Building your early team: Choosing a co-founder. (Part 2)

From the previous article, we already came to know what core skills, values, and ideas mean. Here, in today's post, the table provided above will provide us with a generous understanding of the best combination of co-founders for any startup/business.

From the table provided above, S stands for Same, while D stands for Different.

So what makes a perfect team?

The one that has people from different skill-set, can suggest different solutions to the same problem, and a team that shares the same value. Let's understand this with a scenario.

Suppose, you are very good at cooking and want to start a restaurant business. Would you rather choose a friend of yours who can help you in the kitchen as a partner or someone who is very good at accounting? Do not choose anyone of them. Instead, look for someone who is good at management, preferably someone who worked in the restaurant industry before.

There's this mistake that's often seen in the software industry, especially in our country. That is a group of developers possessing the same skills partners up and starts a company. What happens afterward? They lack marketing, communication, and a bunch of other stuff which are fundamental for the overall growth of the company.

Therefore, it is advisable to assess yourself first, followed by the short-term and long-term objectives of your organization. Once you have identified the skills you lack that are necessary for the growth of the company, ask yourself whether you can acquire them (the skills) quickly or if you need assistance from someone (if it's a core skill). In simple words, you need to understand if it's a core skill (e.g knowing restaurant management or cooking) or something that's simply better to have for your business (e.g knowing graphic design for a restaurant business). After considering these variables, go ahead and look for a partner who best complements your skill. The next best skill required to keep your venture moving.

While it's reasonably easy to choose partners for a traditional business using these sorts of measurements, it's quite tricky to perform the same tactics to a startup; yet, a lot would eventually match between them because the measurement provided in the table is established after researching numerous startups and based on common sense. Still, given there are exceptions, you should absolutely take a look into other factors before making a decision solely depending on these types of metrics.

Anyways, I'm dropping a few notes from my notebook that I wrote in 2020:

"Having an ant and lion combo is necessary. An ant always builds, whereas the lion looks for prey."

"A small team with high morale is not easy to defeat."

"Having a smart high-energy team that learns rapidly about the signals the market is giving in is priceless."

• Guest speakers (I forgot their name) attending a seminar at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.