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“It’s something I thought I’d never do,” one founder told me yesterday. He had hired a recruiter to help him grow his team. But at some point in time, most quickly growing startups will need help forming their teams.

We kicked off searches at two Redpoint companies in earlier this year in addition to several last year and I’ve been taking notes on each of the processes. One of my partners, Tim Haley, was a top recruiter in the valley for many years and having his experience and expertise has been invaluable. These are my notes:

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Even in infrastructure, many of the big data technologies driving increases in IT spending like Hadoop and Cassandra were developed by consumer internet companies (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, etc date: 2012-10-17

The first mobile phones were purchased by corporations and given to employees. Thirty years ago, most people used computers at work but not at home. Most of the innovation flowed from the enterprise into the home. Today, it’s very much the opposite.

The big trends in enterprise trace the opposite movement both at the software layer and the device layer: consumerization of IT means using consumer channels to acquire customers and bring your own device (BYOD) means 66% of employees bring their own devices to work.

You’re walking down the hallway at work from one meeting to the next. A colleague or report stops you en route, asks for a minute and presents an important problem. It’s easy to respond with “let me think about it” and duck into the meeting. In that half-second, all the responsibility of the decision has been transferred. Unlike a minute ago, you have the monkey on your back.

The challenge with these situations is two-fold. First, you’re unlikely to have enough information to make a decision. Second, no time has been allocated to solving the problem.

One way of measuring the efficiency of a company’s revenue model is to benchmark revenue per employee. Google and Facebook, the two most efficient companies, generate $1M per revenue per employee per year.

Setting aside those exceptional cases and focusing instead on SaaS companies, the typical average revenue per employee is about $190k to $210k per year. The histogram above shows the ranges for publicly traded SaaS companies.

Financial statements are a Rosetta Stone for startups. They reveal the strategies and the tactics of how to bring a product to market. These are the ten metrics I look at when sifting through a startup’s operational model, whether when considering an investment or in a board meeting.

1. Revenue growth indicates how quickly a company can grow under the current way of doing business. The top line shows whether the market affords steady growth (SaaS) or lumpy revenue growth created by the long sales cycles of big customers (Telecom) and whether the company must sell one product or a collection of complementary products. The revenue growth projections indicate the potential of the business.

On January 8, 1966, the New Yorker profiled Buckminster Fuller for the first time. During a trip to a Maine island with the journalist Calvin Tomkins, Fuller said something tremendously prescient:

Fuller proposed a worldwide technological revolution…[that] would take place quite independently of politics or ideology; it would be carried out by what he calls “comprehensive designers” who would coordinate resources and technology on a world scale for the benefit of all mankind, and would constantly anticipate future needs while they found ever-better ways of providing more and more from less and less.

The traditional theoretical price demand curve is often drawn like this. The chart makes two points: there is some relationship between price and demand / revenue opportunity, and customer segments underpin that relationship. Each segment demands different products to satisfy different needs and presents a different revenue/profit opportunity.

Even if the details are very hazy, price demand curves are useful tools to inform product strategy and prioritization. To make PD curves useful requires marketing research. It means identifying customer segments, estimating the the demand of each segment, quantifying the investment required to build the right product, and uncovering the costs of acquiring and servicing customers within that segment. After all that, there’s also a process of testing various price points to get a better sense of price elasticity. All of these are useful in the process of establishing product market fit.

Raising money for a startup is expensive. The typical legal fees for a Series A are about 1% of the total money raised: roughly $40k on $4M. Of course, this doesn’t factor in the time for the process and the dilution of the investment.

But if your startup is considering an IPO be prepared to pay eight times as much in fees. Across 360 venture backed technology IPOs in the last 10+ years which on average raised $107M, 8.8% of the dollars the startup raises in the initial public offering is paid to investment banks, accountants and attorneys.

When startups are acquired, there are many considerations in accepting an offer. Does the vision of the acquirer fit the startup? Will the startup operate independently or be integrated? What is the price and structure of the transaction?

Most of these questions have to be answered through extensive conversations with suitors. As for the structure of the acquisition, there’s data that can be used for benchmarking. I’ve assembled about 2400 M&A events of venture-backed technology companies since 2000 to compare the fraction of the total consideration which is stock and cash.