Startup Team Quotes

There can’t be anything more fatal to a business than making decisions based on somebody else’s assumptions.

You don’t want to run your business based on mere suspicions and assumptions.

A successful business owner will know their business as good as they know their favorite celebrity, their partner, and even their dogs.

Being successful is not that tough, you just need a little mindset change.

Business growth happens when people remember you.

Accepting that you’re wrong, shows humility which will set a better example of you as a leader on your team than sticking to something that others can clearly see is wrong.

Become a leader that shows humility and not stubbornness.

Search engines' results aren’t always trustworthy. As a matter of fact, they can be easily manipulated.

You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.

A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.

The best thing you can do to come up with a lot of new ideas is to learn a lot of old ideas. Because new ideas are just connections between old ideas, the more ideas you have in your head, the more connections you’ll be able to create between them.

The Engineering Question Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? 2. The Timing Question Is now the right time to start your particular business? 3. The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market? 4. The People Question Do you have the right team? 5. The Distribution Question Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? 6. The Durability Question Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future? 7. The Secret Question Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?

but how to establish a process by which a sales team of modest size can move the product to a wide audience.

A team in the business world will tend to perform at the level of the worst individual team member

Henry, you’re not a team player,” she said in an icy tone. “I think you should leave right now.

Every successful start-up is built on four pillars. Team, Idea, Passion & Presentations

Boyd’s Law: speed of iteration beats quality of iteration.

Team performance is directly proportional to team stability. Focus on building and maintaining a stable team. Stability reduces friction and increases credibility and confidence.

Most important, teams working in this system begin to measure their productivity according to validated learning, not in terms of the production of new features.

While Elizabeth was fast to catch on to engineering concepts, Sunny was often out of his depth during engineering discussions. To hide it, he had a habit of repeating technical terms he heard others using. During a meeting with Arnav’s team, he latched onto the term “end effector,” which signifies the claws at the end of a robotic arm. Except Sunny didn’t hear “end effector,” he heard “endofactor.” For the rest of the meeting, he kept referring to the fictional endofactors. At their next meeting with Sunny two weeks later, Arnav’s team brought a PowerPoint presentation titled “Endofactors Update.” As Arnav flashed it on a screen with a projector, the five members of his team stole furtive glances at one another, nervous that Sunny might become wise to the prank. But he didn’t bat an eye and the meeting proceeded without incident. After he left the room, they burst out laughing.

If a competitor can outexecute a startup once the idea is known, the startup is doomed anyway. The reason to build a new team to pursue an idea is that you believe you can accelerate through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop faster than anyone else can.

Ian also had issues with Elizabeth’s management, especially the way she siloed the groups off from one another and discouraged them from communicating. The reason she and Sunny invoked for this way of operating was that Theranos was “in stealth mode,” but it made no sense to Ian. At the other diagnostics companies where he had worked, there had always been cross-functional teams with representatives from the chemistry, engineering, manufacturing, quality control, and regulatory departments working toward a common objective. That was how you got everyone on the same page, solved problems, and met deadlines.

Westrum’s description of a rule-oriented culture is perhaps best thought of as one where following the rules is considered more important than achieving the mission—and we have worked with teams in the US Federal Government we would have no issue describing as generative, as well as startups that are clearly pathological.

So all you need is a great idea, a great team, a great product, and great execution. So easy! ;)

If you don’t give your team permission to fail, you’re not giving them permission to innovate.

If you focus on the strength of the team, you will begin to find work as a positive challenge.

If you want to glide toward money, you have to make sure your message is clear as a bell, and you need to ensure that you have a unified team capable of communicating it.

During a meeting with Arnav’s team, he latched onto the term “end effector,” which signifies the claws at the end of a robotic arm. Except Sunny didn’t hear “end effector,” he heard “endofactor.” For the rest of the meeting, he kept referring to the fictional endofactors. At their next meeting with Sunny two weeks later, Arnav’s team brought a PowerPoint presentation titled “Endofactors Update.

he bragged that he’d written a million lines of code. Some employees thought that was preposterous. Sunny had worked at Microsoft, where teams of software engineers had written the Windows operating system at the rate of one thousand lines of code per year of development. Even if you assumed Sunny was twenty times faster than the Windows developers, it would still have taken him fifty years to do what he claimed.

Venture capitalists, with the exception of people like Don Valentine, would tell you that they'd rather fund a great team than a great idea. The reason is that if they have a bad idea, great teams can figure out a better one. Mediocre people even with a great idea can screw it up in its execution. Or if they have a bad idea, then they aren't going to be in a position to think about how to change it. They're just going to pursue it blindly.

Cycle after cycle, the team is working hard, but the business is not seeing results. Managers trained in a traditional model draw the logical conclusion: our team is not working hard, not working effectively, or not working efficiently.

what kind of environment encourages new ideas? It varies from person to person, but here are the most common ingredients: Give yourself plenty of time. Keep an idea journal. Work on the problem. Get away from work. Add constraints. Look for pain points. Talk to others.

I like innovation. I like ideas. I like people and I like being part of winning teams. I don't gamble, I don't watch sports, I don't do any of those things. What I like to do is bet on people in the innovation business, so as soon as I had the capacity, that’s what I started doing as an individual—writing some small checks, and then some bigger checks.

a quote from John Doerr, the famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist: “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers. In a dedicated product team, the team acts and feels a lot like a startup within the larger company, and that's very much the intention.

Gene Berdichevsky, one of the members of the solar-powered-car team, lit up the second he heard from Straubel. An undergraduate, Berdichevsky volunteered to quit school, work for free, and sweep the floors at Tesla if that’s what it took to get a job. The founders were impressed with his spirit and hired Berdichevsky after one meeting. This left Berdichevsky in the uncomfortable position of calling his Russian immigrant parents, a pair of nuclear submarine engineers, to tell them that he was giving up on Stanford to join an electric car start-up. As employee No. 7, he spent part of the workday in the Menlo Park office and the rest in Straubel’s living room designing three-dimensional models of the car’s powertrain on a computer and building battery pack prototypes in the garage. “Only now do I realize how insane it was,” Berdichevsky said.

This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans. So we instituted a blanket rule: pass on any company whose founders dressed up for pitch meetings. Maybe we still would have avoided these bad investments if we had taken the time to evaluate each company’s technology in detail. But the team insight—never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit—got us to the truth a lot faster. The best sales is hidden. There’s nothing wrong with a CEO who can sell, but if he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.

The Engineering Question Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? 2. The Timing Question Is now the right time to start your particular business? 3. The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market? 4. The People Question Do you have the right team? 5. The Distribution Question Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? 6. The Durability Question Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future? 7. The Secret Question Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see? We

On the day the company starts, there is very limited customer input to a product specification. The company doesn’t know who its initial customers are (but it may think it knows) or what they will want as features. One alternative is to put Product Development on hold until the Customer Development team can find those customers. However, having a product you can demonstrate and iterate is helpful in moving the Customer Development process along. A more productive approach is to proceed with Product Development, with the feature list driven by the vision and experience of the company’s founders.

As soon as we formulate a hypothesis that we want to test, the product development team should be engineered to design and run this experiment as quickly as possible, using the smallest batch size that will get the job done. Remember that although we write the feedback loop as Build-Measure-Learn because the activities happen in that order, our planning really works in the reverse order: we figure out what we need to learn and then work backwards to see what product will work as an experiment to get that learning. Thus, it is not the customer, but rather our hypothesis about the customer, that pulls work from product development and other functions. Any other work is waste.

One remarkable part of the SnapTax story is what the team leaders said when I asked them to account for their unlikely success. Did they hire superstar entrepreneurs from outside the company? No, they assembled a team from within Intuit. Did they face constant meddling from senior management, which is the bane of innovation teams in many companies? No, their executive sponsors created an “island of freedom” where they could experiment as necessary. Did they have a huge team, a large budget, and lots of marketing dollars? Nope, they started with a team of five. What allowed the SnapTax team to innovate was not their genes, destiny, or astrological signs but a process deliberately facilitated by Intuit’s senior management.

Focus on People, Perseverance, and Passion These “Three P’s” are the keys to successful entrepreneurship. People are the most important, particularly in the first year of a venture. To maximize their value, spend as much time as you can assembling the best possible team that really complements your skill set and can lead a little bit into where you’re heading, not just where you are. Creating the right kind of dynamic in terms of culture and commitment is really critical. Perseverance: never underestimate the value of really caring about your idea and being unwilling to drop it. If you have a big idea, and you know in your heart it’s going to happen (Passion), but know there will be roadblocks and challenges along the way. In this regard, a high degree of passion and commitment is extremely important. In my experience, really big ideas often take a decade to reach fruition. Sign

As the other startups do at the end of their presentations, Shen offers to the batch the expertise of his team's members: "Kalvin and Randy are developers," he says, and as for himself, he knows how to stay motivated in the face of rejection. "I've gotten rejected thirty days in a row," he says, a reference to his putting himself through "Rejection Therapy," in which one must make unreasonable requests so that one is rejected by a different person, at least once, every single day- inuring one to the pain of rejection. (One example of Shen's first bid to be rejected: he asked a flight attendant if he could move up to first class for free. In another case, he saw an attractive woman on the train and decided he would ask her for her phone number, and when she would turn him down, he would have fulfilled the day's required quota of rejection. He sat near her, fell into a conversation, and when they got off the train and he asked for her number, she said, "Sure." He categorized this as "Failed Rejection.") "So if you need to get pumped up for your sales calls, talk to me. p121

Mosseri’s answer to the important question was perfect by Facebook standards: “Technology isn’t good or bad—it just is,” he wrote. “Social media is a great amplifier. We need to do all we can responsibly to magnify the good and address the bad.” But nothing “just is,” especially Instagram. Instagram isn’t designed to be a neutral technology, like electricity or computer code. It’s an intentionally crafted experience, with an impact on its users that is not inevitable, but is the product of a series of choices by its makers about how to shape behavior. Instagram trained its users on likes and follows, but that wasn’t enough to create the emotional attachment users have to the product today. They also thought about their users as individuals, through the careful curation of an editorial strategy, and partnerships with top accounts. Instagram’s team is expert at amplifying “the good.” When it comes to addressing “the bad,” though, employees are concerned the app is thinking in terms of numbers, not people. Facebook’s top argument against a breakup is that its “family of apps” evolution will be better for users’ safety. “If you want to prevent interference in elections, if you want to reduce[…]

Launching “Buy It Now” was a large change that touched every transaction, but the eBay team also innovated across the experience for both sellers and buyers as well. With an initial success, we doubled down on innovation to drive growth. We introduced stores on eBay, which dramatically increased the amount of product offered for sale on the platform. We expanded the menu of optional features that sellers could purchase to better highlight their listings on the site. We improved the post-transaction experience on ebay.com by significantly improving the “checkout” flow, including the eventual seamless integration of PayPal on the eBay site. Each of these innovations supported the growth of the business and helped to keep that gravity at bay. Years later, Jeff became a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he would kick off the firm’s success in startups with network effects, investing in Airbnb, Instacart, Pinterest, and others. I’m lucky to work with him! He recounted in an essay on the a16z blog that his strategy was to grow eBay by adding layers and layers of new revenue—like “adding layers to the cake.” You can see it visually here: Figure 12: eBay’s growth layer cake As the core US business began to look more like a line than a hockey stick, international and payments were layered on top. Together, the aggregate business started to look like a hockey stick, but underneath it was actually many new lines of business.

But Holbrooke brought to every job he ever held a visionary quality that transcended practical considerations. He talked openly about changing the world. “If Richard calls you and asks you for something, just say yes,” Henry Kissinger said. “If you say no, you’ll eventually get to yes, but the journey will be very painful.” We all said yes. By the summer, Holbrooke had assembled his Ocean’s Eleven heist team—about thirty of us, from different disciplines and agencies, with and without government experience. In the Pakistani press, the colorful additions to the team were watched closely, and generally celebrated. Others took a dimmer view. “He got this strange band of characters around him. Don’t attribute that to me,” a senior military leader told me. “His efforts to bring into the State Department representatives from all of the agencies that had a kind of stake or contribution to our efforts, I thought was absolutely brilliant,” Hillary Clinton said, “and everybody else was fighting tooth and nail.” It was only later, when I worked in the wider State Department bureaucracy as Clinton’s director of global youth issues during the Arab Spring, that I realized how singular life was in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan—quickly acronymed, like all things in government, to SRAP. The drab, low-ceilinged office space next to the cafeteria was about as far from the colorful open workspaces of Silicon Valley as you could imagine, but it had the feeling of a start-up.

One day Spinner, the woman who runs PR tells me, “I like that idea, but I’m not sure that it’s one-plus-one-equals-three enough.” What does any of this nutty horseshit actually mean? I have no idea. I’m just amazed that hundreds of people can gobble up this malarkey and repeat it, with straight faces. I’m equally amazed by the high regard in which HubSpot people hold themselves. They use the word awesome incessantly, usually to describe themselves or each other. That’s awesome! You’re awesome! No, you’re awesome for saying that I’m awesome! They pepper their communication with exclamation points, often in clusters, like this!!! They are constantly sending around emails praising someone who is totally crushing it and doing something awesome and being a total team player!!! These emails are cc’d to everyone in the department. The protocol seems to be for every recipient to issue his or her own reply-to-all email joining in on the cheer, writing things like “You go, girl!!” and “Go, HubSpot, go!!!!” and “Ashley for president!!!” Every day my inbox fills up with these little orgasmic spasms of praise. At first I ignore them, but then I feel like a grump and decide I should join in the fun. I start writing things like, “Jan is the best!!! Her can-do attitude and big smile cheer me up every morning!!!!!!!” (Jan is the grumpy woman who runs the blog; she scowls a lot.) Sometimes I just write something with lots of exclamation points, like, “Woo-hoo!!!!!!! Congratulations!!!!!!! You totally rock!!!!!!!!!!!!” Eventually someone suspects that I am taking the piss, and I am told to cut that shit out.

In fact, the same basic ingredients can easily be found in numerous start-up clusters in the United States and around the world: Austin, Boston, New York, Seattle, Shanghai, Bangalore, Istanbul, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Dubai. To discover the secret to Silicon Valley’s success, you need to look beyond the standard origin story. When people think of Silicon Valley, the first things that spring to mind—after the HBO television show, of course—are the names of famous start-ups and their equally glamorized founders: Apple, Google, Facebook; Jobs/ Wozniak, Page/ Brin, Zuckerberg. The success narrative of these hallowed names has become so universally familiar that people from countries around the world can tell it just as well as Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. It goes something like this: A brilliant entrepreneur discovers an incredible opportunity. After dropping out of college, he or she gathers a small team who are happy to work for equity, sets up shop in a humble garage, plays foosball, raises money from sage venture capitalists, and proceeds to change the world—after which, of course, the founders and early employees live happily ever after, using the wealth they’ve amassed to fund both a new generation of entrepreneurs and a set of eponymous buildings for Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. It’s an exciting and inspiring story. We get the appeal. There’s only one problem. It’s incomplete and deceptive in several important ways. First, while “Silicon Valley” and “start-ups” are used almost synonymously these days, only a tiny fraction of the world’s start-ups actually originate in Silicon Valley, and this fraction has been getting smaller as start-up knowledge spreads around the globe. Thanks to the Internet, entrepreneurs everywhere have access to the same information. Moreover, as other markets have matured, smart founders from around the globe are electing to build companies in start-up hubs in their home countries rather than immigrating to Silicon Valley.

Betsy didn’t want to be at the party any more than Cole did. She’d met the birthday girl in a spin class a couple of years earlier and had been declining her Evites ever since. In an effort to meet new people, however, this time Betsy replied “Yes.” She took a cab to the party, wondering why she was going at all. When Betsy met Cole there was a spark, but she was ambivalent. Cole was clearly smart and well educated, but he didn’t seem to be doing much about it. They had some nice dates, which seemed promising. Then, after sleeping over one night and watching Cole wake up at eleven a.m. and grab his skateboard, Betsy felt less bullish. She didn’t want to help another boyfriend grow up. What Betsy didn’t know was that, ever since he’d started spending time with her, Cole had regained some of his old drive. He saw the way she wanted to work on her sculptures even on the weekend, how she and her friends loved to get together to talk about their projects and their plans. As a result, Cole started to think more aspirationally. He eyed a posting for a good tech job at a high-profile start-up, but he felt his résumé was now too shabby to apply. As luck would have it—and it is often luck—Cole remembered that an old friend from high school, someone he bumped into about once every year or two, worked at the start-up. He got in touch, and this friend put in a good word to HR. After a handful of interviews with different people in the company, Cole was offered the position. The hiring manager told Cole he had been chosen for three reasons: His engineering degree suggested he knew how to work hard on technical projects, his personality seemed like a good fit for the team, and the twentysomething who vouched for him was well liked in the company. The rest, the manager said, Cole could learn on the job. This one break radically altered Cole’s career path. He learned software development at a dot-com on the leading edge. A few years later, he moved over and up as a director of development at another start-up because, by then, the identity capital he’d gained could speak for itself. Nearly ten years later, Cole and Betsy are married. She runs a gallery co-op. He’s a CIO. They have a happy life and gladly give much of the credit to Cole’s friend from high school and to the woman with the Evites.

Company culture” doesn’t exist apart from the company itself: no company has a culture; every company is a culture. A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.

Start-up teams must fall in love with the market and customers, not with their product.

The whole situation was ludicrous. A start-up rocket company had ended up in the middle of nowhere trying to pull off one of the most difficult feats known to man, and, truth be told, only a handful of the SpaceX team had any idea how to make a launch happen.

Interestingly, I see this same problem play out in many consumer Internet startups. I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention. This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention. Why? For many products, metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance. In contrast, the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool. As a result, many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience. This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product. It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.

Another way in which values can be expressed is in how different teams are treated throughout the organization. As also mentioned in Part III, it is common in startups for engineering teams, especially web and mobile development ones, to be valued more than other, nonengineering teams. While this usually is not explicitly stated, it becomes apparent through behaviors such as allowing more flexible schedules or remote opportunities for engineers; giving them a higher budget for swag, training, and travel; and giving them more recognition for their accomplishments.

Competing in a 100-pushup challenge in the office This is another example of an activity that can be a way to facilitate group bonding but isn’t necessarily inclusive of people with different levels of physical ability. Especially in startups with a younger median age, team activities can tend to skew toward those enjoyed by a very specific subset of the population. Things like fantasy sports teams; foosball, ping-pong, or pool tables; and fitness challenges can give off a “tech bro” kind of vibe. This isn’t to say that they shouldn’t be allowed, and it might not be possible to find an activity that every single person will love, but it’s important to pay attention to the type and variety of activities and rituals and who they might be unintentionally favoring or excluding.

When Brian Chesky was pitching venture capitalists to invest in Airbnb, one of the people he consulted was the entrepreneur and investor Sam Altman, who later became the president of the Y Combinator start-up accelerator. Altman saw Chesky’s pitch deck and told him it was perfect, except that he needed to change the market-size slide from a modest $ 30 million to $ 30 billion. “Investors want B’s, baby,” Altman told Chesky. Of course, Altman wasn’t telling Chesky to lie; rather, he argued that if the Airbnb team truly believed in their own assumptions, $ 30 million was a gross underestimate, and they should use a number that was true to their convictions. As it turns out, Airbnb’s market was indeed closer to $ 30 billion.

Rather than asking customers explicitly about feature X, Y or Z, one approach to defining the MVP is to ask, “What is the smallest or least complicated problem that the customer will pay us to solve?” This approach runs counter to the typical cry for more features, which is often based on what the competitors have or what the last customer visited had to say. The MVP is the inverse of what most sales and marketing groups ask of their development teams.

If you haven’t already read Eric Ries’s book The Lean Startup, go do that now. Then pick up Sprint by Jake Knapp and the Google Ventures team.

How to find investors that will fund your start-up and raise the money you require to grow your business. A perfect startup team is essential to establish and run an organization successfully. We help entrepreneurs build and grow their ventures and enterprises. Contact us for further details: +49-617420920

While forming a team for your startup always remember 5Cs: commitment, capability, capacity, character and craving of your team members.

Some of the same forces have come to bear in the business world, where many companies in thriving talent-dependent industries embraced a new workplace ethos in which hierarchies were softened and office floor plans were reengineered to break down the walls that once kept management and talent separated. One emerging school of thought, popular among technology companies in Silicon Valley, is that organizations should adopt “flat” structures, in which management layers are thin or even nonexistent. Star employees are more productive, the theory goes, and more likely to stay, when they are given autonomy and offered a voice in decision-making. Some start-ups have done away with job titles entirely, organizing workers into leaderless “self-managing teams” that report directly to top executives. Proponents of flatness say it increases the speed of the feedback loop between the people at the top of the pyramid and the people who do the frontline work, allowing for a faster, more agile culture of continuous improvement. Whether that’s true or not, it has certainly cleared the way for top executives to communicate directly with star employees without having to muddle through an extra layer of management. As I watched all this happen, I started to wonder if I was really writing a eulogy. Just as I was building a case for the crucial value of quiet, unglamorous, team-oriented, workmanlike captains who inhabit the middle strata of a team, most of the world’s richest sports organizations, and even some of its most forward-thinking companies, seemed to be sprinting headlong in the opposite direction.

Founding entrepreneurs are out to make their vision and business real. To succeed, they must abandon the status quo, recruit a team that shares their vision, and strike out together on what appears to be a new path, often shrouded in uncertainty, fear and doubt.

Entrepreneurship is messy. Startup life is messy. Growing a business is messy. I guarantee you it NEVER looks as glamorous on the inside as it does from the outside. If you are comparing what is going on in your company to what you see your peers and competitors doing, and feel behind or inadequate, or in any way not up to par..... Just let it go. You have no idea what they are going through that you cannot see. You never will. You don't need to. Take a deep breath. Stay on your path. Stay focused on your mission. Stay focused on your customers. Stay focused on your team. Your family. Your health. Find connection and joy in your own journey. Allow yourself to be inspired and fueled by others' success, but by all means, do not allow yourself to get derailed or thrown off of your path. Stay focused.

One of our engineers actually designed a bomb for this purpose; when he presented the schematic at a team meeting, calmer heads prevailed and the proposal was attributed to extreme sleep deprivation.

Many major automakers have established research centers in Silicon Valley to work on autonomy, including Nissan, Toyota, Mercedes, Ford, and GM. The newcomers—Apple, Lucid Motors, Faraday Future, Byton, and Nio—have made autonomy central to their business models and established software development teams in California. Che He Jia and Singulato Motors are working on the technology in Beijing and Shanghai. In the meantime, other tech companies and start-ups, such as Uber, Lyft, Comma.ai, Nauto, Luminar, Aurora, Caracal, Starsky Robotics, and Zoox, are all chasing variations of the self-driving prize, be it for cars, buses, or trucks.

Max Levchin, my co-founder at PayPal, says that startups should make their early staff as personally similar as possible. Startups have limited resources and small teams. They must work quickly and efficiently in order to survive, and that’s easier to do when everyone shares an understanding of the world.

According to Sequoia Capital, the average startup in Silicon Valley spends 990 hours to hire 12 software engineers!1 That’s more than 80 hours per hire, and all that time taken away from a team that’s already understaffed and working on deadline only adds to the urgency to staff up.

Product evangelism is, as Guy Kawasaki put it years ago, “selling the dream.” It's helping people imagine the future and inspiring them to help create that future. If you're a startup founder, a CEO, or a head of product, this is a very big part of your job, and you'll have a hard time assembling a strong team if you don't get good at it.

Your job as CEO of a startup is to assemble a team that truly enjoys working together building a product they truly believe needs to exist.

To have a successful startup, you need: a great idea (including a great market), a great team, a great product, and great execution.

about your mission and answers about your team. You’ll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it’s important in general, but why you’re doing something important that no one else is going to get done. That’s the only thing that can make its importance unique.

In the early days of the company, Jeff Bezos heard a comment in a meeting that irked him. Without saying anything, he suddenly jumped from his chair and left the room. His colleagues were baffled. When he returned, he brought an empty chair into the room, which he rolled right up to the table. He told the group that they weren’t thinking about things from the customer perspective and that this empty chair would now represent the customer. In every meeting thereafter, Bezos insisted on reserving an empty chair at the table so his teams would consider the customer in every key decision. This is a brilliant tactic, and it’s obviously proved incredibly successful for Amazon.

I could read it so you don’t have to?” she offers, but I’m already halfway through. I start to read aloud. “ ‘I had this vision for creating a platform that would help people to connect and coalesce around the things that mattered most to them. It was a natural extension of what I’d been doing for years. People used to call me a humanist spirit guide—I guess that’s what I’m bringing to WAI now, just on a larger stage.’ “He doesn’t even mention us. Doesn’t say anything about how Jules and I dragged him kicking and screaming into this. I wanted to create a platform. Cyrus just wanted to baptize cats.” “To be fair, the Cat Baptism is one of the most shared rituals,” Destiny says, trying to lighten the tone. “Eight hundred thousand videos and counting.” I keep going. “ ‘I’m attracted to the solitary life, Jones says. You can imagine him in a monastery, although he’d have to cut off that halo around his head. In addition to creating a social network that millions of people are turning to for meaning and community, he is also taking care of his employees—he has just kicked off a mentorship program to give the women on his team the support they need to thrive in their roles.’ ” Destiny tells me to stop reading. “It’s just bullshit.” I take a shaky deep breath. “That’s my mentorship program,” I whisper. “Cyrus is telling them what he wants to hear. You and I both know that.” I’m stammering now, but I keep going. “ ‘He’s otherworldly but handsome in an almost comical way. His sentences are long, and when you’re in the middle of one, you wonder, where is this going? But he always manages to bring whatever he’s saying to a satisfying conclusion. Everything he says is mysterious and somehow obvious at the same time.’ ” At least this one is funny. I allow Destiny to laugh briefly. I get to the last line. “ ‘I have to say, I’m developing something of a crush.’ ” “Oh, for God’s sake, another woman in love with Cyrus. Take a number, sister.” Destiny leans over, reads the byline. “George Milos. Guess Cyrus appeals to all genders.” As we get up to leave, she says, “I don’t think Cyrus is a bad person. He’s just basking in a sea of adoration, and it makes him think more of himself than he should.” “Where does that leave me?” “You have a tough gig. No one wants to be married to the guy everyone thinks is going to save the world.

Topics & Questions for Discussion In Chapter One, “Cyrus Jones and the Magic Funeral,” Asha describes Cyrus as “mostly human, a little bit cartoon, a tiny bit ghost.” Having read the book, what do you think of Cyrus as a character? Have you met anyone like him in real life? Think back to your high school crush(es). Do you recall that first feeling of attraction? How would you react if you happened upon that person now? What does Asha’s relationship with her older sister Mira bring to story? How does she add to your understanding of Asha as a person? Jules is a source of support, emotional and financial, for Cyrus and Asha. What other roles does he play in the novel? Recall the manifesto Cyrus writes in Chapter Three: “We don’t try to convince people to buy things We don’t spy on anyone We don’t sell our souls (we don’t sell anything) and We are equal partners and make all decisions together.” Did you predict any of these points might falter? Were you correct? Consider what kind of workplace Utopia is. Would you like to work there? What elements would you like to see in your current work situation? At the end of Chapter Five, Asha thinks about the cultural differences between her and Cyrus, contemplating his “whiteness.” To what extent do you think their differences affect their understanding of each other? Have you had to think about cultural differences in a similar way? Besides WAI, several other app ideas are mentioned in the novel: Consentify, LoneStar, Buttery, Flitter, and so on. Discuss your favorite, or if you have any other start up ideas. Asha, Cyrus, and Jules must delve into all the logistical aspects of starting and growing a business, from assembling the right team to sourcing funding. What seem to be the biggest challenges to starting a business? The novel deals with themes of gender dynamics and white male privilege throughout. At what points can you see these dynamics at play, and how do the characters respond? If you were Asha’s friend, or family member, how would you react to her relationship with Cyrus? Would you have warned her or supported her? What does or doesn’t seem to work about their marriage?

The perfect salesperson will naturally attract prospects, set a polished first impression, keep prospects engaged as well as educate them, follow up with them at just the right time and handle any objections with expert salesmanship, skillfully close the sale while simultaneously looking for upsell opportunities, and get referrals while retaining them as customers for life. Whether your top salesperson is you or someone on your team, that person will inevitably have a bad day, take vacations, and need benefits. The ASP™ takes the perfect version of your sales process and permanently stamps it into a technology system that works for you 24/7/365, never having a bad day, never needing a vacation, and never requiring benefits. The ASP™ is the growth-hacking framework we implement for our clients that range from traditional brick-and-mortar businesses to venture-backed technology start-ups. It’s a framework that can be applied to any type of business, and in the next several chapters, we’ll dive into ASP™ and its six individual components and show you how best to implement them for your business.

MATCH STRATEGY TO SITUATION—CHECKLIST What portfolio of STARS situations have you inherited? Which portions of your responsibilities are in start-up, turnaround, accelerated-growth, realignment, and sustaining-success modes? What are the implications for the challenges and opportunities you are likely to confront, and for the way you should approach accelerating your transition? What are the implications for your learning agenda? Do you need to understand only the technical side of the business, or is it critical that you understand culture and politics as well? What is the prevailing climate in your organization? What psychological transformations do you need to make, and how will you bring them about? How can you best lead change given the situations you face? Which of your skills and strengths are likely to be most valuable in your new situation, and which have the potential to get you into trouble? What are the implications for the team you need to build?

Teams were involved in creating new technologies, processes, and systems. • Cross-functional teams were formed around new great ideas. • Customers were involved from the inception of each feature concept. It’s important to understand that the old approach did not lack customer feedback or customer involvement in the planning process. In the true spirit of genchi gembutsu, Intuit product managers (PMs) would do “follow-me-homes” with customers to identify problems to solve in the next release. However, the PMs were responsible for all the customer research. They would bring it back to the team and say, “This is the problem we want to solve, and here are ideas for how we could solve it.” Changing to a cross-functional way of working was not smooth sailing. Some team members were skeptical. For example, some product managers felt that it was a waste of time for engineers to spend time in front of customers. The PMs thought that their job was to figure out the customer issue and define what needed to be built. Thus, the reaction of some PMs to the change was: “What’s my job? What am I supposed to be doing?” Similarly, some on the engineering side just wanted to be told what to do; they didn’t want to talk to customers. As is typically the case in large-batch development, both groups had been willing to sacrifice the team’s ability to learn in order to work more “efficiently.

Situation: The company has weathered the start-up and turnaround or crisis stage, and is now in accelerating growth. While there is a good growth strategy, there are not enough good leaders to carry it out. The products and services are good, but many business processes are either missing or dysfunctional. Strategy: Don’t think in terms of doing it all yourself, but focus on creating a team of ‘A’ players. Your mindset: “get me the best in the world,” rather than just fill slots. Do an assessment on what’s working and not working, and address what’s missing that could make a difference— build a brand name, leverage new technology, and outsource missing or broken processes.

VOYAGER is a unicorn start-up valued at $16 billion for its opaque use of data to target users, driving them to make purchases online. I am the head writer on the marketing team.

Humans are wired to oversimplify explanations for both good and bad outcomes through what philosophers call the single cause fallacy. We shine a spotlight on one big reason for a calamity—say, a failed presidential bid (“neglect of a key swing state”) or a sports team’s late-season collapse (“the star pitcher’s torn hamstring”)—when the outcome is actually a result of multiple factors.

The diamond-and-square framework provides the answers. The framework’s diamond breaks down the startup’s opportunity—that is, the “horse”—into four constituent parts: its customer value proposition, technology and operations, marketing, and profit formula. The diamond is framed by a square whose corners denote the venture’s key resource providers: its founders (that is, the “jockeys”), other team members, outside investors, and strategic partners.

startups are more likely to be vulnerable to the Good Idea, Bad Bedfellows failure pattern when they pursue opportunities that involve 1) complex operations requiring the tight coordination of different specialists’ work; 2) inventory of physical goods; and 3) large, lumpy capital requirements. By contrast, consider the more modest management demands on a purely software-based startup like Twitter when it launched. A small team of engineers created the site, and it spread virally without a paid marketing push. Capital requirements were modest and there was no physical inventory to manage. As Twitter grew, it eventually added an array of specialists to manage various functions—for example, community relations, server infrastructure, copyright compliance, etc. But it didn’t need these specialists at the outset.

Nagaraj and his new team were heading for a False Start—a failure pattern common to many early-stage ventures. A false start occurs when a startup rushes to launch its first product before conducting enough customer research—only to find that the opportunities they’ve identified are rife with problems. By giving short shrift to early and accurate customer feedback and by neglecting to test their assumptions with MVPs, they simply run out of time to fix all the flaws, thus turning Lean Startup’s “Fail Fast” mantra into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But Triangulate’s team, like many entrepreneurs, neglected yet another Lean Startup precept: complete “customer discovery”—a thorough round of interviews with prospective customers—before designing and developing a minimum viable product. In Nagaraj’s postmortem analysis of Triangulate’s failure, he acknowledged skipping this crucial early step: “In retrospect, I should have spent a few months talking to as many customers as possible before we started to code.

Compared to a lot of startups, the Grockit team had a huge advantage: they were tremendously disciplined. A disciplined team may apply the wrong methodology but can shift gears quickly once it discovers its error. Most important, a disciplined team can experiment with its own working style and draw meaningful conclusions.

To acquire customers, Baroo did not invest in traditional paid marketing, such as Facebook ads. Instead, the startup relied on the marketing efforts of apartment building partners and on word-of-mouth referrals from existing customers. Buildings would distribute a welcome gift from Baroo—a chew toy or leash—to new residents who owned pets. The team also hosted quarterly events for residents, such as “yappy hours” and pet Halloween. Finally, building concierge staff would recommend Baroo to residents. In exchange, the startup paid buildings a share of the revenue that it earned from their residents, averaging about 6 percent. Such revenue sharing is standard practice for service providers, like cable TV companies, that want access to residents.

VC Fred Wilson estimates that a typical startup will turn over its management team three times between its inception and when it achieves significant scale. Wilson emphasizes that turning over a team is not the same as firing someone for poor performance. Still, it can be tough to create new roles for senior managers who can’t handle the evolving demands of their current positions, and terminating them can be demoralizing for colleagues who’ve worked with them since the beginning—especially if those individuals are torchbearers for the startup’s mission and values. Wilson notes that serial entrepreneurs, having seen these patterns before, are better equipped to manage executive churn. He also advises founders to be open with new hires, letting them know that “they may not make it to the finish line, but they will be handsomely compensated with equity.

Cultures in scaling startups can fracture in two ways. First, “old guard versus new guard” conflicts may arise if early team members resent the growing power of specialists or some new employees’ lack of initiative and commitment. Recent hires, in turn, may be jealous of early employees who’ve amassed enormous stock option gains (“That engineer in the next cubicle does the same thing I do, and she just made $5 million”). Second, as specialists are added to the staff and their units expand, functions can develop their own subcultures. Employees may feel a stronger sense of attachment to their functional unit—say, marketing or warehouse operations—than to the venture overall.

The four elements described above—the “diamond” in the diamond-and-square framework—collectively specify the opportunity: what the venture will offer and to whom; its plan for technology and operations; its marketing approach; and how the venture will make money. To capture this opportunity, the venture will need the right resources in the right amounts. The “square” in the diamond-and-square framework specifies the four types of resource providers whose contributions are important for success in most startups. They include the venture’s founders, other team members, outside investors, and strategic partners who may provide key technologies, operational capabilities, or access to distribution channels.

Beware founding teams whose members all have similar training and functional experience. Startups launched at business schools often fit this profile.

One decision about team composition that early-stage startups often wrestle with is whether to hire for attitude or skill. This is a delicate balance. If founders hire mostly for attitude, their team will be comprised of highly motivated, hardworking, jack-of-all-trade generalists who will shift readily between tasks as circumstances require. Hiring for cultural fit can yield similar results,

However, hard work alone may not get the job done if no one on the team has the skill to solve tough problems in marketing, engineering, or other functions. Hiring mostly for skill can give early-stage startups a performance boost. But attracting talented specialists isn’t always easy for an unknown, cash-strapped startup with questionable survival prospects.

Hiring a team of skilled specialists does have its pitfalls. For example, specialists may be too quick to embrace solutions that worked for their prior employer but may not be suited for a nascent startup. Specialists may also display a “not my job” attitude when asked to help with work outside their area of expertise.

Quincy hadn’t assembled the resources required to capitalize on its promising opportunity. As a result, it fell victim to the early-stage startup failure pattern I call “Good Idea, Bad Bedfellows.” In this context, “resources” doesn’t refer simply to capital; we see the Good Idea, Bad Bedfellows pattern play out when a startup with a promising opportunity falters due to deficiencies and dysfunction among a range of key resource providers, including its founders, other team members, investors, and strategic partners.

About the Bacharach Leadership Group: Training for Pragmatic Leadership™ “Vision without execution is hallucination.”—Thomas Edison The litmus test of pragmatic leadership is results. The Bacharach Leadership Group (BLG) focuses on the skills necessary to lead and move agendas. Whether in corporations, nonprofits, universities, or entrepreneurial start-ups, BLG instructors train leaders in the core competencies necessary to execute change and innovation. At all levels of the organization, leaders must master ideation skills for innovation, political skills for moving change, negotiation skills for building support, coaching skills for engagement, and team leadership skills for going the distance. The BLG approach: 1. ASSESSMENT BLG will assess your organizational challenges and leadership needs. 2. ALIGNMENT BLG will align its training solutions with your organization’s challenges and culture. 3. TRAINING BLG training includes options for mixed-modality delivery, interactive activities, and collaboration with an emphasis on application. 4. OWNERSHIP BLG provides continuous follow-up, access to the exclusive BLG mobile apps library, and coaching. Whether delivering a complete leadership academy or a specific program or workshop, BLG will partner with you to get the results you need. To keep up to date with the BLG perspective, visit blg-lead.com or contact us at info@blg-lead.com.

solutions to market saturation might sound straightforward—add new geographies, support more formats and business models, and other tips that sound like common sense. However, the challenge is in the execution, which can’t be underestimated. Launching in every major country around the world while simultaneously staying on top of a hypergrowth startup in a core market is not easy. Yet that’s exactly what eBay had to do, building one of the most valuable internet companies in the 1990s while simultaneously adding the international business, “Buy It Now,” and new product verticals. Once these obvious growth levers are mined, what’s next? Eventually new products have to be layered on. It’s hard to ask teams to start and build new products from scratch. It’s difficult enough as a startup, but trying to do this inside a larger company adds myriad of complexities—there’s internal politics, distractions, lack of resources, adverse selection of talent, and dozens of other challenges.

The person who’s not scaling to the new level of complexity of the business and the size of the team and the different kinds of problems, that’s different—that’s not necessarily a mistake. You would possibly have made the same decision if you had the same information you have now. Whereas the mistake, if you had the same information, you would not go back and make the same decision. So that one, you definitely want to limit to one digit if you can. The scale and

Rarely discussed in studies of entrepreneurial startups is just how lonely it can be out there with a revolutionary new product, no competition, and a market that doesn't seem to get what you are doing. You can try to hide in an echo chamber of your own team but eventually, you have to go outside and deal with investors, analysts and potential customers. And when all of them are skeptical, even dismissive, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the supreme confidence you need to keep going. That's why many of the great entrepreneurs are arrogant and obsessive to the point of megalomania. They sometimes have to be able to take their solitary vision and make it real.

Managing personality types is a skill you have to develop for scaling—leading leaders is a different ball game from leading a startup team. But it starts with understanding your profile and understanding the profiles of others. Otherwise, you could unintentionally create a team of clones or place people in the wrong positions.

One way to make yourself less vulnerable to copycats is to build a moat around your business. How Can I Build a Moat? As you scale your company, you need to think about how to proactively defend against competition. The more success you have, the more your competitors will grab their battering ram and start storming the castle. In medieval times, you’d dig a moat to keep enemy armies from getting anywhere near your castle. In business, you think about your economic moat. The idea of an economic moat was popularized by the business magnate and investor Warren Buffett. It refers to a company’s distinct advantage over its competitors, which allows it to protect its market share and profitability. This is hugely important in a competitive space because it’s easy to become commoditized if you don’t have some type of differentiation. In SaaS, I’ve seen four types of moats. Integrations (Network Effect) Network effect is when the value of a product or service increases because of the number of users in the network. A network of one telephone isn’t useful. Add a second telephone, and you can call each other. But add a hundred telephones, and the network is suddenly quite valuable. Network effects are fantastic moats. Think about eBay or Craigs-list, which have huge amounts of sellers and buyers already on their platforms. It’s difficult to compete with them because everyone’s already there. In SaaS—particularly in bootstrapped SaaS companies—the network effect moat comes not from users, but integrations. Zapier is the prototypical example of this. It’s a juggernaut, and not only because it’s integrated with over 3,000 apps. It has widened its moat with nonpublic API integrations, meaning that if you want to compete with it, you have to go to that other company and get their internal development team to build an API for you. That’s a huge hill to climb if you want to launch a Zapier competitor. Every integration a customer activates in your product, especially if it puts more of their data into your database, is another reason for them not to switch to a competitor. A Strong Brand When we talk about your brand, we’re not talking about your color scheme or logo. Your brand is your reputation—it’s what people say about your company when you’re not around.

As is typically the case in large-batch development, both groups had been willing to sacrifice the team’s ability to learn in order to work more “efficiently.