Together vs. Alone: Thoughts on building a team
preetamnath.com
preetamnath.com
Team mode works well when you have found a beachhead and are ready to settle the new territory. If you are still looking through the fog, however, or exploring multiple ideas, or even some giant crazy sounding project, scout mode (single or small team) is more resource efficient and teaches/surfaces the resourceful and obsessed. Zuckerberg tinkering at Harvard, Drew Houston with DropBox, the Wright brothers, and plenty of others to showcase.
Solo developers and two person teams without a trust fund may even build revenue generating boring stuff first, to use the funds for moonshot prototyping (as the article writers also did).
Creativity, especially deep problem-solving or exploration requires hermit mode (ask PhDs). Ideas generated in solo mode make great discussion material for team brainstorming, but going straight to team produces mostly shallow work. Then there is the dynamic of managing work, expectations, direction, stakeholders.
If you are the type of founder who enjoys managing other people doing the work, you may start with fundraising/hiring, but I would put my money on those truly obsessed with the problem. Especially if they take the first stab at it to find the right direction and iterate a few times until they are confident with a solid target before growing a team.
In the post I talk about how we moved from the mindset of "only doing things as the 2 of us" to "having a team of 5-15 people will could get us 100x farther" :)
Some team members go on their own path-finding journey and can make the decisions on their own on where to take it.
I believe a team effort also involves a transfer of knowledge. I know some companies are disfunctional regarding this. Some companies aren't and while you are working on something, you can invite others to comment and give suggestions while you present your current progress.
I would present during team meetings what I was doing and why and sometimes got great feedback which helped me. If what I was working on affected many teams or wasn't interesting to my own team, I would send an optional meeting invite. Two kinds of people accepted it. The ones who were interested and the ones who had experience in that particular sub-topic.
Generally, the ones with experience asked questions during the meeting and the ones without sometimes asked questions afterwards. Both were helpful. Those with experience sometimes made me pivot. And those without, I flagged as someone I would like to include now or at some point in the project.
I don't think what I said was contradicting what you said.