Kevin is the VP of Engineering at Abnormal Security, overseeing all aspects of growth and execution. In this class, Kevin describes the requirements for building a well-rounded and highly functional engineering team from both a technical and cultural perspective. Kevin spent time at eBay and Quantcast prior to becoming an early-stage engineer leader at TellApart, then a Director of Engineering at Twitter.
I think there's a wide range of these that kind of come up.
Kevin W: There's at least three topics that come to mind for me, I think not individually unique to engineering, but recruiting is a big problem early on, and being able to find the right talent to bring in, to build your nucleus of the founding team, I think is super critical. That's true. Not across just engineering, but every other function, but most startups do start by building up their technical team.
So I think that's a really critical one that has to be solved. I think the second one has to be solved is building the right technical platform, To allow very fast and quick iteration and innovation to validate product market fit as quickly as possible. So making sure you make those right technical decisions upfront, cut the right corners and not cut the wrong ones is super critical.
And then I think the third one, is just setting. Cultural expectations because whatever that founding nucleus team does will become whether formally or informally codified as the way that this company behaves and what it values. And I think. Not explicit about that upfront. Just [00:01:00] very dangerous, right?
You'll end up. Calcifying just the random things that people happen to do for the first six months as the go-forward,hallmark right out of the way we want to behave as a team as well. So I think, across recruiting, culture, technology, a lot of different challenges that to be solved.
