Hi, I'm Charles

Born and raised in the UAE, I’m half British, half Lebanese, and grew up in various countries across the Middle East, Africa and Europe. I’m now based in London. I love terrible jokes, beautifully crafted sandwiches and looking at designer houses I will never live in. I like to occasionally torment my sons with my piano playing and spend more time than is probably 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.

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What I’m doing now

Generic Exec Person @ PostHog

• Running a well-oiled sales, marketing, ops, finance, and people machine
• Came up with weird things like isgoogleanalyticsillegal.com and dictatorortechbro.com
• Wrote large chunks of our public handbook

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Stuff I’ve written about startups

Marketing

• 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
• How we spend our marketing budget at PostHog (with actual $ figures)

Sales

• How software salespeople will try to screw you (and how to fight back)
• How to buy software in an enterprise company

Hiring

• 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
• Myths (and truths) I’ve learned from 10 years of startup hiring
• Startups, stop treating engineers like a different species

Ops & Finance

• The ops toolkit for early-stage startups
• How to run finance at your startup without hiring a finance person
• Don’t bother securing your trademarks in the beginning

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What I’ve done before

partner @ hedgehog.vc

• Created a VC fund from scratch during a 48-hour hackathon, focused on early-stage open source investing
• Now hibernating

COO @ Vitl

• Looked after ops, product, R&D, CS, and legal
• Restructured and ran tech team as interim CTO
• Ran process on 2 major licensing deals to giant pharma companies

Various @ ROLI

• Held several roles - Director of Product, Chief of Staff to the Founder, Head of Program Management, and more
• Grew the business from 15 to 150+ people
• Raised $70m+ through Series A and B (and then spent it)

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Where I’ve studied

• University of Cambridge - BA Hons, Law
• School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London - MSc, Public Policy & Management
• Imperial College, London - MBA

I learned nothing about startups at any of these places

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Books I’m reading

I use Storygraph and always appreciate a recommendation

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