Each chapter is made up of essays whose titles complete the following:
Under no circumstances should you...

Chap 2 - Building A Team - Monday, August 3, 2009 10:59 - Comments

…Decide To Go It Alone

There’s a phrase that I used to hear all the time when I was growing up. My high school soccer coach (really, every coach and wanna-be manager loves this one) used to say "there’s no ‘I’ in team." The implicit statement is that you can’t do everything on your own, and in fact you need a team to help get to the finish line with a win.

I would like to take that statement one step further, and make it a little more topical given the content of this book. "There’s no ‘I’ in team, but there’s an ‘I’ in ‘fail.’" When you think about what it takes to be successful with a new company or project, there list is long, and most certainly one of them is having at least one co-founder. The needs of the business and the prerequisites for success are too much to bear for a single person.

When considering the applications from potential startups for the Y!Combinator and TechStars programs, both programs will tell you that the ideal size of a founding team is somewhere between two and five people. If you start a company with a founding team of larger than 5 people, you will ultimately end up with a team of less than that number, and most likely lost a few friends along the way.

The reason for this "optimal" size is pretty straightforward. You need to have enough people to balance out the skills of the team, as well as diversity in the views expressed when making decisions, but you also need to be able to make decisions quickly and not get bogged down in meetings. Meetings are the productivity killer.

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