Internal Documentation

Welcome, François (and Rel 40)

December 1, 2023 (Review of Week EOY-5)

Hi, y’all - Happy Friday! First of all, it feels great to be wrapping up the year with François onboarding in December! Welcome, and buckle in!

It’s been an eventful week for product: Release 40 is out – kudos to Chuck and Jason! While the first half(?) of multiple building projects is welcome, I feel like the fact that we’re back on regular releases is no less an accomplishment. We were fast out of the gate with our initial product, then fast in making incremental improvements for our early customers. It’s great to be back on track after our recent slowdown.

In our chat earlier today about Crossing the Chasm, I suggested that we may be early to the chasm because of our industry track record; I think our ability to actually deliver a product has contributed, too - As Marc says: the opportunities are right in front of us, and we just need to deliver the product that folks are waiting on.

Revenue

  • New revenue this week: 0 (next on deck is Related Co)

  • 2023 ARR: $301,130

  • 2023 New customers: 11

  • Outstanding invoices as of Nov 30: $99,152.39

This Week’s Highlights

  • François onboard!

  • Offer made to Mech-e candidate!

  • Release 40: Multiple building projects (pt. 1)

  • Good call with TC, our Catalyst Innovation Labs investor. He continues to be really engaged–and we’ll soon sign an NDA so we can keep being very frank.

  • Completed docs for MA MBE certification & CA foreign corp registration

  • Submitted an application to EPRI, the association of electric utilities, to do what we’re doing for ConEd somewhere outside of NY. Fingers crossed. This came via NYU Urban Future Lab!

On Deck for Next Week

Here’s what’s on my radar screen - Anything missing?

Releases:

  • Wednesday release: an admin tool (temporary) for Jason to correct wonky addresses; improvements for generating Willdan monthly reports; file uploads

  • Friday release: DevSquad items, TBD

Events:

  • Urban Future Lab showcase event

Investors:

  • 3 intro/catch-up meetings for potential Seed round investors

It was a whirlwind 62 days of searching! Here’s a look-back on how it played out.

First, the funnel. Here’s the pass rate from stage to stage:

  Expected Actual
resume → tech screen 50% 36%
tech screen → interview 40% 36%
interview 1 → interview 2 15% 38%

More than half were slated to go to interview 1, but we sorted by strength of technical background based on the screen, so in the end, not everyone who passed the tech screen got a first interview (which was with me).

We (John, Reuben, and I) discussed whether I would go first or they would do the technical interviews first. In the end, I was glad that we went with me going first. We had many candidates who had great (on paper) technical backgrounds, so it was really important to gauge the culture and management-style fit early.

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I was also really curious how the climate focused job boards would fare against Hacker News. These are pretty small numbers, so may not mean anything at all, but the pattern seems to be that even though only 22% of Hacker News resumes made it to interview 1, there were just so many candidates coming through HN that they still made up a big part of each phase. Ditto LinkedIn.

The three sources with the highest survival rate from resume to interview were referrals, Work on Climate (a Slack group for people looking to get into climate careers), and Tech Jobs for Good. Assuming the basis of the referrals was climate interest, maybe what these numbers suggest is that because we are strongly selecting for mission alignment, the climate-focused job boards work well for us. The exception seems to be Climatebase – could it be that engineering leaders make up a smaller portion of their pool of candidates?

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I’m pleased by the speedy movement from phase to phase, and the efforts we made to be very communicative to everyone who applied. Every single resume we got was reviewed by a person and no one was ever ghosted. I don’t know whether people appreciated it or not, but I’m satisfied we did the right things.

Everyone (including you, François!) participated in this process, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on how our first really procedurally buttoned-up search went!