A Flock of Entrepreneurs
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The first time the 7 current partners of Wolox gathered around a table, it felt strange. We were 8 at that time; neither friends, nor strangers, and we all knew — based on previous failures — that to start a business, having great team was the key to success. We shared values: that was clear. And we all knew everyone around that table was worth our while.
We were sure that being together was fortunate, but we didn’t know exactly what to do. For months, we considered a wide variety of options. During that period of time, the eighth partner walked away. We fiddled around a lot. We had many ideas, but none of them seemed to fully convince us all.
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We gathered periodically. Our objective was not quite clear, thus we made no progress at all, yet we all agreed on the fact that we made a fantastic team. The debates about what to do with that team were intense — frequently heated up with hard talk — but we understood that was required to reach the best results.
Eventually, by February, 2012–10 months after our first meeting — we decided to create Wolox as we know it today: A software company dedicated to startups. This company will have some partner startups that will have a discount on the rate per hour and some clients with a traditional approach, and it will also embark in building its own startups.
The challenges we faced were very complex. Our business model was unknown in the market. We had to come up with agile decision-making processes to make swift progress, and we were yet to assign roles and responsibilities to each one of us.
For the first year — until February, 2013 — our growth was dull in terms of profit but huge as regards structure. We gradually outlined a decision-making scheme. As we reinforced the positive aspects of what we were doing and tried to correct the negative ones, we came to realize we had a lot to work on, pulling from some ends and shortening other ones, just to give an idea of the context.
What’s important is that we kept going on, the 7 of us together. Always supporting the courses of action on the decisions made during our shareholders meetings, each one of us assumed a particular role to fit the full picture.
At the very beginning, I believe what we created was a utopian company, in terms of its structure. We did not define what percentage of the shares each one of the members should hold until December, 2012. Then, we decided we were going to establish an initial distribution of the shares, but we also established that those percentages were going to change until December, 2015. At the end of each year, we measured the overall performance of the team as a whole and of each member in particular, to determine our share scheme as well as to spot improvement opportunities for each one of us.
I think the huge debates, always based on clear key values, on decisions made beforehand and in writing, have led us to consolidate our team. This is how we started to fly towards our dream as a flock of birds: Sometimes organized, sometimes disorganized, helping one another to reach the common destination. Each one of us, from the role assigned, supported the others or moved to a strategic position to accomplish the shared goal.
This story made us understand that what really matters for a startup is the team itself. Only by having a marvelous team you can feel proud of every day, you can accomplish something extraordinary. And, as we kept growing, we started to think the same should apply to our employees.
They had to be better than us, share the same values, and be able to own the collective dream we keep on shaping together with the support of everyone, reorganizing the flock to fly better, higher, further, longer but, especially, happier. We are happy and proud to share this dream with every member of Wolox.
Posted by Santiago Bermúdez Baglietto (santiago.baglietto@wolox.com.ar)
