What Goes Into Creating An Amazing Company: Getting Together A-Grade Folk (2/9)

Over the years, I have developed a working model of what goes behind creating an amazing company. As I look to build my 3rd venture - ithinkyouare - the world's 'compliment' app - I thought this might be a good opportunity to publish these ideas

In case these strike a chord with you, or you think of someone with whom they will - the misfits, the rebels, the round pegs in square holes - I am also building the initial team of pirates for ithinkyouare - so do get in touch with me

The Extraordinary Power Of The Founding Team

The first five people that you pick for your startup are not quite like any other hiring that the company does in the future. The leverage here is insanely high

Why is that? Mainly because you are sowing the seeds here for a forest. The quality of the first few seeds is crucial. It will decide the quality of the forest

A-grade people only like to work with A-grade people (it's not a great experience working with people of lower standards than yourself)

So effectively the initial team is self-policing in terms of the kind of people they let in (in the future)

Manage the first seeds well, and you will have a great, self-sustaining, organically-growing forest

Since the impact of the first five hires is so high, it deserves exceptional energy and time allocation. Don't worry too much about how much it takes. The long-term results are worth it

How To Assemble A Great Founding Team

How do you get that amazing first team though? I think you need to do primarily 4 things:

1. Suss out Passion (or, even better...Purpose)

Doing an ambitious startup is a crazy thing, that very few people are marked out for. It can often be an extraordinary rollercoaster, that will test your character to the hilt

What kind of people can overcome this scale of obstacles? In the end, it's quite simple - whatever you do in life, what matters in the end is if your motivation is higher than the obstacles

Since the obstacles here are so crazy, you better look for super-motivated people

These are often the ones who really, passionately care about bringing the product/service that you are creating to the world. It aligns with their sense of purpose

It aligns with their ikigai:

1. What they love
2. What they are good at
3. What the world needs
4. What the world will reward them for

Suss out such people and they will be the pillars that the organization can stand on for years to come

For instance, with ithinkyouare, I am driven by the idea of building something that makes it more natural for people to (liberally) give compliments. Because compliments are a beautiful thing - they cost you nothing, and they 'make someone's day' - so a world where compliments are given more freely, where people don't hesitate when they have something good to say to someone, that's a world I want to live in. So I am creating it, and I want to work with people who are as excited about the idea of creating it

2. Set A-Grade Standards

How do you attract A-Grade people? By providing them with a great salary, and great perks? Not really. The best people want to create impact, and they want to invest in themselves

They actually want higher standards to keep to, not lower, because they have an intuitive desire to grow, to improve, and to become the best version of themselves

They are also usually both smart and nice, and they have energy (Warren Buffet has often talked about using this metric for hiring - find someone with intelligence, energy, and integrity - and if someone has the first 2 but not the last, don't even bother)

So set high standards, don't be scared. It works well because it will quickly weed out the unexceptional, and at the same time attract the best, because they will like the idea of working in an environment where everyone expects and delivers great things. Working in such an environment is an immensely joyful experience. Being able to depend 100% on your teammates to deliver on their promises is as liberating as it gets, and the best people will often do their best work in exactly these kinds of environments. And they know this is the case (intuitively even if not consciously), so they will sense it when they encounter a team/founder that sets high standards

And when it comes down to it, how do you decide if someone is worth it or not? I personally like to get these decisions down to one phrase that I can test against. One phrase that sums up everything. And the phrase that I have developed over time is 'Is this a person I would go to war with?'

There is great power to such phrases. They bring an overall big-picture-sense to decision-making when there might be a hundred different factors being considered

3. Create An A-Grade Environment

The fact that they are working with A-grade teammates is a big motivator, but you add to that by making sure the environment is amazing in other ways as well:

• Clear communication: Set clear expectations and goals
• No bureaucracy, minimal meetings: Smart people like to be left alone, and seek help when they need it. They self-organize
• High trust, high freedom, high ownership: Smart people hate being micromanaged. Again, they self-manage. Let them be. That's where the leverage of a team also comes from - from delegating things and not needing to worry about them
• Beautiful, calming work environment: Our environment and our background affect us in numerous ways. If you can have an office set up in a nice, green, close-to-nature, bright environment, nothing like it. If you can't, think of other ways, but exercise some control over background factors like the environment, which affect us in unconscious ways
• A sense of working together on a mission: Apart from picking people who are already excited about the mission, the other thing you want to do is to get them together, and let them feed off each other's energy (and learn from each other) as they work for a greater cause. If possible, get them to work together physically, not remotely
• Recognition: A-Grade-people go out of their way, beyond the call of duty. Recognize it when they do. Appreciate freely, liberally

4 .Build a family, not just a 'team'

Even if you do all the right things, you may not succeed. A common thread you will find in all of the world's philosophical systems is the idea that it's much wiser to give your heart and soul to something meaningful to you but still be detached from the outcome. By doing the right things, we just improve probabilities, but we don't ever make it 100% - there will inevitably lot of things beyond our control, and beyond our current understanding

So the idea is not just to find the right team to succeed, but rather the right 'family' that you would not mind even failing with. The kind of people you would still be proud to have worked with on a joint mission, the kind of people who would teach you things that would make you a better human being for the rest of your life

Our biological families are our initial set of playing cards. Some people get lucky (I am one of the really lucky ones on that count), while others don't

But our chosen families - our friends and our colleagues - are down to us. There's a proverb that I really like - 'We become the average of the 5 people we spend most time with' - I think there's great profoundness there

Choose your 'chosen family' well, surround yourself with people who inspire you, and you will win in the long run

That's it. Good luck with creating an amazing organization, that is much more than the sum of its parts!