Who should be on a startup team

Today we are going to talk about building a startup team. So, who should be on a startup team? At the early stages of a startup's development, the team should certainly include people who believe in the idea unconditionally and are ready to work for it without breaks or days off. Besides faith, startup founders need a particular mindset. How does it manifest itself? First, readiness for change and the ability to work under uncertainty. An early-stage startup is a company without a clear structure, hierarchy or documented business processes, constantly searching for the right business model.

Second, energy. The startup founder's path is impossible without the right amount of effort, trial and error, constant failures and small victories. To get through this path, you need a great deal of both mental and physical strength. Third, and most important, the ability not to give up. As a startup founder, you will receive many rejections: from customers, from people you want to see on your team, from business angels and venture funds, from friends and family who will not believe in your idea. At some point, you may genuinely start to doubt your idea, your team and yourself.

And here it is important not to give up, but to keep moving forward, look at your idea from a different angle and try to do something differently. I would like to make a small digression here. Many startup founders also make one and the same mistake. They build a startup alone, taking on all the roles and doing all the work themselves. Nine times out of ten, such a startup is doomed to failure. In addition to the qualities and competencies mentioned above, the core members of a startup team must be able to speak the same language and be, as they say, on the same wavelength. Team members should understand, complement and sense one another.

Good mutual understanding affects the speed of decision-making, and this is very important for a startup. Also, do not forget about so-called hard skills, that is, the expert knowledge of team members. If it is a high-tech startup, it would be good to have two or more people on the team who deeply understand that technology.