The Silent Data Hire Delay

The first data hire usually lands a funding round later than it should have.

At seed, the engineers handle data on the side, and it works. At Series A, the board wants metrics, someone builds them in a weekend, and they’re mostly right. Around Series B, finance, sales and product all ask for numbers, the answers disagree, and now it’s urgent.

At every step the pain is spread thin enough that nobody owns the decision to hire. The CTO thinks it’s a finance problem. Finance thinks it’s an engineering problem.

When the hire finally happens, it’s usually a panic hire: one person, expected to build the platform, clean up the history and answer the board by next quarter.

I’d bring in a senior data person, full-time or fractional, the first time two people bring different numbers for the same metric to the same meeting.

What was the meeting where your numbers first disagreed?