"I'm sure these Craigslist Rolex watches are legit." You've just been hired fast. What happens next? If you can't explain to the average person on the street what your company does, your company doesn't do anything. Right. Because "how much money do you spend" and "how much money do you make" are bizarre metrics only employed by venture capitalists. ...and it goes on and on and on. I may go back and read this later but this seems a lot like the whiny rant of the one person stupid enough to take the job after the smart people ran screaming. When the CTO asked me to book it and told me it would be reimbursed later, I was hesitant and skeptical but followed through with blind faith. There’s no way a startup I found on Angel.co is going to screw me over, I thought.
When I asked him if hired employees were given a probationary period (it was standard for several of my past employers), he said “No, because I hire fast and fire fast.” I didn’t know which part of that sentence gave me more pause.
The co-founders wanted to be the next “Credit Karma of LinkedIn” and considered their competition to include Indeed, CareerBuilder, Angel.co, Zip Recruiter, and of course LinkedIn.
When we finally touched the 31 slide pitch deck, the investor stopped us on our team page. He asked, “You have 20 employees? How much have you spent, and what’s the revenue”? That was the first lesson I would learn from those VC investor meetings: your burn rate matters.