Building a Team

So you can't do it by yourself. That's what everyone told me getting into this, but the last several months have cemented that. In order to survive as a startup founder, you need to build a team. Figure out what your skills are, and find people whose skills complement yours. At the same time, you need a shared vision and passion. To be honest, the idea isn't as important as a shared love for a given process

What does this mean? You need to find people who have both the right skills and the right goals. In my case, that requires finding people who can do the things that I can't, who are passionate about building a company, and who are willing to stick with it no matter what. When I talk to the founders of successful startups, I'm amazed by what they were willing to do to succeed. Some of the stories are actually pretty incredible (on some level, it even sounds glamorous in the aftermath, although they were just doing what it took to scrape by). Sometimes I wonder whether I have what it takes, but then I remember that every path is different, and that you need to be willing to follow your own path.

So, to get back to the original topic, I think that there are two major types of companies. There is the hub and spoke, where there is a single founder, and everyone else plays a support role. Some people manage to make this work - usually the strong personalities who always need to be in control. The startup founder is kind of like the dictator of a small nation or the founder of a cult. Everything goes through him, and other people are sort of drawn to the energy that he puts out. I don't think this is for me.

Then there is the collaborative model, where you have a couple of core founders, each of whom has an equal (or mostly equal) stake in the company. Decisions diffuse out of this group. Each founder has control over a sphere of influence, and although everything is discussed among this group, the controller of each function is responsible for the execution and the outcome. In order for this to work, you need fairly equal strengths, and everyone needs to be both willing to stand up to the others and to yield when appropriate.

I'm not sure whether this post makes much sense. I'm trying to reason some of this stuff out as I write it.