top of page
Search

Stage of Company

Updated: 3 days ago

When you are thinking about your career, it is important to:


This table (and the 🐶 analogies below;) will help you clarify what stage to focus on.   When you are communicating your stage focus to others, we recommend using FTE ranges because people typically don’t know the financing or revenue details of a company

Stage

Round

Revenue

FTEs

Focused on

Typical Roles Hired at Stage

Startup

Pre-Seed

$0M

<3

Product-market fit

Founder mode

Early

Seed

<$1M

3-10

Channel-market fit

Head of sales

Early

A

<$2M

10-30

Channel-market fit

VP Sales Head of CS

Mid

B

$5-20m

30-150

Scale

VP Marketing VP People

Mid

C

$15-25m

150-400

Scale

CRO VP of CS VP RevOps VP Finance

Mid

D

$25-100m

400-1k

Efficiency

CMO, CFO

Late

E+

$100m+

1k+

IPO

CCO CISO

What stage fits you?

  • Startup (Everyone has a dog and someone makes cookies every Friday)  Hungry generalists who are uncomfortable being bored and secretly enjoy a little chaos. They probably did poorly in school (despite their high test scores), but instead got really into arcane subjects like Russian History or never left the computer lab.   

  • Early (There's too many dogs. How can we decide who gets to bring a dog in? Also, who ate all the friggin cookies that clearly had my name on them)  Can the person succeed in chaos/lack of structure? The person needs to be willing to wear multiple hats, work hard, iterate, fail fast, pivot, etc. None of this intimidates them…they thrive in it.  They flourish in lack of structure, are resourceful and scrappy and can develop processes and drive operational efficiencies.  They can juggle multiple buyer personas and KPIs.   

  • Mid (We can't bring dogs in anymore because of the "chocolate incident". Somebody writes a negative review on Glassdoor about how there used to be cookies) can this person take lessons they learned and develop repeatable processes for scale?  As the company is maturing, there are more leaders and departments so this person will need to have the ability to work cross departmentally and be flexible/welcoming to feedback.  Executive team that can scale globally and through an acquisition is important, so things get more complex. Many of your early-stage leadership can't hang here, so you'll need to figure out what to do with them. 

  • Late (There is now an "Official Cookie Policy") Bureaucracy kicks in. People have to be good at advocating and communicating business strategy with clear business cases/justification. There’s a lot of managing up/managing sideways/managing down, etc., more so than at the earlier stages.  It starts to take a long time to get things done here. Departmental silos and knowledge gaps start to materialize.


Network with the right stage investors

Investors and talent partners are powerful partners in your search (see our articles on how to engage and leverage both 👆). Their motivations can also vary so know which type of investor-backing you want to prioritize.


Everyone can use our Investor database to find which firms invest at the right stage.

Paid members can further:


bottom of page