Playing To Your Strengths - A Cautionary Tale

A few months ago, I was speaking to a now ex-cofounder. We had hit a rough patch where we invalidated our original hypothesis, and were thinking about new directions for our business. I was trying to figure out the least expensive strategy that would allow us to get back on track, while he kept proposing things that would require several months of engineering effort.

At the time, I was thinking about leaving his team, mostly because he seemed to be dead-set on following a single path, come hell or highwater. He had spent several years working on this product without really launching anything, and had brought me in much later as an engineering cofounder. His excuse for his failure thus far was "I didn't have a competent engineer."

Then, it sort of hit me. Based on your personal talents and the talents of your founding team, certain courses of action are MUCH more expensive than others. If you are an enterprise salesperson (as this guy was before he left to start a company), sales is fairly cheap. Engineering, however, was pretty expensive for him. It took him years to find a good engineering team, and it would have cost him 30-50% of the company if we had stayed. In hindsight, those years could have been spent making an enterprise play. Once he did the sales, he could hire the engineers to build the product.

For me, an engineer by trade, building is cheap, but selling is expensive. I spent all summer trying unsuccessfully to sell my product to enterprises, and I had no idea where to find people who actually knew how to sell. This showed me that I need to primarily focus on building products, because that best leverages my talents. Unless I have a salesperson or a marketer on my cofounding team, it doesn't make sense to do something that requires heavy sales.

So, what can we learn from this? First of all, when you evaluate business ideas, choose ones that play to your strengths. Take an honest look at the skills of your founding team, and ask yourselves, "do we have what it requires to execute here?" Sure, an engineer can sell a little bit, but most engineers will get demotivated pretty quickly if they spend most of their time selling. Likewise, if your core competency is sales, you should be thinking up things that you can sell BEFORE they are built (and that don't require two years of engineering work before sales can start working).

Furthermore, you may want to make tweaks to your founding team to account for the business idea. If you have two engineers on your team, you might not want to bring on a third engineering cofounder. Maybe that third guy should know sales, or maybe he should be an Internet marketer. It all depends on what you need to make your company successful. If you pick the wrong person, it could be worse than doing nothing.

So, here's an exercise: think of the first (or next) few milestones that you need to hit to build your company. Now, think about what skills are required to hit those milestones, and then ask yourself whether these skills are present in the founding team. If not, then you should consider changing either the idea or the team. Pick a product strategy that's reasonably cheap for your team to execute, because starting a company is already pretty hard, and you don't need to make your lives any more difficult.