Hi, I'm Charles
Based in London, I’m British-Lebanese and grew up in various countries across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. I love terrible jokes, looking at designer houses I will never live in, and tormenting my wife and children with my piano playing.
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
GTM @ PostHog
- $0 -> $50m ARR, 10 people -> 200, $14m raised -> $194m
- Scaling the sales, CS, marketing, demand gen, and support machine, from zero to many
- Founding ops, finance, talent, and people person
- Writing large chunks of our public handbook
- Keeping the culture weird with things like unhinged billboards, isgoogleanalyticsillegal.com and dictatorortechbro.com
Things I’ve written about
- How I actually get good advice
- Collaboration sucks - hit #1 on Hacker News
- 32 things we’ve learned about building a startup that scales
- 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 after making one investment (phew)
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
Books I’m reading
I use Storygraph and always appreciate a recommendation
I keep a separate study list of things I find interesting here