The Idea is Nothing Compared to the Team

I’ve met a lot of people who want to do a startup.  They say they’re just waiting for the right idea.  This is an understandable perspective, but it’s wrong.

Although you need to keep an eye out for opportunities, I’ve got enough experience now and have been immersed in the entrepreneurial community long enough to know better: idea is nothing compared to the team.  A startup company is the team, and the “idea” is embodied by the team.

Before delving in to this rather bold claim, I want to further describe a great founding team. Here’s a framework:  a great founding team has shared values, understands the customer pain, and embraces their role within the team.

The values shared by the founders become the seed for the company’s culture.  Culture is important, and culture trickles down from the founders.  Having shared values, also helps produce alignment.  And the founding team needs some fundamental alignment to keep the team moving forward.  Otherwise, the team will be caught up in a debilitating tug of war trying to make all the decisions a startup needs to make.

I met Marc Fleury, founder of JBoss, which was eventually bought by RedHat.  He said something that stuck with me, “Although we (the team) fought violently, one thing that made me proud, after we got bought by RedHat, everyone would always say they knew who the guys from JBoss were when they worked with them.”  This is indicative of the effects of culture and the presence of alignment despite having to hash out decisions.

A great team ideally also understands the customer pain.  If you want to make great products, I think you need to have the pain yourself.  I believe Steve Jobs once made a statement, “We don’t hire consultants, we design products that we want ourselves, that we fall in love with.”  In a startup, you need to really want to make it real.  And you need to want it bad enough that you’ll go through hell and high water to make it happen.  Noubar Afeyan, a successful entrepreneur and partner at Flagship Ventures, once said to me, “I tend to look for entrepreneurs that are borderline obsessed with the problem.”

A team needs people to play different roles.  In addition to other basic skills, ideally, the person does what they would want to be doing anyway.  If the person was out in the wild, what would they be doing to survive?  Would they be writing code?  They’re probably a good engineer then.  I find that people who are really good at something tend to do it regardless of their employment.  It’s elemental.  They almost can’t help it. They just do what they do.  Those are the types of people you want on your team.

In part II, I’ll take this framework for what a great team looks like and explain exactly why the idea is superfluous compared to the team.

Kevin
11.6.2009