Engineering Leadership: A Hiring Blueprint for $50M ARR to IPO
An analysis of the backgrounds of Engineering executives at SaaS companies from $50M ARR to IPO
We believe executive hiring is the final frontier within the modern organization that has yet to benefit from the proliferation of data. Despite having data to guide nearly every other business decision – and despite the criticality of executive hiring decisions – CEOs and Founders have heretofore largely relied on anecdotal guidance.
We hope this analysis, which examines the backgrounds of Engineering executives at SaaS companies from $50M ARR to IPO, serves as a north star as you build and scale your engineering organization.
Hiring Overview
- As a company scales past $50M ARR, CEOs often seek to hire a Head of Engineering from outside the organization.
- However, it also becomes 2.5x more common to promote someone internally relative to <$50M ARR companies.
- This may be attributed to companies having had sufficient time to develop internal talent and assess whether an individual has the technical and leadership skills necessary to lead the engineering organization through its growth.
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One of the key operational traits we evaluated is the prevalence of leaders with prior experience in leading entire engineering organizations. Interestingly, only approximately half of the externally hired leaders have prior Head of Engineering experience. Among those with such experience, most have led engineering organizations at companies of similar size or larger.
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In addition to prior leadership experience, we evaluated engineering leaders’ sector backgrounds. At the $50M+ ARR stage, Application companies are more willing to hire leaders from outside their sector, while Infrastructure companies generally skew towards leaders with an infrastructure-oriented background. This preference among Infrastructure companies is likely due to the higher technical complexity of infrastructure products.
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