Building a balanced startup team

Increase your odds of success by attracting the right co-founders, advisors and mentors who can enrich your experience and break barriers.

In today’s world of virtually unlimited access to capital (I’d argue this is true regardless of location but surely it is true in Europe and in many hubs in the US — outside of the Valley), teams are a startup’s *only* true differentiated and sustainable competitive advantage.

While this is a truism for companies of any size and stage (although in large stage companies economies of scale, money-in-the-bank and long-term tech & product advantage can play an important role) it is even more so for early stage technology companies.

Life as a CEO can feel lonely

Whether you are taking on incumbents or inventing a new market, as a founder you are embarking on a journey that is going to prove harder than your planned worse-case scenarios. Life as a Sole-Founder-CEO is akin to that of a ship captain without a crew.

Odds are against you and you got very little in your favor — other than your hard skills, resilience, vision, passion and courage. While all these attributes are a pre-requisite to embark on your startup journey, they can only take you so far if you haven’t assembled a strong team of fellow travelers who share your passion and are determined to see the vision through.

Mark Suster has famously argued that (paraphrasing) you’d better be without co-founders than start with the wrong set up — meaning that often founders over value and overpay (in equity or destabilizing fights) in bringing in cofounders too early. I think Mark is right. Starting with the wrong set up is an absolute killer however I am also a strong believer that no great accomplishment is the result of an individual endeavor and that even the greatest innovators of our time — Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Elon Musk — would have not achieved greatness had they not invested in building well balanced teams early on and sustained this along the way.

What Makes A balanced team?

Pragmatic v.s. Visionary

Do you *get shit done* or *see the big picture*? In very simple terms Founders (and human beings in general) tend to lean towards one side of the Pragmatic-Visionary spectrum. Ask yourself: ‘am I a Doer or a Thinker?’ Do I *get shit done* or *see the big picture*?

The founder — with world changing ideas — will fail without the ability to shape these ideas into real things that customers want to use and love. Equally not being able to reach your target customers, engaging them and getting them to come back is useless — however great your vision might be.

Great founders have the ability to unbundle seemingly complex things into small batches of to-dos with related actionable metrics and shoot to achieve the goals in sight.

Steve (Jobs) — perhaps the greatest innovator of our era — wouldn’t have been able to build a product that people loved without the other Steve (Wozniak).

Having someone who can be on the other side of the spectrum creates a positive tension between pragmatism and long term thinking that helps shape the company and make important decisions along the way.

What are the basic roles to cover?

Clear and focused roles are equally important A balanced team has all 3 of the following roles:

• Marketer: seeks and tests problem /solution and product / market fit with a combination of qualitative and quantitative metrics (qualitative is more important early days).

A marketer’s job is to do non scalable things

• Product Manager: defines roadmap, translates customer problem into productionizable solution

It is often the case that a marketer and product manager ‘’merge’’ into the role of the Growth Hacker

• Developer: establish the early architecture, codes the product, iterates
• Designer: defines UX paths and UI, conducts usability testing and constantly iterates on the user experience and aligns with the value proposition

A developer and designer’s job is to turn problem and customer knowledge into a workable prototype and later on do things that scale

All are fundamental early stage roles: lacking one reduces your chances of success greatly.

Can any one founder cover 2 or more roles ?

Sure she can but it comes down to *deep expertise and focus*. You are not only competing with the incumbents but with a number of fierce startups that are trying to go after the same problem-customer as efficiently as they can.

Your best chances are to have individual contributors who can focus on the problem at hand and complement your skills so that 1 + 1 + 1 = 5.

The Art of Fundraising: pick a Chief Fundraising Hustler

Depending on the the mix of your founding team and business you’ll find yourself fundraising (from friends, family and fools to Angel investors to VC funds). Whatever the timing, what you cannot afford to do is to have the entire founding team involved with fundraising. Fundraising is an incredibly distracting activity that can end up taking 100% of one’s job. You want to nominate a Chief Fundraising Hustler (CFH). The CFH will be in charge of the following:

• Create a Pitch Deck and nail the Art of the Pitch (30 seconds, 3 minutes, 10 minutes)
• Build a Google excel list of Angels or Micro-VCs that you believe would be a good fit
• Figure out who in your connections can get you a warm intro
• Prepare a blurb that can be forwarded describing what you do /traction
• Respond to the intros
• Set up calls/meetings with Investors
• Run the pitch
• Follow up with individual investors with engaging and relevant content
• Close the deal

Pro Tips:

Do I have to bring all roles in as co-founders at equal equity split?

The answer is no. You don’t have to get all founders in with the same stake. While this sounds counter intuitive, it is really basic. It is virtually impossible that all founders are equal in terms of seniority, skills and/or time they’ll dedicate to the venture. You want to be able to discriminate based on these variables.

When is the right time to hire more business people

You shouldn’t hire too many business people until product is complete and early product/market fit tested.

Should I outsource product development ?

You do not want to outsource core product development, have consulting firms build it for you to speed up time-to-market.

The role of Mentors and Advisors

Most first time founders over value money and undervalue skills and knowledge. It is the general belief that if you are open to learn and courageous you’ll have time to learn anything there is to learn and convince anyone there is to convince to use, sell or invest in your product. Truth is: you limited time and resources and you don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Getting advice from someone who’s done it before fast-tracks your efforts.

The right mentors and long term advisors can help you fill gaps more quickly accelerating your learning and time to market. Mentors and advisors can also help open doors to a strategic partner or investor.

Most people chant your superior skills once your story becomes known and it’s clear you have made it. It’s those who believed in you and promoted you before it was all that clear, that counts.

The Power of Accelerators and Founder Networks

I was lucky enough to join Seedcamp early on in our startup’s life. I came from 8 years of building teams, products and operations at Yahoo. Most people were asking me whether I really needed it and planted doubt in my head —in retrospect it’s been the best thing I could have done. Founders are the best motivators and challengers one can find. There is a level of camaraderie in an accelerator that I have never seen replicated elsewhere. You get honest and tough feedback but with the level of support you only get from someone who really cares about your success. Being part of Seedcamp allowed Karim and I to connect with other founders who would test our product, challenge our assumptions and give tips on hacks.

In giving us access to a network of thousands of mentors Seedcamp 10x accelerated our learnings.

In conclusion…

Whatever the type of business you are planning on building you’ll need help. From day 1, make sure to dedicate a good chunk of time vey to building a network of people who believe in what you do as much as you and are fired up to join you on the ride.

If you haven’t done this before, you can absolutely learn it. To speed up the process seek help from a founder who has done this before and can help you get there faster or join an accelerator.

I am the CEO of Fusion and advice founders as part of 500Startups, Seedcamp, Techstars and Startupbootcamp. If you want to know more or discuss the topic get in touch.