Seth's advice on Forming a Team

seth posted this on October 10, 2007

Over
the last two days I got to talk with students at both my high school
and my college. In both cases, the students were all interested in
potentially starting their own business some day, and my goodness did
they have a lot of questions. One of my favorite topics that usually
comes up is how to put together an initial team to actually work on the
project!

Those of you who've used meebo for a long while know
that Elaine, Sandy and I got together and worked on completely
different ideas before ultimately coming up with the idea of moving IM
over to the web. We actually started back in 2003, but didn't launch
anything until 2005. What this means, though, is that we decided that
we liked working together and that we were a really strong team, so
even if we started in on one project and decided we didn't like it, we
stayed together and worked on the next one.

I tried to start a
bunch of startups before meebo...and they all, more or less, failed. A
common factor, I think, was that I tried to do them myself...I didn't
find other really great people to team up with. The reality, of course,
is that any given person is only knowledgeable in a relatively narrow
field. Sure, I can raise a round of funding, but I could never actually
build meebo. That has Elaine and Sandy written all over it! And then if
you look at Elaine's and Sandy's unique skills, you notice that they
too are very complimentary to each other. Elaine's focus is what you
see on the screen (front end) while Sandy's is moving bits through
servers really efficiently (back end).

The team that you work
with to do a startup is incredibly important. You really want to find
people who are NOT like you...who have unique skills that compliment
your weaknesses (me: attention to detail...not so good!). So make sure
you branch out and find folks who compliment you, and perhaps above
all, make sure you all really love working together...you'll be
spending many sleepless nights working together!

Seth