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Getting the hiring process right is one of the most critical and challenging aspects of building a startup. Early hires shape your companys culture, operational efficiency, and future growth, yet many founders face this task without prior hiring experience or a clear sense of what their evolving business truly needs. Without being thoughtful about hiringfrom crafting compelling job descriptions to setting consistent compensation and onboarding practicesstartups risk bringing in team members who are misaligned with the companys needs or culture, creating friction and slowing momentum. Over the course of my three decades as a startup operator, executive coach and educator of entrepreneurs, Ive observed that investing the time upfront to build strong hiring practices not only helps attract the right talent but also lays a foundation for a healthy, scalable organization. While you cant prevent occasional mis-hires, you can try to minimize the possibility by including a project phase in your hiring process or even considering a project as a paid consulting engagement (try before you buy) for both you and the candidate. This allows the candidate to demonstrate what they are capable of and what it might be like to work with themand them with youonce they are on board full time. Projects can give you a higher degree of confidence that this is the one, which can be super hard in the early stages of your startup when you are not sure what the one even is. If this is not a try-before-you-buy situation, I recommend that projects are performed just before you are ready to do reference checks and make an offer. This can be an especially helpful step if you are down to two finalists you really like so you can compare how each one approaches a project. Unless you plan to do a trial engagement with them, try not to choose a project that takes more than one to two hours to do unless you pay them for the work. A startup Ive worked with offers to pay for the time taken to do a project, and if the candidate declines payment, the startup makes a donation to a charity of the candidates choice as compensation for their time. Below are some projects that can be effective at startups. Keep in mind that these projects test the candidates approach more than whether they do the work perfectly. Build alignment with your team on what good looks like for each project and plan to debrief once the assignment is complete and/or presented. Here are a few examples of what good might look like. The First 90 Days This is a good general test for any new hire, especially an executive, but also for a people manager or technical leader. Have the candidate explain what their first ninety days on the job will look like. Either leave it wide open or offer a few prompts like, Who will you spend time with? or How will you get to know the business? or What accomplishments do you hope to make by the end of the first ninety days? Engineering and Design Projects While there are some nifty tools out there that can test coding skills for engineers, I am a strong advocate for testing the softer skills. Those who design and/or build your product should be able to demonstrate their work beyond coding or portfolio samples. The best type of project here is a brief scenario about building a new feature or capability for your product that will allow the candidate to demonstrate not just depth of syntax knowledge or design best practices, but also how they will work on a problem with your team. These projects can be done as homework, although its nice if it can be done in person or as part of a video interview. Present a scenario and ask the candidate how they will approach it. You could give them some alone time to think about it and then ask them to talk through it. Ask them to cite how they thought about it and to explain the direction they took and why. Prepare to have another approach or idea for the scenario when they walk through their work. This can help gauge how the candidate handles feedback and if they are willing to collaborate on ideas. Scenarios for Non-Engineering Teams (Marketing, Sales, Product) I prefer scenario tests over presentations of a non-engineering candidates past work because such tests will show you how they use their experience to approach something new. Scenarios you may ask them to work through can be actual challenges you are facing, or they can be hypothetical. Here are some quick examples of scenario tests for a few functional areas: Product: Our CTO just came back from a listening tour with some of our customers and wants to explore a new set of features to expand our product offerings. These offerings are not on the product roadmap. What steps would you take to understand these new features and how would you approach the prioritization process? Marketing: Were about to launch a new product for our customers. What steps would you take to plan for this product launch and how will you measure its success? Sales: We are building a product to attract new customers in a new segment. What information do you need to prepare your team to sell this new product and how will you set sales goals for the team? You could imagine similar scenarios for finance, customer sup- port, or other functional roles. Remember, these candidates dont know how your business functions day-to-day, so this isnt about whether they have a perfect plan but more about how they approach the problem. With all the interviews and projects, you still may not get it right every time. Again, hiring is hard. Thats why the try-before-you-buy approach is often the best way to go for both the candidate and your startup. One way to ease that process, if a trial candidate can work full time before converting to a permanent employee, is to offer them equity in your startup that will be granted when they convert, but with a backdated vesting schedule to when they started their trial. If youre hiring for a role for the first time and no one on your team has experience with that roleso no one knows what good looks likeask an experienced advisor, investor, or friend with experience to be part of the interview process. They should be able to interview the candidate and help you formulate the projects you may assign. Excerpted with permission from After the Idea: What It Really Takes to Create and Scale a Startup. Copyright 2025 by Julia Austin. Available from Basic Venture, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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E-Commerce
Whats the big idea? In the book Apocalypse, the term itself is understood as a rapid, collective loss that fundamentally changes a societys way of life and sense of identity. Viewed as an ending of existence as we know it, rather than an end of all existence period, helps reframe such terrifying times of upheaval as our greatest opportunities for growth and improvement. Human history shows that our species has approached and retreated from the brink of annihilation time and again, offering inspiring wisdom and tales of resilience that should empower the modern reader to seize our turbulent moment by the horns. Below, Lizzie Wade shares five key insights from her new book, Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures. Listen to the audio versionread by Lizzie herselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. Weve been here before Life in the 2020s started out scary, and its only getting more terrifying. The decade began with the worst pandemic in a century, upending our lives, health, and politics in ways were only beginning to understand. Climate disasters that may have seemed like distant possibilities are now upon us, no matter who we are or where we live. Political and economic systems that once seemed durable, even natural, are proving to be frighteningly fragile, cracking under the weight of an increasingly apocalyptic world. As the world we knew comes to an end, its easy to feel alone. But by spending time with archaeologists, I learned that cataclysms like climate change, societal collapse, global pandemics, total war, and even human extinction are not uniquely modern problems. Our ancestors experienced all those apocalypses. More importantly, they survived them all. We are the heirs of a long history of resilience, adaptation, and creativity that has already seen countless human beings through the worst of times. Our ancestors have so much to teach us about our future, if we can cast off our assumptions and learn how to listen to their stories. 2. Community and collaboration are keys to survival Around 47,000 years ago, humans in northern Europe found themselves facing a jumpy and unstable climate. Conditions swung between cold and warm and back again relatively quickly. Those who ventured out to new lands during warm periods could find themselves cut off from food, resources, and other communities when the cold suddenly returned. The animals they hunted started dying or migrating, and humans struggled to continually adapt to an environment they could no longer trust or predict. These humans were Neanderthals, and they would soon find themselves confronting another challenge: the arrival of Others who looked and lived just enough like them to rely on the same resources. Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were not competitors and enemies, nor victors and victimsor at least, not only those things. Early paleoanthropologists believed that what happened next was the apocalypse that set it all in motion. They believed those Others, Homo sapiens, eliminated Neanderthals through violence, competition, and domination, in a process that looked suspiciously like 19th-century colonial genocides. But 21st-century research has revealed that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals were not competitors and enemies, nor victors and victimsor at least, not only those things. By sequencing the Neanderthal genome, paleogeneticists were able to find pieces of it in almost every person alive today. That proved that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had children together, in many places and at many times, and that those children would go on to have their own children, so successfully that our shared ancestry spread around the world. Neanderthals became us, and we also became them. We survived, together. 3. Apocalypses destroy old worlds, but they also create new ones I define apocalypse as a rapid, collective loss that fundamentally changes a societys way of life and sense of identity. An isolated drought might make for a few bad harvests and some tough years, but it wont force society to give up on farming entirely. A drought that lasts for decades, however, might do that. It could also lead to the overthrow or disintegration of the government that failed to prevent such a crisis. In this manner, environmental apocalypse spurs a political one in a feedback loop of destruction. Thats what happened in ancient Egypt 4,200 years ago, when catastrophically low Nile floods hit during and just after the reign of a weak and ineffective king. The construction of grand monuments like the pyramids abruptly stopped, provinces broke away from royal rule, and scribes wrote of an upside-down world so full of suffering that people began committing suicide by crocodile. Old Kingdom Egypt had been unified for 800 years until this apocalypse tore it apart. But in destroying the Egyptian state, this apocalypse also destroyed the strict social and economic hierarchy that had governed and constrained Egyptian lives for centuries. Wealth that had been concentrated in the capital flowed to newly independent provinces, and new leaders arose who boasted of taking care of their followers during the hardest of times, rather than extracting labor and resources from them as the pharaoh had done. Archaeological excavations reveal that commoners not only survived but also thrived during Egypts drought and state collapse. It was the elites of the old order who suffered most in the new, more equal world created by the apocalypse. And it is their perspective that written history is preserved and propagated, to the detriment of all our imaginations. 4. We already live in a post-apocalyptic world Most of us have been taught to see human history as a march of inevitable technological, political, and cultural progress. Weve been told that the world we live in today is the pinnacle of that progress, and any disruption to it is a terrifying tragedy. As we face our own apocalypses, its easy to feel that we have everything to lose and nothing to gain. These apocalypses connected the entire planet for the first time, sparking new identities, hierarchies, and ideas. But archaeology can help us see that the modern world is already postapocalyptic. It was built from the rubble of the twin apocalypses of colonialism and slavery. These apocalypses connected the entire planet for the first time, sparking new identities, hierarchies, and ideas, including capitalism and consumerism. They also resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, the enslavement of millions more, and the attempted destruction of ancient communities and cultures. Unlike the apocalypse that destoyed, but also remade, Old Kingdom Egypt, colonialism and slavery precluded the conditions necessary for recovery. Through centuries of unchecked resource extraction, they created a world thats dangerous for all of us who inhabit itand they continue to ensure our present and future apocalypses will transform into the worst versions of themselves. 5. Apocalypses are the best chance societies have for change The next apocalypse is no longer a specter on the horizon. It is here, no matter how much we wish we could delay or deny it. But that doesnt mean were doomed to the worst-case scenario. It means that this is our moment. This is our chance to harness the transformative energy of apocalypse to build a new, different, and better world. Weve misunderstood apocalypses as interruptions in the human story, unfortunate deviations from the path of progress and growth were supposed to be on. But in my research, Ive learned that apocalypses are the human story. Each and every one was a vital turning point that led to everything that came after, for better and for worse. Our apocalypse will be, too. Like it not, our world is changing. If we can move beyond denial and fear and look straight at the apocalypse, we have the chance to participate in, and even guide, our own transformations. In ancient Greek, the word apocalypse means the unveiling. Apocalypses are moments when we can see the truth of what our society is and what it could become. The world we thought we lived in is over. What world do we want to build next? Lizzie Wade is an award-winning science journalist and correspondent for the prestigious journal Science. She covers anthropology, archeology, and Latin America. Her work has appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times, Aeon, Smithsonian, and Archaeology. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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E-Commerce
At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, top agencies and brands vie for awards and hustle to close deals. As this years event wraps up, Autodesk CMO Dara Treseder shares the insider buzzfrom the continued rise of creator-led content to how brands navigate getting the right kind of attention in a polarized market. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. What are you hearing people talk about here at the festival? A lot is going on. There’s a recurring theme. I think . . . everyone is trying to figure out, How can I cut through without being cut out? How can I cut through without alienating a core part of my audience? Because we’re living in such a polarized time, where there are very few things people can align on. And so there is really that, but we are also in an attention recession, where it’s so difficult to get attention, and getting attention is not enough, because you have to convert that attention into intention, right? To get people to actually go into discovery, consideration, and ultimately purchase. So, it’s not just getting the attention, but the attention in the way that’s right for your brand. Exactly. Getting attention in a way that’s right for your brand and drives action, drives engagement. And now, there’s just so much that grabs people’s attention, so grabbing attention isn’t enough. It’s actually converting the attention into intention, into buyer intent. Are there any rules about it, or is it that each brand has to do it in its own way? I think that there are some themes that we’re seeing about how brands in general are doing this, across all industries, B2B, B2C, healthcare, technology, beauty, retail. We’re seeing some recurring themes. And I think one of the big themes is leaning into creators and community, because people show up for people. They might not necessarily show up for brands in the same way as we’ve seen in the past. So a lot of brands are leaning into [that]. I mean, creators are all over the place. Creators and athletes. Because creators and athletes come with a more dedicated and a more engaged and a more, I’m going to use the word rabid, a little bit, fan base. Yes, real fans. Real fans, rather than just celebrities that you see. I mean, we’ve been talking for a few years about influencers and how that has sort of changed the marketplace. It sounds a little bit like we’ve broken through to a new layer with that? We’ve certainly broken through to a new layer. And in fact, they don’t want to be called influencers. They want to be called creators. Because they’re saying, “Hey, I’m not here to just influence. I’m here to co-create with you to drive a certain outcome.” So we’re seeing that happen more now. And does that change the relationship that a brand like yours has with a traditional advertising firm? Are you going to creators in a different way? It definitely changes, because creators have, I think, a lot more say and a lot more power, and they’re taking a bigger space at the table. So, gone are the days, I think, where it’s just you find a creator, you tell them exactly what you want to do. If you’re actually trying to drive real results and you want their fans to show up, they’re taking an audience-first approach. So first of all, you’ve got to find that creator that aligns with your values. So you have to know they agree with you or they’re simpatico in that way before they start. There’s got to be trust. . . . And the trust goes both ways. You have got to trust that they are aligned to your brand values, they are aligned to your customer base, because remember, you want to cut through, you want to break through, but you are not trying to cut out a big portion of your customer base. So you need to make sure that you have that trust that yes, they are aligned to your brand values, they’re aligned to your purpose, they’re aligned to the outcomes, but then you also have to trust them to give them the space to do what they do. Because it can’t come across as an ad. It has to come across as something more organic, something that they would truly want to do on their own, because that’s when their audience shows up, and that’s what determines the result. Are you, in your conversations with your peers, with other CMOs, are you hearing them privately acknowledge like, Oh, we didn’t do that quite right? We alienated a group we didn’t want to. One hundred percent, especially in today’s world. . . . As we’re having these private CMO roundtables, we’re all sharing, here’s what went wrong, here’s what went right, here’s what I learned. And a lot of it is just, the margin for error is a lot slimmer than it ever was. There is a very thin line between cutting through and cutting out. It’s like walking on high heels on a teeny-tiny thread. There is no margin for error. And so . . . a lot of CMOs are thinking about, How do I do this and how do I do this well? . . . And I think one of the things that’s really important is making sure that you have a broad pull at the table as these decisions are being made, and that you are also able to pivot and adjust very quickly. I mean, you talked to me previously about this idea of opine with a spine, right? Yes. The idea that to break through, you have to say something sharp, but you’re also saying that the risk is higher than ever, but you have to take that risk. There’s no way out of this bind. There’s no way out. Let me tell you. Weve got to give CMOs and marketers, all marketers at all levels, weve got to give [them] a break. It is a tough world out there. And so, yes, you have to opine with a spine, but you got to be careful what you opine on. So you need to pick the thing that truly makes sense for your brand and business. You cannot opine on everything. If you speak about everything, you’re speakingabout nothing. And if you end up speaking about things that you have not earned the right to speak about, you don’t have the credibility to speak about, you could end up in some real hot water that you don’t want to be on. Not the good kind of bath, the scalding kind of bath. So there really is that thoughtfulness that has to go into it.
Category:
E-Commerce
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