The startup team

A student wrote to me: “We are a group of Computer Science graduates who want to start our company. We read your advice and agree with many things you wrote, but we still have a question: “What is the best way to start a company? Please advise.”

Answer: A good startup always begins with the team. A good team is an important condition for any startup to succeed. Many people mention the idea as the most important thing, but I do NOT agree with that view. Everyone can have an idea but to make an idea become a reality depend mostly on the team. I never see a successful startup that did not have a good team, but I saw many teams with a good idea failed because team members do not work well together. A good team should consist of several members with “complementary skills.” A team of all technical people is NOT a good team because you need more than just technical skills to succeed.

To start, you need people with a vision for the startup. Visionary is the person who has the idea and wants to make that into a product. A visionary person could be one or more person, but they all know where the startup should go, what values it could create, and willing to “drive” the startup from the beginning to the end, despite all the ups and downs of the market. These people are not just passionate but also have the leadership skills to implement the conceptual idea into a valuable product, and if needed, willing to change it to meet the market demand.

A startup needs people with strong business and communication skills to sell the product. These are people who develop the relationships with customers. They know how to listen to customers’ problems and identify what the customers need, they understand the business aspect of the competing market, and aware of the competitors. These people understand the vision of the startup and work very closely with the visionary people to ensure the startup will succeed.

Of course, a startup needs people with strong technical skills to build the product. A good startup should have several persons with different technical skills and experience. (i.e., Programmers, architect, user-interface specialist, web developers, etc.) These people build the product and make sure it meets the needs of customers.

The startup team must be able to work together in a high-pressure environment. How they work with others and share the same vision is the key element for starting the company. However, they do not have to agree on everything, conflicts will happen and they will happen often, but as long as the team can overcome that and continue to work together, the startup has a chance to succeed. However, if the team always agrees with each other, it is probably they do not have different views to deal with the challenges. Starting a company is always a challenging work, if team members do not challenge others, they may be “biased” and it could lead to failure sooner or later. However, if there are early conflicts where team members disagree early, it could be a signal that there is an indicator of many problems later on.

Entrepreneurial skill is NOT something easy to learn because there are many unexpected things happen that few people can deal with it. That is why the startup team must consist of many people with “complementary skills” to support others. The team must have many different personalities to deal with many issues such as self-awareness, curiosity, bravery, motivation, honesty, the ability to deal with uncertainty, and passionate to accomplish the vision. However, the most important skill is the ability to learn from failure and constantly learning, creating and adjusting as they go through this experiences.

Most people like the idea of startup because they are attracted to wealth and glory as they worship someone like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or believe their startup could be another Google or Facebook. However, as a startup, the chance to succeed is extremely rare and only people who are passionate to pursue this dream and willing to learn from failures, many failures will have a chance. Everyone can have a good idea, anyone can start a company, but without the strong team, to implement the vision and make it into a reality, it is just a dream. Having a strong team with complementary skills is the essential for any startup.

Sources

  • Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University

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