Hold Out for the Right Stuff

As a serial entrepreneur, one of the things I have learned about founding startups is the critical importance of holding out for the right idea and the right team. You will invest years of your life trying to realize the potential of your startup vision – and the idea and the team are critical success factors.

Holding out for the right stuff is incredibly hard, especially when you are not yet even sure what the right stuff is. However, if you move too quickly, you set yourself up for more pain and failure than anyone should ever want to undertake. So:

• Investigate the demand
• Understand the difficulty
• Don’t force it
• Don’t rush it

The Right Idea

The right idea:

• Gets your future customers excited!

If you envision solving a real unmet need, then you should be able to articulate it to your target customers in a way that gets them excited. If you have not yet found a compelling need, keep hunting until you do because if you can elegantly solve a real pain point, customers will be willing to take a chance and pay for something new – and then keep coming back for more while telling their friends. When you have got it, your prospective customers will tell you. This is the foundational element of the virtuous cycle that startups need to succeed.

• Gets you excited!

Startups are hard, so it is crucial that your founding team can emotionally commit to solving the problem you have identified for the long haul. Ask yourself how much you care about this problem, these customers, this solution, this impact because it is those things that will help you keep getting up when you have been knocked flat so you can persevere along the long road to success.

• Can be solved with reasonable technology steps in a reasonable timeframe

Sometimes, the solution you must invent will take longer than you can realistically fund to develop. Take care to establish a realistic assessment of how big the technical mountain you need to climb is. Layer on some conservative factors for the unknowns you have not uncovered yet. Pay attention to the hurdles that must be overcome. Remember that even once your magic mousetrap is built, selling it will be far more complicated and take far longer than you initially imagined. Some of my worst mistakes were when I thought that we could overcome complex technical hurdles or fund long development cycles. Such things are challenging to fund and, therefore, hard to overcome. Make sure you think carefully and practically about the road ahead before you take the plunge and start.

The Right Team

The right team:

• Has complementary strengths and weaknesses that together cover the essential bases

First, you must understand where you are starting from (think stage of development) and what skills your team needs to accomplish the next few critical milestones. Since the earliest teams are almost always tiny, every person who joins must bring specific capabilities that can contribute to those early creation steps. This almost certainly means “no clones.”  In the founding stage, you don’t have the resources to hire replicates for specific skill sets, and you don’t have the time to hire newbies who haven’t done anything before. Figure out what bases you need to cover and then form a founding team (which could be as few as two people) to accomplish the first initial tasks before you begin expanding. Don’t recruit people for future stages yet, as resources are too precious, although you can undoubtedly welcome enthusiastic supporters of your vision who might be good fits to join later.

• Have an ownership mentality, which is the commitment to do what it takes together

Founders invariably need to be willing to jump into areas that they may not be experts in and just start solving the problems in front of them. If founders are waiting for someone else to tell them what to do (which does not preclude seeking good advice and counsel!), then they really should not be founders. You must own the problems, solve them even when they are a stretch, and not expect someone else to show up as a saving knight to rescue you. This is the difference in attitude between people who are owners and people who are employees. Know that the right team to start an entrepreneurial journey will be filled with owners who have the emotional commitment and capability to forge a path together.

• Collaborates, communicates, learns, and grows together

The essence of creating an innovative, high-potential startup is learning because, almost by definition, you are going where no one has gone before. That is inherently hard work that demands a team that can learn individually and together, must solve a diverse set of challenging problems, and must be able to navigate disappointments and setbacks together without breaking apart.

The entrepreneurial passion required to start a company to solve some difficult problem compellingly is rare. Yet, when done well, it can be one of the most potent forces for extraordinary impact in our capitalistic society. If you are the one to do it, then pursue that path with wisdom, energy, and excellence; if it is worth doing, it is worth doing thoughtfully and well.