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How to Build the Ultimate Start-up Team

Entrepreneurship


Table of contents

Relationships are hard. It's even harder in startups where the ups and downs cause tensions to run high. Almost twice as many startups fail due to people problems than any other problems.

How do we mitigate this risk? By finding the right co-founders and setting clear expectations.

🤨 How to choose the right people

  1. Shared vision: Find people with the same values and reasons for starting a business. Know their ambition, family, and life situation. You'll see the value when making major decisions in the future.
  2. Complimentary skills:
    • Builder: The technical co-founder who builds things.
    • Brander: Connects product to customers by marketing, branding, visuals.
    • Business developer: Handles operations, finance, and sales.
  3. Shared interests (least important): Not the main point, but shared interests help decisions go smoother. And if you have similar values, chances are that your interests will automatically align.

⏳ How to set expectations

The most important thing is choosing the right people, but it's not good enough to succeed. It's important to set up team norms and clear expectations as well. Most team issues come from misunderstandings.

Develop a communications strategy. How often should you meet? Aside from business talk, learn everyone's values and motivations, life situation, and working style.

Set clear roles and responsibilities. Choose which data to collect, and the metrics by which performance will be judged.

"The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing."
- Peter Thiel

🚀 How to develop workflows

Data. Data. Data. Take that data to iterate and pivot until you find true fans (customers that love the product so much they scream). Your workflow will have somewhat built itself by then. Your job now is to identify pain points and bottlenecks.

First, document every step, every person, every software, information flow, everything. Make sure to really dive into the informal things. The formal processes are usually fine, but it's the informal processes that are the wrench in the works. These are individual workarounds, shortcuts, and personal "ways of doing things" that might be genius solutions, or they can cause problems later on. Either ways, just document them.

Second, for every pain point or bottleneck, ask why 5 times. Get to the very bottom of the cause.

Thirdly, try tweaking something to improve workflow. If not possible, then redesign it (which is quite hard, so avoid if you can). Remember to keep taking data, and repeat from step 1.

Conclusion

Set yourself up for success by choosing the right co-founders. It's not enough to get the right people, you must also set clear expectations. Monitor those roles and responsibilities by analyzing the data, and improve your workflows.


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