Hiring is hard

We recently began a search for a new VP Products & Marketing. Starting to see some good candidates but it's going to be hard to find the right mix between the outbound/positional side of things and the product direction/product management needs we have. Not quite as hard perhaps as hiring a VP Sales, which can be a life-or-death hire for start-ups, but tough nonetheless. There's still a lot about our business model, positioning, pricing ,market segmentation etc. that has yet to be nailed down so the candidate will have to own driving those issues to ground. In addition, there's still all the outbound marketing work to do, customer visits, building bridges to engineering (non-trivial given they are all based overseas) etc. Yes, work for at least three senior people.

Alas, and perhaps more so than in established companies, start-ups cannot afford to hire multiple people to cover-off one function such as this, but neither can the business afford to compromise on the quality and breadth of whoever that one person is who does get the role. This one may run and run.