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Nabeel’s worked at scrappy small scale, in hyper-growth mode, and at large public company scale several times over the last couple decades as a CEO, COO, and head of product. He now spends time at Spark Capital partnering with ambitious founders.

  1. Discuss the scary things first.
  2. Use visuals where you can to indicate good, bad, meh.
  3. Time scale your goals and performance: what needs to get done by next quarter, next year, by next fundraise.
  4. Aim to present things that are border-line controversial: If everyone is agreeing with you, you’re doing something wrong.
  5. Use OKRs as a mechanism of review to answer “why” goals are being met or missed. Always pose the question to yourself – are we moving too fast or too slow?

Outline

15
minutes

CEO Overview

Financials, OKRs, and KPIs
15
minutes

Team

Departmental Team Updates
30
minutes

Proposed New OKRs

Product Roadmap
60
minutes

Strategy

Board Approvals

About

For Nabeel Hyatt, product comes first, and everything else follows. He believes the technology that founders build, not the team’s pedigree or a big market size, says everything he needs to know about a company. “You can learn more about a team and how they see the world by simply experiencing their choices with the product than you ever could from a pitch,” he says. ‍

Nabeel has always been a maker. He started his first technology company at 16-years-old and spent the early part of his career as a serial entrepreneur, participating in his first IPO before the age of 25. His last company, Conduit Labs, was acquired by Zynga where he joined the leadership team through the hyper-growth of scaling from 200 to 2,000 employees in a few short years. In 2012, Nabeel joined Spark as a General Partner to open the firm’s San Francisco office.

Drawing on his entrepreneurial background, Nabeel backs companies that use technology and design to build revolutionary user experiences. He believes that providing founders with an unwavering support system for bringing their vision to life leads to products that will transform the way people interact with technology in the future. “There is no startup playbook,” he says. “I don’t prescribe a way to build your company—together we will figure out the best way.”

Try picking just one thing. Try making sure you will knock out of the park in the next 1, 2, or 3 months. It’s incredibly hard. But I think we all intuitively know it virtually never “all comes together” — it happens by simply, clearly, solving things one move at a time.

Nabeel Hyatt

Spark Capital

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