[thafman]

I once had a short conversation with Max Levchin (of PayPal fame) and the one thing he said that stuck in my mind -besides all the drivel about how Slide was going to change the world- was that 10% of a start-up's workforce should be metrics people, obsessed with measuring the company performance i.e. if you have a ten person start-up, at least one should should be an analyst, otherwise he said, the company is essentially flying blind.

From my own experience, if you can not only master the technical side of working with metrics, but be the kind of guy who can actually ask intelligent, relevant questions and structure them in a way that gets meaningful answers from raw data, then you are worth your weight in gold to any start-up.

[djb_hackernews]

I'd just like to leave a comment here, but I wonder if you misunderstood him. It seems more practical to me that every employee in a startup should dedicate time to metrics, and probably more than 10%. For instance, at the last startup I worked for, the CEO put together metrics useful for VC conversations/sales metrics etc. The CTO put together metrics on bug fix flow/hardware throughput etc, the VP of CS put together metrics on turnaround time on customer issues etc. Our architect kept metrics on time based data throughput.

I think it's a poor use of recources to dedicate one person to do all of that. The people steering the company at that stage should have a total hands on feel for the data and a level of indirection seems unnecessary.

I'd like to hear back from founders on this. Were you tracking metrics yourself? Do you think you were more or less effective that way?