Start Smart: Essential tips for the next A-Team

Building a strong team early in your company’s life-cycle is one of the key attributes that pre-disposes your company to success and to gathering investor interest.

In this presentation, I cover some of the attributes that makes an A-Team compelling.

The Slideshare Slides for this presentation can be found here –

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The Perfect Team Slide And Why It Matters

Originally posted on Netocratic.com on July 2, 2014

When an investors considers your company for investment at the earliest stages, who you are is so much more important than your idea. Your team is such a crucial part of your company’s success, and yet many teams omit their team slide or bludgeon it because they don’t feel they have anything interesting to add other than team photos and a job-title.

What’s worse is when pitching, founders usually just point to the team slide, and say something like – here is our team, we have lots of rockstars or something generic like that. And that’s it…

Wow.. way to undersell who you are!

Let’s look at what the major selling points of a team slide should be:

1. To show a team’s capability to deliver

Basically, does your team know anything about what you are doing. If you are a healthcare company, do you have a healthcare background? If you are making something for the financial industry, have any of your team members worked there? What companies have your team worked in that can validate you? If you’ve worked at Google before, for example, it would be worthwhile to put that company logo up on your team slide because the image of the brand would speak faster to your audience, than any number of words you could say in the same time frame.

2. To show a team’s capacity to deliver

Are you effectively complete or incomplete as a team? Is your team mostly business people but lacking the technical capabilities to deliver or is your team well rounded and able to execute? If your company industry requires an amazing specialist, do you have that specialist?  By the way, do not assume that it is a bad thing to admit you are looking to hire for specific functions you don’t currently have in an early stage startup, it shows maturity and your team’s self-awareness, although you don’t have to state it as part of your pitch (just saying, in case it is asked as a question).

3. To show a team’s culture & communication style

What is your company like? Is it a fun place to work in or is the tone more serious? What ‘titles’ do people have? How many of your team are outward facing and how many inward facing? These details are all items that an investor can pick up on based on your team slide.

In terms of where your team slide should be… there is not hard and fast rule, but I’ve found that if you are building something born out of a personal experience at your prior job or of interest.. it makes for a decent early slide to explain the background to your story/pitch. If you are building something that isn’t part of your background story, then where the slide sits is more about flow. Focus on telling a good story that is complemented by your team slide rather than the other way around.

So next time you are doing a presentation in front of investors… ask yourself, are you doing your team slide justice?

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How does an investor evaluate a startup’s team?

Management structure of BEST
Image via Wikipedia

A startup’s management team is its lifeblood… no amount of awesome ideas will ever overcome a fundamentally flawed management team. In the early stages of any startup, it is all about the people.

But what makes up a good team? How do you know if you have a good team, if you are a good team member, and if an investor will perceive you the way you perceive yourself?

Perhaps it is best to then approach this question from a different point of view…

A startup is fraught with challenges from day one. These include commercial, HR, and technical hurdles of all sorts, to name a few. These generally require a certain attitude and personality attributes from the founders for the startup to have a chance at surviving.

These personality attributes include a combination of confidence, stubbornness, individuality and a sense of self without arrogance, curiosity, humility, energy, maturity, and an eagerness to learn. I have found that founders that share many of these characteristics tend to fare better over the long run than those that do not share these.

While the above are just personality attributes of a likely ‘good’ founder, the equation is in fact far more complex. In addition to the above, I also believe you need to include the following variables as well when doing an analysis:

1)    The technical or commercial competency (depending on their focus) of the founding team. This can either mean the founder(s) have the relevant experience from either having done a startup before (or the relevant role) or they have developed the appropriate skills necessary to execute on the stated vision of the company.

2)    The ability to resolve conflicts quickly and constructively within a team. As most teams will likely hit road blocks when they can least afford them, an ability to either insert humor at the right time, or to divide a problem into parts, or know when to take a break, can all be really important skills to demonstrate the longer term likelihood of a team staying together and working well in spite of the inevitable conflicts that will arise. Although I have heard of some investors doing an artificial ‘stress test’ during investment reviews, it isn’t standard practice for you can usually tell just from spending time with a team, when a team may have potential internal personality issues.

3)    Intuitively know when to persevere and when to quit (on anything). Some people just quit too early, others keep on going too long beyond the point when a strategy is the right one to use. Although harder to evaluate when meeting a founder or their team, this is an important attribute to have internally so as to use an investors time and money most optimally.

4)    The team understands the assumptions and metrics about the market they wish to operate in, or have at least an understanding on how to research this information (the Lean ‘Build Measure Learn’ loop is a good example of a framework that is applied). An airplane pilot can fly an airplane through the dark and through really bad weather because he understand where he was, where he is going, and what he needs to be keeping an eye on the dashboard during the flight. Every great team I’ve ever met always understood the dynamics of their market well enough, knew what they needed to find out as part of what their startup was attempting to do, and knew how to measure it so as to know if they were going down the right ‘flight path’.

5)    The team or founder can articulate their thoughts and plans. Communication both internally and externally is the most important thing to get right within an organization. It makes absolutely no sense if you have an awesome coder who can put out some amazing things if they are wrong because he didn’t get specificity from management or didn’t understand what he was supposed to be working on. Also, it is pointless if the founders of a company are awesome at building product, but then are entirely unable to communicate their vision to the outside world to both interest others to join their business and also to raise more capital.

6)    Although defined as ‘working together to achieve a common goal’, I believe you could argue that collaboration can be summarized as a combination of both conflict resolution skills and communication skills. A team’s ability to collaborate both internally (with team members) and externally (with biz partners, investors, and the media), I believe, greatly increases the chances that they will succeed.

7)   The geographical spread of a team is also something to be considered. This has mostly to do with the dynamics of working as a team. Yes, Skype has done marvels to revolutionize the way we communicate, but for the necessary ‘collision’ of ideas (borrowing from Steven Johnson’s book on Where Good Ideas Come From) to occur repeatedly, close physical proximity is an asset for any new team.

8) The equity spread between founders. Although generally speaking most founding teams have an equal equity spread (50/50, 33/33/33, etc) an investor will take note if there is an equity imbalance that makes for a key hire or co-founder to feel unmotivated.

So, when I meet a startup’s management team… aside from looking at the attributes I’ve listed above, I generally ask myself three questions:

  1. Does this team have the necessary experience it takes to deliver what they have set out to do? (Teams with technical founders are of particular interest to me).
  2. Does this team have the insight to identify their own weaknesses and hire good people to complement them?
  3. Can this team constructively deal with all the challenges that are and will occur during the life-cycle of a company?

Once I feel like I’ve been able to answer these questions while also keeping an eye out for the attributes I’ve listed above, then I feel comfortable in appending the arguably overly-simplified statement of “they have a good team” when speaking about a startup.

So, some parting thoughts and advice for anyone evaluating their own team in the context of forming a new startup or raising money:

  1. Get a co-founder that complements your skills
  2. Understand what skills you lack as a team and hire them
  3. Research the hell out of your market & understand your customers
  4. var stated_vision = (think_big) *  2; -> multiply your vision by two.
  5. Rehearse your pitch A LOT
  6. Don’t be arrogant, but also add some spice and humor to your presentation

Appendix A:

John W. Mullins, PhD, Associate Professor of Management Practice, Marketing and Entrepreneurship at London Business School has kindly offered for download chapter 7 of his book titled The New Business Road Test.

Appendix B:

In my experience, the more subjective a subject matter is, the better off you are by getting more opinions to ‘triangulate’ around a ‘right answer’. To that end, I asked some friends of mine what their thoughts were around this topic. I have included their thoughts below:

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In my view, I look for three things:

(i) Leadership: a CEO who can articulate a vision that excites and imbues a sense of mission in his team is very important. This is often evidenced by the calibre of team he is able to recruit around him [when he has nothing else to offer].

(ii) Self Awareness:
a) Breadth: businesses need ‘flour to balance the yeast’. The great teams have a balanced breadth of expertise and experience, not just one hero.
b) Evolution: as a business grows, so the team must evolve. A willingness to embrace this change is critical.

(iii) Openness: We look for teams who are willing to consult and collaborate. We are not good passengers and we wish to work closely with and assist teams wherever possible.

Alliott Cole (@alliott)- Octopus Ventures

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 “I look for founding teams with a balance of skills in the following three areas:

1) design / ux,
2) marketing / distribution and
3) tech.

However the skills are distributed amongst the founders, they need to be present. I don’t worry too much about traditonal management skills, other than the founder who is the CEO showing a desire to learn them.”

Sitar Teli (@sitar) – Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures

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“When we look at very early start ups, there is not much to judge, but the story and how it is told. The delivery of the story is as important as its content. The founder(s) have to be credible. One of the issues is that technical founders are proud of their technical competence and tend to overdo it on tech and lose the perspective of the other side of the table, that is thinking “are these guys going to make me money?”  That is the bottom line, but it is not a question you can ask directly. The first attempt to answer comes out of the observation of the team during the first hour of meeting (it then needs more time to confirm it, but if the first impression is negative, there is the end of the journey). Are they passionate? Competent? Ambitious? Do they come across as honest and dedicated? Is this “a project”, or is this the thing they will be doing 22 hours a day for the next years? how is the team dynamic? Do they complement each other or are their duplication of the same guy. Is there a decision making process, or is it one guy that decides. Do they argue against each other (bi no-no during the pitch) or they have built a good delivery of the pitch so that it shows maturity and collaboration. “

Ivan Farneti (@ivanfarneti) – Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures

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1) Balance: product, technology, market/commercial.
2) A Leader [in the team].
3) Good mutual respect for one another.

Robin Klein (@robinklein) – Index Seed

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“Eden likes to invest in a team.  That is NOT one founder who has hired a group of employees but still holds all the equity him/herself.  To us, a team is a group of like-minded people who have come together to pursue a common vision.  They are all ‘at risk’ in the opportunity and so are looking for significant wealth creation.  They regard each other as ‘peers’ in the business and have comparable equity stakes.’

 They have to be smart.  And persistent.  One good sign is where the team worked together before, it didn’t work out but here they are again on the next gig.  Let’s call it ‘stickability’.

 ‘It’s easy to build a team once you have raised money.  We often hear that ‘the team will come once the money is in’.  This is not what we are looking for – we are looking for a team that has been built on a common vision through the tough times of starting a company.  Where the founders have got behind the opportunity, as a team, before the cash came in.'”

Ben Tompkins (@b_tompkins) – Eden Ventures

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 “Metrics, knowing your numbers cold, measuring everything. I’m all over that stuff. Seriously. Don’t know what’s going right or wrong if you’re not measuring it.”

Sean Seton-Rogers (@setonrog) – Profounders Capital

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“There are lots of “obvious” qualities which a founder/management team should have – they must know their market, they must me smart, they must be extremely dedicated etc. This has been said a million times already of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

To pick one quality which is particularly important from our point of view, the founders need to be able to build a kick-ass product which solves a real problem. As early-stages investors we can and love to help in many areas like sales, marketing, hiring, financing etc., but the ability to create a great product with a clear product/market fit is something we believe needs to be in the founder team DNA.”

 Christoph Janz (@chrija) – Point Nine Capital

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 “I look for teams that innovate vs optimize.”

Jason Ball (@jasonball) – Qualcomm ventures

Appendix C:

I recently wrote a blog post on understanding how an investor evaluates the vision of the founders.

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