Startup CXO. Matt Blumberg

      After selling Return Path, and finishing up the second edition of Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, my colleagues and I at our new startup Bolster started envisioning a new book as a sequel or companion to Startup CEO.

      Simply put, the first book left me with the nagging feeling that it wasn't enough to only help CEOs excel, because starting and scaling a business is a collective effort. What about the other critical leadership functions that are needed to grow a company? If you're leading HR, or Finance, or Marketing, or any key function inside a startup, what resources are available to you? What should you be thinking about? What does “great” look like for your function? What challenges lurk around the corner as you scale your function that you might not be focused on today? What are your fellow executives focused on in their own departments, and how can you best work together? If you're a CEO who has never managed all these functions before, what should you be looking for when you hire and manage all these people? If you're an aspiring executive, from entry‐level to manager to director, what do you need to think about as you grow your career and develop your skills? And if you're a board member or investor, what scorecard or metrics are you using to ensure your companies and investments are achieving greatness?

That was the origin of this new book, Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams. This book is a “book of books,” with eleven separate, detailed Parts, one for each major function inside a company, each composed of several discrete short chapters outlining the key playbooks for each functional leadership role in the company. Because it covers CFOs, CMOs, CPOs, etc.—we landed on “Startup CXO” as the name.

      America's “startup revolution” continues to gather steam. There are increasing numbers of venture capital investors, seed funds, and accelerators supporting increasing numbers of entrepreneurial ventures. While there are a number of books in the marketplace about CEOs and leadership, and some about individual functional disciplines (lots of books on the topic of Sales, the topic of Product Development, and the like), there are very few books that are practical how‐to guides for any individual function, and none that wrap all these functions into a compendium that can be used by a whole startup executive team. Very simply, each Part in this book will serve as a how‐to guide for a given executive, and taken together, the book will be a good how‐to guide for startup executive teams in general. The eleven Parts are:

       Part 1 Introduction (Chapters 1 and 2)

       Part 2 Finance and Administration (Chapters 3–23)

       Part 3 People and Human Resources (Chapters 24–41)

       Part 4 Marketing (Chapters 42–53)

       Part 5 Sales (Chapters 54–69)

       Part 6 Business/Corporate Development (Chapters 70–82)

       Part 7 Customer Success and Account Management (Chapters 83–94)

       Part 8 Product and Engineering (Chapters 95–108)

       Part 9 Privacy (Chapters 109–121)

       Part 10 Operations (Chapter 122)

       Part 11 The Future of Executive Work (Chapters 123–132)

      We also have a number of ancillary materials—templates and charts—that would normally be included in an Appendix. Because the book is already over 600 pages we decided to provide that material externally on our Startup Revolution website: “http://www.startuprev.com” www.startuprev.com.

This book carries my name as its principal author, and although I'm writing parts of it and editing it, I'm not THE author, I'm AN author. That's an important point. The book has a very large number of contributors and external reviewers and you'll probably notice a different “voice” for each Part. That's what you should see with multiple authors, but despite the various perspectives, we're all focused on providing a playbook for each functional area including the mistakes we made, what we would do differently, and what worked really well. Each Part has one or two principal authors who have the experience, credibility, and expertise to share something of value with others in their specific functional disciplines—most of my Bolster co‐founders are writing Parts, and the others are being written by former Return Path executive colleagues or members of Bolster's network. And that is a good lead‐in to a few caveats before you embark on the book.

      First, although most of the book is being written by former Return Path executives, it is not meant to be the Return Path story. Every author here has 20–30 years of experience working at multiple companies of different sizes and at different stages and in different sectors on which he or she is drawing. It's also not the story of Bolster, the new company that a number of us started earlier this year, although Startup CXO is pretty closely related to Bolster's business of helping assess and place on‐demand CXO talent.

      Related, this book is based on the experience of the contributors—as with Startup CEO, for the most part, that means U.S.‐based tech or tech‐enabled services businesses. Most of us have more B2B experience than B2C, although a number of us have both. Some of the authors write a lot about people, some write a lot about process, some are philosophical, some are more practical and tactical. They reflect the nature of those functions and the nature of the writers of those Parts. I hope the book proves to be timeless and that it spans cultural and industry boundaries but there will be some inherent limitations based on our own experience.

A few notes on language. We realize that not every leadership role in a startup is actually a “C”‐level role. Sometimes the most senior person running a functional department is an SVP, a VP, or even a Director or Manager. But Startup Functional Leader is a lousy title for a book. There are also some elements of language worth noting up front. First, we got a lot of feedback