Tech Start-up Lesson 1 - Choose your team wisely

When you are single and actively putting yourself out in the dating wilderness, a small part of you is always subjectively biased to the potential partners that you meet along the way.  Most of us who put up emotional walls in a vain attempt of protecting our fragile egos would say that this is not true. But you can’t deny the fact that when we are desperately single and we meet someone nice, part of us hopes that the person standing in front of us will tick all of the boxes we are looking to have checked. Thus many of us allow ourselves to be lulled into the idea of the person instead of the person themselves. We end up focussing on the things that are right with the person while at the same time completely ignoring the warning bells that are screaming blue murder at us about all the things that are wrong about them.

This disillusionment can go on for years, since we have a vested interest in continuing it. We want the relationship to succeed. We are in fact genetically programmed to want to make the relationship survive. But unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) there is more to being human than our primitive evolutionary inclinations. Somewhere in our muddled little hormone-crazed minds there exists a cortex that eventually will successfully tell us that the relationship in question is no longer beneficial to us and that it is time to move on.

Now you may be asking yourself why I am talking about dating in a tech start-up blog. The answer is simple. Starting your own tech venture in many ways parallels that of the dating world. My previous business venture consumed my life for three years (a similar amount of time to that of your typical failed “serious” relationship) and it has taught me many valuable lessons through that time. I am grateful to every single person that I was involved with and what they have taught me directly or indirectly so hopefully nobody will read into anything I am saying and take it personally.

The fact is the beginning of a tech start-up is a wonderful and intoxicating time. The possibilities, the excitement, the promise of riches beyond your wildest imagination, it all is very infectious. So infectious as a matter of fact that like dating one can ignore the early warning bells about the people that one is embarking on the venture with and subsequently get lulled into a fake sense of belonging. Like the honeymoon phase of any relationship in the beginning of a tech venture people tend to always put their best foot forward and show only the best sides of their personalities to one another. Obviously at that stage everyone involved genuinely want the whole thing to work out and the faces that they put forward to one another are reflections of their self-imagined wishes of how things could be for them all. But as time progresses the same cortex that warned you about the misalignments in bad relationships, will start pointing out that all is not well in your team. Just like relationships one could ignore these warnings by choosing blind faith over reason, but it is only a temporary fix to a problem that will eventually consume everything. It is only later in the entrepreneurial journey (when there typically is a lot more at stake) that the wheels will come off the misaligned team frequently with disastrous consequences. 

  

This brings me to my first lesson. The most important and most fundamental lesson that any aspiring tech entrepreneur can learn is that you have to, YOU HAVE TO pick the right initial team for the project. Weak members might not seem like a problem in the beginning, but later on THEY WILL become a problem and trust me by then you are so far down the line that it will never end well for anyone. Above ideas, above innovation, above talent, creativity, even capital, if you do not have the right team you are doomed to fail. The age old adage of people being the most important thing in software is clearer nowhere more than in the life of a tech start-up.

Of course the dating game could go the other way too. You could meet a person that is so right in so many ways that you can’t imagine a life before them (like my guaranteed one reader my dear wife whom I love immensely). The relationship could become the source of years of companionship and mutual love. It could be the most fruitful and beneficial human relationship that we will ever enjoy during your short time here on planet earth. Once again the same mechanics apply to tech start-ups. Having the right team from the start of a venture could drive the venture to greatness faster than one can imagine. It could be the source for long term friendships and profitable companionship that would make past professional encounters seem trivial. The road of a tech start-up is hard, and having the right people to share the experience with simply makes the whole thing magical.