The Smarter Startup

The best team wins, in sports and in business alike.

At a stage where assembling a great team is crucial, a great founder focuses on setting the vision, charting the course and assembling a winning team.

 Make sure you fill those crucial initial spots with a great team that will take you places.

Congratulations to the Houston Astros, 2017 World Series Champions, and to the city of Houston who can use the win after a rough summer of devastating storms.  How did the worst team in baseball in 2013 with only 51 wins turn it around so quickly and reach the pinnacle of their sport?  They committed themselves to building the best possible team using all means available.  The Astros beat the Los Angeles Dodgers, another great team that also had a great season.  Both teams won over 100 games and survived a tough run through the playoffs.  Also, both teams made major in-season moves that just may have been crucial to getting them to the World Series.

Assembling the best team

Like every other major sport, it’s now conventional wisdom that to win a championship, you do everything you can to put the best team on the field. The Astros traded for Justin Verlander, who went a combined 9-1 in the remainder of the regular season and playoffs and was key to all three of their playoff series wins.  The Dodgers picked up Yu Darvish who helped solidify their rotation and get them to the World Series.  Last year, it was Aroldis Chapman joining the Cubs and Andrew Miller joining the Indians.  In 2015, it was Johnny Cueto and Ben Zobrist for the Royals and Yoenis Cespedes for the Mets.

This lesson applies just as well to startups and to companies as a whole. The best team wins, and the question to ask is: are you doing everything you can to put the best possible team on the field?

I spent 13 years as a venture capitalist and during that time we had a saying.  If the three most important factors in real estate investing are “location, location, location”, we often said the three most important factors in VC investing are “management, management, management.”  We would take an “A” management team with a “B” idea over the reverse every time.  Why?  Because we had confidence the “A” team would be able to handle all the twists and turns required to successfully navigate the startup minefield and eventually find the “A” idea.  While the “B” team might just get stuck and fail to execute.

As a founder and entrepreneur, I had the same experience regarding the importance of having the right team. No matter how novel the idea, there were always multiple other companies chasing the same goal.  With the proliferation of startups, accelerators, incubators, seed funds, crowdfunding, etc, this is likely more true today than ever.  There is no doubt that timing matters.  Market size matters.  Business model matters.  But all else being equal, the better team has a much greater chance at winning.  I’ve seen it personally from both sides.  Bet the jockey, not the horse.

The relentless pursue of opportunity

Of course, as a startup you don’t have unlimited funds to pay seasoned leaders to join your team.  So, you need to be creative and grab talent whenever and however you can.  Probably the best definition of entrepreneurship I ever heard was from legendary Harvard Business School Professor Howard Stevenson, who defined it as “the relentless pursuit of opportunity beyond resources controlled.”

I joined Burkland about a year ago and one thing that has surprised me so far is how many founders I’ve met who spend their time building Excel models, creating pitch decks and even doing journal entries and reviewing expense reports instead of leading their companies. At a stage where assembling a great team is crucial, a great founder focuses on setting the vision, charting the course, motivating the team and assembling the resources to be successful.  Recruit a team of experts – full time or part time, employees or consultants – to help you execute.

Justin Verlander and Yu Darvish may only take the ball every fifth day. They may not even be around 2-3 years from now, but this year, they made all the difference. The lesson to learn from this is: who can you add to your team to give you the cover you need to put you over the top?

Think about it.