First Who: The Importance of Teammates
Our company, Abstract Assembly, would not be where we are today if not for the efforts of my teammates. Above is a sketch I drew over a year ago in my personal journal. As you can see, this is a rough sketch — a vague idea based on the dreams of one small aerospace engineering student. Yet, since forming a proper team, we’re well on our way to building our first product.
If you recognize the title of this article, it’s actually the title of Chapter 3 in the book Good to Great by Jim Collins. This book is a study of the underlying factors behind ‘great’ companies and their ‘good’ counterparts. Of the 300 companies that were explored by Collins’ research team, only 11 were identified as great. These 11 were carefully examined to determine what caused them to make the leap to greatness and how they managed to stay that way for at least 15 more years. In his book, Collins’ states:
The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus … and then figured out where to drive it.
We certainly didn’t start out that way. When Abstract Assembly unofficially started in August 2017, I already had a clear idea of how our engineering AI could be built and monetized. At the time, I was a senior in college and I had a packed schedule.
In an attempt to make it easier on myself, I tried to fit aspects of the company into group projects I had for certain classes (without using Virginia Tech resources for development, of course!). For example, product-dev was handled in my software design class group project while business-dev happened in an entrepreneurship class I was taking. This way, I would have people to help me and I would find people to be on the founding team.
Bad idea.
No one from those school teams became founding members of Abstract Assembly. These early sub-teams suffered greatly because the wrong people were on the bus. Don’t get me wrong, ‘wrong’ people can still be highly capable and productive individuals. Many of them were excellent at what they did— they just weren’t team players. In the end, the entire group suffered because wrong people are toxic to a company.
The biggest problem was how I approached team-building. I was looking to fit people to specific jobs. It was wrong of me to expect so much commitment. I fell into the classic trap of being a “genius with helpers” instead of building a superior executive team. I’m certainly not a genius but without reading Collins’ book, I might have had to become one to realize what was wrong with the company. As Collins implies, it’s much more important to get the right people on the bus and guide/trust them to find the right seats.
After the school teams disbanded, I looked through my phone’s contact list in the winter of 2017. I found people I’ve worked well with before and I brought them on board. Later in the spring of 2018, I enrolled in another entrepreneurship course where I got to choose my teammates. Instead of searching for skill, I instead searched for character — reasoning to myself that a person with the right character can (and should) always learn needed skills later.
What resulted was a carefully-selected team based on the merits of their character rather than simply the merits of their skill. This is Abstract Assembly’s team today.
Teammates are more valuable than the idea. So far, everything we’ve been up to has been done without funding. All of our accomplishments come from our amazing team. Though many of us have full-time jobs or are full-time students, our team is willing to put forth the effort somehow. We’ve worked many nights and weekends — not to mention the occasional 3am meeting with a potential client due to timezone differences. In my opinion, efforts like these are what make a company great.
Thanks to my team, my sketch from over a year ago is finally coming to life.
As always, be sure to visit our website and Facebook page if you’d like to learn more about Abstract Assembly and about the AI we’re building for engineering design.
