teamWhenever I read about successful people who accomplished a lot with their business, it’s never been alone.
So now, I need to build a team for my startup.
My question is, how do I go about doing that?
Do I go to events?
Post online?
What has been a proven way of assembling a team?
There is a difference between a hired team and a cofounder. A cofounder/partners are more interested in the idea and may have more buy in than employees.
There are many sites online that can help you find cofounders or people who are interested in working with startups such as startuply and cofounderslab. However, more commonly people start with people they already know. They can be school mates (Bill Gates and Paul Allen), college buddies (Larry and Sergei), coworkers, family (Disney brothers), friends (Jobs and Wozniak) etc. The advantage is that
Look in your current circle if there are people with the kind of skills you need for the enterprise. If you do not know someone, try expanding your circle. Go to meetups in your area, reconnect with your friends from college etc.
It is not entirely true that you need to have a cofounder/partner/friend with you to do a successful startup. Dell, Steve Ells, Jeff Bezos,Fred Smith and John Delorean were all solo and worked on the idea by themselves and then hired the people they needed.
Don’t spend too much time looking for the right people to partner with. If you start working on the idea and start building it, you may draw people who are interested in it to you and you may meet the your cofounder that way. Even if you don’t, don’t worry as there are plenty of successful entrepreneurs who were solo acts.
From personal experience, choose people you trust, and people who are as driven as you are. Don’t get too hung up if someone doesn’t have exactly the skills you want, its more important you get the person with the right work ethic and with the mindset. For example, you need a Java programmer but the guy you want only knows C++, their mindset tells you they’re a programmer, so they can learn the language, focus on their transferable skills.
In my experience, work with people you know at the start, posting online or going to events is great if you’re hiring later on, but at the start, stick with people you know personally, ex colleagues, classmates or close friends (be careful with this as you may not know their ambition/work ethic).
More importantly, partners should be as ambitious or unambitious as you. If you are doing your startup to supplement your 9-5 job for a bit of extra income, don’t partner up with someone who wants to turn it into a multi billion dollar corporation. Have your goals set up from the start, and pick people who agree with them.
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