term, always have this push and pull. There are some years where they’re expanding really broadly. Some years where they’re checking in and working on profitability, tightening the belt a little bit. And sometimes when you have multiple businesses like we do at Amazon, some businesses are expanding at the same time that others are checking in.” Amazon is certainly not alone in such decisions, either. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans for cost cutting measures and a hiring freeze at the social media giant back in September.

Make 4 promises to hire better staff for your startup team • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in EC Future of Work, EC How To, hiring, Paul English, StartupsNo Comments

“When I hire someone, I make two promises. And I ask for two promises in return,” said Paul English — currently the co-founder of Boston Venture Studio but perhaps best known as the co-founder and CTO of travel platform Kayak. “I promise them that they will have the most fun they’ve had at any job.” What he means by “fun,” he explained, was that he likes to give people the freedom to do what they need to do — to try things out. “The second promise is that your skills will accelerate faster than at any other company,” he added, suggesting that he really values investing in staff and trusting what they do. A micromanager, he said, is failing at both of those promises: It isn’t fun, and the team isn’t trusted to work toward their goals. “Are all the people sitting around you energy vampires, or do you have fun with them? Do they enhance your ideas? Do they stimulate you? Or are you sitting with someone who’s kind of an asshole?” Boston Venture Studio co-founder Paul English “If you are micromanaging, you are already failing to realize that a person is no longer a good fit for the team. It doesn’t mean they aren’t talented — it may be just a case of the wrong person, wrong place.” We caught English as he was talking at a conference organized by venture fund Baukunst in Boston yesterday. We wrote about the new fund’s first close back in April; yesterday, the fund announced that it had closed its full $100 million fund — the largest amount raised for a debut fund at the pre-seed stage. So what does English ask from his employees? That’s where things get truly interesting.

Technical due diligence, web3’s promise, how to hire well • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Crypto, due diligence, EC roundup, hiring, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, Venture, web3No Comments

In films, screenwriters always include a moment known as the Promise of the Premise. It’s the part of the story where the audience settles in to the new world they’ve entered. One of my favorite examples is in the first Harry Potter movie, when Hagrid takes Harry to Diagon Alley, the magical shopping district that introduces him (and us) to the world of wizarding. So far, web3 has not paid off on the Promise of the Premise: open source software that runs live on the blockchain. “It’s still much easier to develop a Web 2.0 app simply because the ecosystem is mature and enjoys a large and thriving developer community,” says Devin Abbott, who specializes in design and development tools, React and web3 applications. Full ZebethMedia+ articles are only available to membersUse discount code TCPLUSROUNDUP to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription According to Abbott, the web3 development community is approaching “an inflection point where our own tools are becoming quite powerful,” but “that doesn’t mean Reddit is moving off its Web 2.0 cloud servers.” So far, most of the hype for web3 is coming from investors and journalists, so Abbott’s perspective as a developer makes this a useful read. Most of web3’s early use cases don’t interest me. Then again, I’m not a developer, so I didn’t truly appreciate the value of mobile gaming, GPS and cloud storage until they’d achieved product-market fit and were integrated into my smartphone. Today, I wouldn’t consider buying a device that couldn’t help me find a restaurant or hotel. When it emerges, I suspect web3’s killer app will be similarly utilitarian. Thanks for reading, Walter ThompsonEditorial Manager, ZebethMedia+@yourprotagonist 3 ways to hire well for your startup Image Credits: AndreyPopov (opens in a new window) / Getty Images For early-stage startups “this is arguably one of the worst times to be looking for talent,” says Champ Suthipongchai, founder and GP of Creative Ventures. Opportunistic hiring managers might assume that widespread layoffs have shifted the balance in their favor, but “those were generally not employees executing core businesses.” Usually, startup recruiting resembles scenes from heist movies where the characters are putting a crew together: it’s an expedited process designed to fill knowledge or experience gaps, not necessarily find the best fit. “Whenever possible, it is far better to slowly integrate a great candidate in as an adviser or part-time contractor and let things play out,” writes Suthipongchai. “Just as a customer pilots the product, companies should pilot their most important hires whenever possible.” 8 questions to answer before your startup faces technical due diligence Image Credits: kutaytanir (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Outsiders study multiple facets of a startup to determine its value and quality, and codebase health is one of them. A pitch deck is just part of the story, writes Matt Van Itallie, founder and CEO of codebase analytics company Sema. After technical due diligence begins, no amount of storytelling can cover the secrets buried in GitHub and Jira. To help companies prepare for TDD, Van Itallie has written a primer with eight questions founding teams must be able to answer confidently. Tomorrow, we’ll run his detailed TDD checklist. To better thwart ransomware attacks, startups must get cybersecurity basics right Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / ZebethMedia Creating systems that are resilient against ransomware isn’t top of mind for early-stage startups, but many companies don’t even follow basic best practices, much to their detriment. “Enable multifactor authentication (MFA) on everything you have,” said Katie Moussouris, founder of Luta Security. “Enable it on every account that you have.” Last week at ZebethMedia Disrupt, Moussouris and Brett Callow, threat analyst at Emsisoft, spoke about the need to invest early in locking down their systems, starting with MFA. “It’s a matter of stacking security layer upon security layer,” said Callow. “MFA in conjunction with staff training — in conjunction with other things — all serve to reduce risk.” Black startup founders raised just $187 million in the third quarter Image Credits: Getty Images The downturn appears to be disproportionately affecting Black founders’ ability to raise capital. “When the venture capital industry catches a cold, underrepresented founders catch pneumonia,” said Tiana Tukes, an investor with Colorful Capital. In Q3 2022, Crunchbase reports that Black founders raised just $187 million, “a staggering decline from the nearly $1.1 billion they received in Q3 2021 and a sizable drop from the $594 million the cohort raised in Q2,” writes Dominic-Madori Davis. Investors are sitting on mountains of cash: Where will it be deployed? Image Credits: H-Gall (opens in a new window) / Getty Images No matter what’s happening in the public markets, bees make honey, and venture capitalists raise money: it’s just what they do. But since the “extreme valuation recalibration” in the public markets, VCs are amassing more and more dry powder, write Jeremy Abelson and Jacob Sonnenberg of Irving Investors. More frustrating news for founders: investor fundraising “is on pace to finish the year at $172 billion,” but capital deployment is way down. “Dollars are flowing and will continue to flow, but it will be more capital to fewer companies,” they write. Now that “traditional SaaS has become too expensive and secondarily saturated,” sectors like web3, life sciences and agtech will attract more investors, they predict.

Skuad manages hiring and compliance for building distributed teams • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in distributed teams, hiring, Singapore, Skuad, Southeast Asia, StartupsNo Comments

Singapore-based Skuad helps companies hire employees in different countries while staying compliant with local employment regulations and processing cross-border payroll. The startup announced today it has raised $15 million in Series A funding. Skuad has signed up more than 350 employers so far, mostly from North America, Europe and Southeast Asia. This funding round, which brings Skuad’s total raised to $19 million, was led by NMVM and two global payments platforms. It also included participation from returning investors Beenext and Anthemis, plus angel investors Jitendra Gupta, Jupiter founder; Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau; Credit founder Kunal Shah; Alok Mittal, co-founder and CEO of Indifi; Varun Mittal and Rafael Lopez. Skuad was conceptualized just before the pandemic in 2019 by founder Sundeep Sahi with the aim of simplifying international hiring. Since then, the company’s focus has been on helping employers deal with issues that make building distributed teams challenging, like variations in regulations from market to market, international payrolls and remote onboarding. Skuad also serves as a platform for workers to find employment. Sahi told ZebethMedia that traditional hiring and recruiting methods aren’t sufficient to deal with creating a team of people around the world. “Building distributed teams or hiring in another country requires you to establish a subsidiary, register as an entity, open local bank accounts, stay up-to-date with local employment laws, as well as hire local HR, legal and payroll teams. This process often takes months, if not years, and requires an investment of thousands of dollar,” he said. Skuad lets companies hire, onboard and pay employees and contractors in more than 160 countries without needing to set up local entities, and it manages local compliances, well also providing country-specific benefits and insurance packages. Most of its customers are from the tech and consulting industries that employ digital workers in different geographies to fill a talent gap or scale internationally. The startup now has customers from 34 countries, talent placed in about 94 companies and 3x growth in ARR since January 2022. One of Skuad’s clients is Indonesian fintech Akseleran, which needed to fill tech openings. It built a strong candidate funnel through a vetted talent portal called allremote.in, social job networks, recruiters and agencies. Skuad serves as the legal employer in India, since Akseleran doesn’t have a legal entity in the country, and manages local compliance for payments, taxes and benefits. Skuad monetizes through pricing plans that start at $199 per employee per month for payroll and $499 per employee per month for talent found through the platform or 12% of the compensation of the employee, whichever is higher. The company is currently finalizing its acquisition of Codejudge, a data-focused talent assessment platform that automates tech interviews, to expand it hiring and onboarding capabilities. Some competitors in the remote hiring space include Deel, Remote, Globalization Partners and Multiplier. Skuad serves as a hybrid of talent platforms, like Turing and Toptal, but with a focus on remote full-time jobs that are enabled by its network of local entities that process payroll compliantly, like Deel and Remote do. Sahi says it differentiates with its process transparency and the size of its tech-enabled talent platform, which can be used to manage the entire employment lifecycle.