justinY
Joined 17 years ago
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Comment · 13 years ago
500friends founder/CEO here.
It's not that people with 12+ years of experience are not as good. We were trying to screen out candidates (many of them who are smart) but have been "managers" for so long that they can't get their hands dirty and solve issues themselves (something you have to do at a very small team).
Don't take my word for it, 26% of people on our team are older than 38. If you're bored, check out some of their bios at 500friends.com/team
Admittedly however, this was not clear in our post, and it has since been edited.
Thanks!!
Comment · 13 years ago
Hello sir. 500friends founder/CEO here.
It's not that people with 12+ years of experience are not as good. We were trying to screen out candidates (many of them who are smart) but have been "managers" for so long that they can't get their hands dirty and solve issues themselves (something you have to do at a very small team).
Don't take my word for it, 26% of people on our team are older than 38. If you're bored, check out their bios at 500friends.com/team
Admittedly however, this was not clear in our post, and it has since been edited.
Thanks!!
Comment · 13 years ago
Brian,
In our original job post, we had specified that the ideal candidate would, "not have more than 12 years of MANAGEMENT experience." We UNDERSTAND that this could be misunderstood to indicate that we do not value experienced people. As you can see from the seniority in our team however, this is far from the truth. The intent here was to indicate that we are looking for a "hands-on" VP of Engineering. Someone who has coded in the last decade and can solve issues themselves (rather than asking their engineering manager to then delegate it to a developer :).
Don't take my word for it, check out the people who work at my company - 500friends.com/team. 50%+ are 30+, and 25%+ are 38+
Formerly, he was SVP at Merkle (acquired by Dentsu for $2B) via the acquisition of his company 500friends, a provider of SaaS loyalty marketing solutions backed by $12M+ from Crosslink Capital, Intel Capital, Silicon Valley Bank, and YCombinator. He is also an investor in Mobovida (Series A), Hipmunk (acquired by Concur), Bounce Exchange (seed, Series A), Dropoff (seed), First Opinion (seed, former member of the BOD), Firebase (acquired by Google), and Zencoder (acquired by Brightcove).
Prior to 500friends, he dropped out of high school to found two e-commerce marketplace companies, both of which were acquired after reaching $10M+ in revenues.