Perret: Early-career professionals should join startups with 100 to 500 employees
Zach Perret · 20VC: Plaid's Zach Perret on Why You Have To Hire For Spikes and What That Really Means, Fintech Predictions From Incumbent Entrants To The Rise of Europe & The 2 Big Questions That CEOs Should Ask Themselves · Jun 7, 2019 · at 6:56
Zach Perret is the co-founder and CEO of Plaid. He offers career advice to recent graduates evaluating whether to join early startups, mid-stage companies, or large incumbents.
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“The path seems to be joining a mid to late stage company and learning a great deal, then kind of having your pick of what you want to do after that. There's a particular phase of a company somewhere between kind of a hundred and maybe 500 people, maybe a thousand people, where the scope of work that you get is really broad. The company is moving really quickly, and there's a lot of challenges, which gives you a lot of opportunity.”
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“I think it's going to be one of the blog posts that is the most misused and actually causes a lot of the worst behavior in startups for a long time.”
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“So the question, is the VC product kind of played out? I think it's kind of played out.”
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“I don't think that most people, like, immediately orient on value, the dollar value of the acquisition. Like, sure, yeah, it reaches a threshold and the dollar value, like, starts to make sense. But I think when people really go through that Agony around selli…”
Perret: Walking away from the Visa acquisition was a 99-1 decision
“And ended up making what I think was a 51 49 call to say, like, it's the right answer to sell the business. For a variety of reasons at the time. A year later, we had that same meeting, same group of people sitting in my living room, having the same, same styl…”
Perret: Startups over-index on early defensibility and ignore late-stage moats
“I think a lot of people worry too much about defensibility In the immediate term and like at the start of a new project and they were far too little about defensibility in the late stages.”
Perret: Hiring an early VP of Sales is wrong for enterprise founders
“One of the most common early stage things that people will tell small companies is you need to go hire a VP of sales. If you're an enterprise company, if you're able to do founder-driven sales, like, I think that's actually totally wrong.”