What You Need to Know to Build & Expand the Ultimate Founding Team
The best entrepreneurs have extraordinary vision. A strong founding team will turn that vision into reality.
I co-founded HotJobs.com with a small team of dedicated entrepreneurs on a mission to transform the job-search industry. We were headhunters and had acutely developed abilities in recruiting and assessing the best talent. We had worked together in the trenches and we had trust. More importantly, we got the classified help-wanted ads from the newspapers to online and into the digital world to create massive efficiency. We helped millions of job seekers in the process. Our team power-built the fledgling startup to 650 employees, $125M in revenues and a $1.2B market cap after its IPO. Although we might not have realized it at the time, we had a founding team with all of the right ingredients to make our startup dreams come true.
From my experience co-founding, recruiting and building all-star executive teams, I’ve come across some essential players that make founding teams achieve the growth and scale they desire.
Your founding team will establish the DNA of your company. If you are beating the odds together and your team is on the brink of achieving high growth success, you’ll want to be selective about your next level of growth. To drive strategic growth, founders need to identify and secure the right A+ executive leaders who can fit within the culture they’ve already established.
If you want to make the best hires to complement your founding team, keep these two critical concepts in mind:
- Hire for Culture Fit & Core Values
Hiring for technical chops alone is one of the gravest and most common mistakes CEOs make. Keep in mind that there are other defining characteristics that are of huge importance in a hiring decision. The biggest reason why someone will succeed or fail at any company has everything to do with whether his or her personal DNA matches the cultural DNA of the CEO, the founders and existing executive team.
2. Build Clarity & Commitment Around the Mission
If you and your co-founders were successful in reaching Series B round funding — then you’ve probably got a winning mission already. Be sure that the new leaders you hire understand your mission and have the same devotion to it that you as a founder do.
Read more on the Dave Carvajal site.
