There are a few areas of expertise that can be critical to the success of a startup, especially early on.
We've built a full-time team at Google Ventures to work alongside our portfolio companies in each of these areas.
We've built a full-time team at Google Ventures to work alongside our portfolio companies in each of these areas.
Finding great people is critical, especially when the third person makes up 33% of the team. We are building our own recruiting team at Google Ventures, and along with the broader resources of Google Inc, we're helping founders hire their first five employees — and teaching them how to hire their next 50.
So far, we've worked with our companies to help them find top engineering talent, interview candidates, build a strong recruiting pipeline, think through compensation packages, and more.
If you are interested in opportunities with our portfolio companies, please join our talent network by sending your resume to gv‑jobs@google.com
Who are your users? How do they use your product? How can you make their experience seamless and fun? These are the some of the questions that our in-house user experience team has helped our portfolio companies understand.
For example, our user experience designer helped a portfolio company redesign one of its key products — and improved the product's performance by over 2x. Our user researcher conducted interviews with users and analyzed the results to help another portfolio company understand how to position a new product in a hyper-competitive market.
Building products that are robust and scale to millions (or billions) of users can be daunting. The Google Ventures engineering experts, composed of engineers who faced these challenges at Google every day, work with portfolio companies on a wide range of problems — whether that's picking a particular piece of software or working through a complete backend redesign.
One portfolio company, for example, embarked on a major rewrite of their platform. One of our engineering experts from Google Ventures worked alongside their engineering team for weeks, to help make decisions about the technology and data models, and help recode their website. We aren't afraid to tackle hands-on work if helpful to the entrepreneur.
Bring questions, curiosity, and unsolved problems to the table, as you and others in the Google Ventures portfolio interact with a team of experts in a small classroom-like setting. Topics range from, "Quick 'n Dirty User Research," to "Website Scalability," to "Fundamentals of Security." Instructors hail from both the Google Ventures team and various groups at Google Inc., and occasionally from industry-leading companies that don't start with the letter "G."
We're in the early days of our experimental Startup Lab, a space near our Mountain View headquarters. At Startup Lab, companies that are just getting started or building a presence in Silicon Valley can work, surrounded by other Google Ventures entrepreneurs, with ready access to the thousands of Googlers who are just next door.
While we generally focus on these key areas, startups face plenty of other challenges — building a great company culture and learning to successfully launch a product, to name a few. That's where we turn to one of our most valuable resources: the tens of thousands of Googlers — scientists, engineers, product marketers, product managers, former CEOs and founders, statisticians, human capital managers, and others — who are ready to pitch in.
