In my second year of Computer Science university I took a technology entrepreneurship class. The main objective of that class is to build a team with your colleagues and, after a semester working together, end up with a working prototype of your scalable business model Startup project. The team I joined in that situation came later to be my first company team.

Just working together in the first few days I could realize many problems in such a team like that, and the trigger problem of all was that every single team member had the same background. All of us were early-twenties male computer science students, born in the same city in the northeast of Brazil, studying at the same university, taking the same classes, with pretty the same interests such as soccer, similar books and surrounded by common friends.

Therefore, the founding team did not include a designer, a businessman, a specialist in the market we were providing the solution for, an experienced marketing guy, a wherever-skills woman, a person from a different city and many other profiles that were needed every single working day when we got stuck because nobody in the team had any idea on how to do a specific task. Worse than that (and the situation in most of the cases), since we had the same skills and experiences we were not able even to think of doing important actions for the success of the project and bringing relevant insights for it.

As a result, many aspects of the Startup project were barely developed such as the market research. The only thing we were able to do well, was the wonderful mobile platform. For whom? If we did have even people to sell and market it.

Despite the fact that we looked for help with mentors and experienced entrepreneurs. Having a geek doing marketing stuff of trying to sell whatever it is, is not the same as having a specialized entrepreneur in that skill in your team. So, if you do not have a good seed investment to hire an excellent and multidisciplinary team at the early stages of your Startup, I strongly recommend you to look for partners with complementary abilities to yours, the ones that are indispensable to the core of the business.

Takeaways:

• Identify the core activities of your idea and look for partner good at them to join your team.
• You are not as good as a specialist just because you read good stuff about the topic. Bring people that are better then you in those topics to your team.
• Focus on what you do best. Nothing else.