Hi, I'm Charles
Based in London, I was born and raised in the UAE and grew up in various countries across the Middle East, Africa and Europe. I love terrible jokes, beautifully crafted sandwiches and looking at designer houses I will never live in. I like to torment my children with my piano playing and spend more time than is reasonable making lists of things, à la High Fidelity.
Get in touch if you ever want to chat all things scaling when it comes to startups! Just stick hello in front of this site.
What I’m doing now
Generic Exec Person @ PostHog
- $0 -> $XXm ARR, 10 people -> 120, $14m raised -> $119m
- Scaling the sales, marketing, ops, finance, and people machine, from zero to many
- Writing large chunks of our public handbook
- Coming up with weird things like unhinged billboards, isgoogleanalyticsillegal.com and dictatorortechbro.com
Stuff I’ve written about startups
- How software salespeople will try to screw you (and how to fight back)
- How to buy software in an enterprise company
- Developer marketing for early-stage startups - what I’ve learned - hit #1 on Hacker News
- Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we’ve learned - hit #1 on Hacker News
- 43 things we’ve learned about hiring at PostHog
- Obvious and non-obvious ways to write great job ads
- Hiring (and managing) cracked engineers
- What startup recruiters actually see when you apply for a job
- Making your first startup ops hire - what founders should look for
What I’ve done before
founder @ hedgehog.vc
- Created a VC fund from scratch during a 48-hour hackathon, focused on early-stage open source investing, made one investment and they got into YC
- Now retired with 100% hit rate
COO @ Vitl
- Looked after ops, product, R&D, CS, and legal
- Was interim CTO for a lot longer than was sensible
- Ran process for 2 big licensing deals to giant pharma companies
Various @ ROLI
- $0 -> $XXm ARR, 15 people -> 150, $4m raised -> $70m
- Did basically every non-engineering role (all ops flavours, product, Chief of Staff, program management, etc.)
- Met Stevie Wonder
Where I’ve studied
- University of Cambridge - BA Hons, Law
- SOAS, University of London - MSc, Public Policy & Management
- Imperial College, London - MBA
I learned nothing about startups at any of these places
Books I’m reading
I use Storygraph and always appreciate a recommendation
I keep a separate study list of things I find interesting here