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COMPLEMENTARY SKILLS. Opposites attract, and in the startup world this couldn’t be truer. When you’re starting a company, do yourself a favour and make sure your cofounders don’t have overlapping skills – you don’t need three master’s degrees in business administration (or MBAs) to start a company (in fact, that’s probably a recipe for disaster and PowerPoint suicide). In the early days you need someone to take care of the product and business side, and someone to build the software. If you’re great on the business side, you’ll need to stretch yourself to develop a product that users really want to use, and then seduce a great software developer to work alongside you. If you’re a great developer, make sure you hunt for someone who is dedicated to producing a great business model and a great product. The key team skills that you’re looking for are the ability to discover, design and refine a great product concept (and business model) and the ability to translate that vision into actual software. With those bases covered, you’ve cracked one of the toughest parts of getting started. PASSION. Being an entrepreneur is a vocation. If you’ve ever been stuck in a job thinking you could do your boss’s job better, or have said to yourself, ‘What the hell is the CEO thinking? I’d never do that in his position’, then you should test yourself and start a business. It doesn’t matter whether your cofounder comes from a business or marketing background, or an engineering or software background, but it does matter that you both have the same level of passion. Make sure your cofounder has the same drive to solve a big problem, to change the status quo. Without the passion, without the drive, you’re never going to overcome the myriad challenges that will appear on the way.
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