Straight to the point lesson on building a startup team | #DailyBlinks45
Building a startup team is no joke, let alone building a startup for years with failed experiments, setbacks, rejection, anxiety and depression in maximum case.
Setting a ground-rule for team building is a very difficult task. Since when you are building a startup, you are completely experimenting with a new market that the world has not seen yet. You solve a problem and building a business around it is a tough job, it takes years of planning, executions, patience and what not. It havoc at times, yet cannot lose the passion.
You don’t know, what kind of people you need. With the maturity in idea, you need people with experience who can bring you value and hence the recruiting criteria cannot be the same while you were building the core team at your initial days.
Lately, I came across an article by Naval. Here’s what he says:
I started my first company 15 years go, and I still can’t manage. I suspect that very few people can. With AngelList, we want a team of self-managing people who ship code.
Here’s what we do:
- Keep the team small. All doers, no talkers. Absolutely no middle managers. All BD via APIs.
- Outsource everything that isn’t core. Resist the urge to pick up that last dollar. Founders do Customer Service.
- People choose what to work on. Better they ship what they want than not ship what you want.
- No tasks longer than one week. You have to ship something into live production every week — worst case, two weeks. If you just joined, ship something.
- Peer-management. Promise what you’ll do in the coming week on internal Yammer. Deliver — or publicly break your promise — next week.
- One person per project. Get help from others, but you and you alone are accountable.
If they can’t ship, release them. Our environment is wrong for them. They should go find someplace where they can thrive. There’s someplace for everyone.
It’s not perfect. We ship too many features, many half-baked. The product is complex, with many blind alleys. It’s hard to integrate non-engineers — they aren’t valued.
But, we ship.
Crisp and straight to the point.
Doing is the superpower. Period.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. Would love to know about your thought on this.
Your Friend.
