Real and Fake Vice Presidents

Choosing who is on the executive management team presents a big dilemma for a CEO of a startup.

Startups, are your VPs real or fake? You can get by with really smart people in the early stages of startup2. But what about when you’re trying to build scale?

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Choosing who is on the executive management team presents a big dilemma for a CEO of a startup. At some point in the life of a startup, the executive team must be able to build scale and manage the business. Jason Lemkin explains what he means when he talks about "real" vice presidents

What I mean by fake VP is once you get to 8 to 10 million, half of any VP’s job is going to be recruiting and managing a team. If its sales it will probably all be internal resources. If it’s marketing, it may be a mix of external resources and internal resources. But it’s a management game, and the problem often is we hire folks who are really smart and we want to believe in them, and they are up and comers, but if they have no management experience, they often stumble really hard when it comes time to hire four, five, six, 10 people for the team.

There are exceptions, but especially in sales I almost never see someone that can scale as a VP of sales that has never built at least a small team before. That I call a fake VP.