[tonystubblebine]

I've been a VPE coming in from the outside. One thing to note right away is that the OP is talking about growing startups. That means that there are usually plenty of things wrong in the startup that everyone agrees are wrong but haven't made a decision on how to fix yet. So, absolutely, the new executive should be facilitating solutions well before 90 days.

As I recall, in my first 90 days:

1. On day one several people hinted to me about work from an under performing contractor. On day 2, I met with this contractor and looked at his code. On day 3 I put him on a performance improvement plan. On day 8 I decided that he was the wrong fit for the role and ended his contract. Great guy, but he was just hired for one thing and then asked to do something else. But there wasn't anyone else who was really qualified to track down whether the problem was direction or fit.

2. There was a general consensus that we weren't shipping code fast enough. On week 3 we implemented Scrum (it was 2005). The engineers kind of hated it. But Scrum achieved what was needed. The rest of the company had enough visibility into development speed to realize that the problem with the company was bad product/market fit, not bad developers. We pivoted a bunch of times. Twitter was one of those pivots.

3. We were running our own servers in a cage at 360 Main. Those servers had been setup originally by one of the founders. There was definitely a desktop computer in there serving production code. The servers were administered by various engineers on the team (administered poorly because it's not what they wanted to be doing). So I started recruiting for a sysadmin. I definitely had hired him within the first 60 days.

There were plenty of things in there that I tried to fix as well and failed at. I can't imagine an exec coming into a startup and not trying to fix things. 90 days is an eternity. Normally there's so much wrong that the exec actually has a lot of latitude from day 1.