Middle managers who are a start-up's unsung heroes

On April 1, 2004, Eileen Burbidge stepped off the overnight flight from San Francisco to London. After years of working in various roles at Silicon Valley companies such as Apple, Yahoo and Sun Microsystems, she was taking up a job in the UK as Skype's product development director.

The internet video calls company then employed about 20 people across offices in London and Tallinn, Estonia. Ms Burbidge's plan was to go to her hotel for a shower, then head straight to work to show how keen she was. But before she could even wash, her eager colleagues sent a message asking when she would arrive.

Her arrival was a matter of urgency because of the speed at which Skype was expanding. She describes the next year as the "rocket ship" phase. Given her prior experience, she could advise how to steer it. "It helped that somebody had a playbook in mind, to map how we should grow."

When Ms Burbidge arrived, tens of thousands had downloaded Skype. Within weeks that became hundreds of thousands. Soon it was millions. Over the next 12 months, the London office went from a staff of five to 50. In 2005, shortly after Ms Burbidge left Skype, it was sold to eBay for $2.6bn.

When the tale of a tech success such as Skype is told, much of the credit - rightly - goes to the boss. In start-up land, all hail the cult of the young founder. These origin stories follow a pattern. Twenty-something male, through inspiration and pluck, builds tech company that changes the world (through an app, available to download). But among these founder myths, few odes are sung to middle managers such as Ms Burbidge. Less is known about these sometimes older, often wiser heads. They are the product managers, sales executives and marketing heads who transform a start-up into a grown-up.

Ms Burbidge, now a partner at Passion Capital, a London-based venture capital firm, says there are a few prerequisites that budding tech groups need to bloom: lots of money, skilled computer engineers and, yes, compelling leadership. But also, she adds, a bench of experienced executives who know how to scale a fast-growing tech company.

In California, hot start-ups already know this. They poach key staff from the trailblazers that went before them. These savvy hires soon become industry stars in their own right.

When Mark Zuckerberg needed someone to build the advertising business for his social network, he grabbed Sheryl Sandberg from Google. She had previously run the search company's sales operation.

When Evan Spiegel, chief executive of Snapchat, needed someone to do the same for his ephemeral-messaging app, he nabbed Emily White, a former lieutenant of Ms Sandberg, who had negotiated the first advertising deals for Instagram, the social network's photo app service.

Miracle-Gro executives are abundant in the Valley. Elsewhere, they are harder to unearth. Hiroki Takeuchi, 28-year-old founder and CEO of GoCardless, a London-based online payments group, says he can find computer engineers aplenty. But for months he has failed to find the ideal candidate for the post of vice-president for marketing. "These are people who will have a large amount of influence," he says. "A year ago, there were no layers of managers here. But once you get to a certain scale, you need a certain level of management, as long as they have an appreciation for the need for speed."

Tech's tender entrepreneurs are often mocked for monumental egos and megalomaniac ambitions. But I've found the very best are humble enough to know the debt they owe their teams.

Patrick Collison is CEO and co-founder of Stripe, a San-Francisco based payments group recently valued at $3.5bn. A couple of years ago at the Dublin Web Summit, the 26-year-old Irishman was feted like a rock star. As local techies lined up to take selfies with him, Mr Collison seemed embarrassed. He told me the founder's role has been overplayed, reckoning that, once the company reached a certain size, it was the executive bench that made the real difference.

"I'm the CEO and the buck stops here on every decision we make," he told me. "But everything we do, that is not my work. I help steer it . . . but it's not my work. If it is, then it's a small part and an increasingly small part."The writer is the FT's European technology correspondent

[email protected]: @muradahmed

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