The Startup Team

I am not quite sure what to make of this. Steve Blank teaches a class on entrepreneurship. If you have a team of Hacker, Hustler, Designer, Visionary Stanford graduates - sounds like you are 90% of the way there. Hell - I will give you money. You can say pretty much anything to a team like that and they are going to succeed. Almost sounds more like investing than teaching.

So...has Steve Blank discovered that teams of people from Ivy league schools who personally know Steve Blank and have his implicit backing tend to be successful?

I believe Steve skipped several steps in team formation and jumped to "capability" aspects of the individual team members in forming the team which I consider to be the last step before forming a core startup team.

From my past startup experience, the core startup team need to consider following aspects before considering working together.

1. Passion (intrinsic motivation) - Ideally, each team members must be passionate at high level about the domain or technology or market everyone will be working in. And, the intrinsic motivation shouldn't be $$$ as the light at the end of the tunnel.

2. Chemistry - There needs to be chemistry between the team members but avoid the extreme ends of groupthink (likely to miss information that might be critical to success) and devil's advocate (likely to never agree on taking next step or becoming disenchanted).

3. Commitment - Once team members have passion for the domain, technology or market, then work together to refine the high level vision into the specific business idea, problem you will be solving etc. A team that comes up with the idea together tend to stay together. If it is one person idea that other bought into initially, that person need to continuously cheer-leading the rest otherwise at first hurdle, the people who bought in will start considering alternate options or walking away.

Once you have figured out these three aspects, then consider the "capability" aspect and who will do what and what need to learn by someone to be able to fill holes.

I was hoping there'd be a bit more in the article about the chemistry that really makes this "world class team" so great. So far, it seems a bit random to me. I've been on teams with a lot of very smart people that have failed miserably, and have been in other teams where the members weren't necessarily the very best but were able to work together and really get the synergy thing going. I wish Steve shared what exactly suddenly made the right teams form and how he knew these were the right world class people (it didn't sound like any of them had major success yet).

This is key, after the idea you have the execution. A brilliant execution can only be achieve with a strong team. You can't excel in every quadrant, the thinking pattern and execution of an Hacker isn't the same of an Hustler. This is a great proof that the personalities you like less are the ones you need most.

The lessons they learned look very similar to the Y-Combinator selection criteria