Specialties Matter

Gathering a startup team is always a challenge. Yet, nearly all startups demand assembling a diverse range of skills that will cover your bases. This enables forward progress to the next milestone and the subsequent funding that allows you to further expand your team. Understanding the relevant specialties and sub-specialties and how to access them will often be critical to success.

One of the significant differences between a startup and a fully established company is that startups begin with tiny teams of people trying to cover the wide range of capabilities the company needs to grow. Fully established companies have reached a scale where they can employ the specialists they need to do the range of tasks that must be accomplished. On the other hand, startups must often make do with people who are stretching their skills to cover areas they may be less expert in, at least for a while, and finding creative ways to make use of part-time contract teams, advisors, and other arrangements.

As the venture creator, you need to think carefully about the most critical skills for your particular startup and assemble a team with expertise in those most important areas, often beginning with technical product development skills. For example, if you are going to build an engineering-based startup, what area of engineering are you innovating in, and what types of engineering expertise are must-haves to develop the company’s products? If you are developing a scientific or biological product, what types of expertise do you need to ensure that you have solid eyes on your most important pathways and success factors? If you are developing a software product, what does your solution architecture demand in terms of developer skills? Bottomline, be sure to invest in expertise in those areas where you must develop your own “secret sauce” to advance your startup through its early critical milestones.

As you grow your venture, you will need to recruit others to complement your skills, yet you often need to build a team whose areas of expertise are different than your own – and on a shoestring budget. One knowledge gap that I often run into when coaching newly forming startup founding teams is a lack of awareness of how specialized some types of potential team members are. This means that usually the most critical team member to add is someone with leadership expertise in particular “secret sauce” domains who can help guide the vetting and hiring of the specific types of technical expertise you need. For example, it is not enough to think I need an engineer, a doctor, a scientist, or even a lawyer. All of these are better thought of as “categories” of expertise because there are many sub-specialties – and you actually will need particular sub-specialties. Now, unless you personally have technical knowledge in the relevant domain, you should find someone who does to possibly join your team to lead the build-out of an internal team or to coordinate and oversee the work of part-time specialists.

To illustrate some of the sub-specialization complexity that makes team assembly and curation such an art, check out the following representative examples of the practically endless possible types of team members you may need:

Engineers: Engineers are professionals who are involved in inventing, designing, and maintaining a variety of machines, structures, and data systems. There are electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, marine engineers, software engineers, and so on. When my startup was developing a life science research tool, we assembled a team of electrical, mechanical, embedded systems, software, and manufacturing engineers to deal with optics, fluidics, electronics, case, and software development, as well as the manufacturing processes. When my startup was developing a novel offshore energy generation technology, we assembled a team of electrical, mechanical, and marine engineers complemented by theoretical and experimental physicists to do the technology development. The point is that you will need to figure out what types of engineering problems need to be solved to develop your product and then make sure you have some experienced specialists available to competently do the highly technical analysis and design work required. The same concepts apply to scientists who are also highly sub-specialized into the different branches of science.
Lawyers: The sub-specialty problem also applies to areas where you may hire consultants, such as legal or regulatory experts. Even though most startups won’t need a full-time lawyer on the team, you will need to hire part-time lawyers with varying specialty expertise to address the needs of your growing business. Remarkably, many entrepreneurs do not realize how many different specialties there are among lawyers. However, it makes some sense as most entrepreneurs are not lawyers themselves, and this is one of those “learn-by-experience” things. To illustrate, you need a corporate lawyer for your company formation, fundraising rounds, stock option plans, and exit transactions. You may need a patent attorney with the right technical expertise and patent expertise for writing and prosecuting the patent process and conducting freedom-to-operate analyses. You may need a licensing attorney to help negotiate an appropriate intellectual property license. You will need a business or contracts lawyer for the day-to-day agreements that make up your business relationships. You may need an employment attorney for human resources topics. Your local generalist attorney will be unlikely to fit the range of expertise your emerging business will need, so be sure to get recommendations and seek an appropriately skilled law firm to help you.
Functional specialists: Startups often make liberal use of semi-skilled functional generalists to get the initial broad brushstrokes of business processes built, with specialized supplementation with outside contract specialists. For example, the company founders will often do almost every function for a while until the business develops enough to start specializing. High-potential startups usually begin with a core technically-skilled research and development team for the product development phase and then add commercial skills like marketing and sales once the product-market fit is established and commercial scale-up becomes critical. As the company grows, it will need to add financial/accounting specialists, human resources capabilities, IT support, facilities, and other back-office functions to support the growing core business.

Takeaway: One of the great arts of building a startup is becoming adequately familiar with all the relevant areas of expertise that you will need to add over time, and figuring out how to finesse finding enough of the right expertise at the right time to get through the next milestone, and then continually evolving your team to meet the business needs. The first step, as always, is recognizing the nuance and complexity of the team assembly challenge and embracing learning enough about it to navigate your way forward effectively. Honestly, I think this is one of the factors differentiating the startups that succeed from those that fail. One of my favorite tricks is taking advantage of learning about other startup teams, especially those who are a step or two ahead of mine and in similar spaces, to learn about what specialties might become logical next steps. I also work to build a network of experts in various areas who can navigate the sub-specialties that I can consult when I am trying to figure out what expertise I need to add or access.