Business model, product, market, timing: all key success factors for any startup (and pretty much any organization!
But team, is an ever-evolving puzzle that changes shape over time. Pitching to investors or accelerators? What’s on paper grabs their attention: technical cofounder, tick. Digital marketing, tick. Worked in a startup before, tick. Domain knowledge, tick.
With so many startups, the pool of candidates available as tech co-founders seems to be shrinking, while the opposite seems to be the case for business founders! A subject for a different discussion. In any case, putting together a startup team is hard. Personality, skills gaps, personal situation, phase in life, all comes into play.
People do what they need to to assemble a team that ticks the boxes. Some are lucky and the glue is deeper than the ticks. For many, the desire to make it happen isnt enough and the team parts ways.
Even slightly misaligned, co-founders make or break. Team is hard.
Going into business with a friend solves the trust factor. Shared histories, similar levels of experience and a common starting goal all make it easy to come together. In my previous startup, my cofounder and I had the odds in our favour: being in the business world long enough allowed us to take all the logical precautions and put in checks and balances. Skills overlap, no problem – divide roles and responsibilities etc. Skills gaps: outsource or hire. Rational, organized, efficient. But looking back, that probably wasn’t enough. Personal lives always triumph the best intentions, and unless everyone in the team is constantly self-reflecting, we become our own worst enemies. Nowhere near as bad as corporate politics, but startup dynamics can punch above it’s weight.
What keeps teams together is a mutual need. But over time, human nature makes us all believe we can do it better ourselves. Insecurities, the need to prove something, or sometimes just ego and a refusal to recognize where the problem lies all weaken the bond. In the enterprise, there is always someone above to play referee, fair or unfair. In a bootstrapped start-up, everyone has to weigh the consequences of disagreement. Sometimes wrongly, but it’s a matter of choosing battles. Skills gaps and overlaps cost time and compound other errors.
Looking back, we did a decent job of managing the simple stuff. But setback after setback, delay after delay can wear the team down. Death by a 1000 cuts, as Cenk, my cofounder put it once, after a particularly rough period at home and in the office.
Team members who are friends will likely continue to share the personal sides of their lives, but probably to preserve this friendship, may end up avoiding the difficult cofounder conversations. I think this was true in our case. Every now and then we’d try to sit down for the difficult discussions, but events would overtake us – there was always a huge workload to distract us. We failed to have the difficult conversations fast enough, and when we did, we didn’t act decisively enough. Speed can be a startup’s biggest advantage and dithering and not deciding comes at a price.
Injecting fresh perspectives into the team can catalyze the team. But recruiting a paid team is hard enough. Convincing someone to join your vision is double edged: the folks that are ready to jump into a startup for less (no) money have already envisioned one of their own; and those that want to join you cant afford to! We tried a few times to bring in others, but it just never worked out. A lot of consultants and freelancers wanted to work with us (for cash of course) and we came close with a few really excellent advisory board candidates. But not the right people who could ride with us on the train as a cofounder. The search can fade over time and in our case, I think it did.
Team is hard. As the startup grows and scales, I think it gets harder, despite having the money to pay people!