Christina Cacioppo, founder and CEO of Vanta, describes how Union Square Ventures uniquely structured its hiring process when she applied early in her career.
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Cacioppo: USV invests in markets and ideas over founder personalities
“USV, I think they're good at a lot of things. They are very, very, like, market and idea driven. And, you know, like all investment theses, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but I think their, like, fundamental world view to me was if you pick, or if a…”
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Cacioppo: Build your startup's leadership team when you hit 20 employees
“If you are growing and you feel like your product market fit, start at 20, such that you don't You don't have to start later when everything is kind of even more chaotic.”
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Cacioppo: The median startup downside is a multi-year slog, not sudden collapse
“And I think again at USV I'd seen that actually starting the company isn't the hard part. That's, you know, shockingly easy. The hard part is like in year four when it's not really working, but you've raised this money and you have employees and you're still d…”
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Cacioppo: How Vanta automated compliance despite intentionally ambiguous industry regulations
“These regulations are complex and nuanced, and there's, they're actually Full of gray and the gray is kind of purposeful so companies can figure out what's best for themselves. But I think that ambiguity led lots of folks to look at it and say, oh, you can't a…”
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Cacioppo: Big tech engineers were the wrong profile for early Vanta
“Asking someone, hey, you're, you have this career path at the Silicon Valley company, you have this mortgage, you have this annual bonus, like, do you want to make one third of that amount and like sit in a room with us and see if this will work? It was like a…”
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Cacioppo: Vanta tests candidates with real internal problems to prevent surprise
“The questions, the exercises in our interview process are all sort of ripped from the headlines. Like, they are just real things we are thinking through. And I think repeatedly through the interview process, trying to be very direct and transparent about what …”