Team Dynamics for Preseed Round
I’ve been seeing solo founders raise preseed rounds ($4/5m) to then hire their co-founders and teams. Many of these only connect with the purpose of starting a company and do not have a prior relationship.
I have also seen more founder breakups within first 2 years which demoralizes & derails the company. Leaves messy cap tables. Really hard things to recover from.
Starting a successful company is not like taking a successful job. There are ups and downs & you mostly have to stick it out for years figuring things out without guaranteed success at below market wages for much higher potential long term upside.
It’s rough at a startup. You have to figure out a lot. Problems aren’t handed to you. You have to find them on your own. Solve them on your own. You have no money to hire people to solve things for you. There is a lot to do. You have no idea what’s going to make it a success.
Sometimes it feels easy to take capital first and then figure it all out later. Figuring it out after you take money is too late. You’ve taken money, made commitments, hired people, and honestly given up better opportunities where you could have been more successful.
It takes a while to figure out how to build a trusting co-founder working relationship with someone. Figuring that out while building a startup just sounds very painful.
Chief Customer, Field Technical/PS leadership and Customer Success Leader Adviser, CyberSecurity, AI Governance, Cloud, Dev/Ops
2 年This is 100% spot on - I couldn’t imagine trying to start a business w a team I didn’t know prior
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2 年??Amen ??
CIO | Manager | Entrepreneur | Advisor & Investor
2 年I totally Agree with You Shruti!
Founder, CEO, Inventor, Visionary
2 年Proposition to the community and to whomever wishes solve this: solve the problem by exploring the use of a dating-site model. Find your perfect partner or partners! Setup a startup to provide a recommender engine for business partnerships. Use Myers Briggs and other test metrics to inputting into the system and develop a complete API for people to service different kinds of "partnerships" (music partnerships, theatre partnerships, science partnerships, engineering partnerships, marketing partnerships .... ). Someone out there build it since LinkedIN is not doing it for us. Maybe LinkedIn will create a ParteringLink portal who knows? OF course, if people lie on their profiles, the partnerships will be doomed - just like internet marriages. But for those that tell the truth, bliss or success can be found.
Entrepreneurial leader and transformational technologist: partnering to create new ideas, empowering teams to bring successful businesses to life.
2 年Great post. One of my rules for funding a startup is that there be at least two founders who have known each other in some kind of working relationship for at least 5 years. I have never had a team blow up following this rule.