

The Startup Team - pier0
http://steveblank.com/2011/12/13/the-startup-team/

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tpatke
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?

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ph0rque
Not quite: Steve Blank's class will be available to everyone online next year
(<http://www.launchpad-class.org/>). Not sure how they will handle the
logistics, though...

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lesterbuck
Last week the Houston Lean Startup Circle enjoyed a Skype talk by Steve Blank.
One question was about forming teams for the Februrary online class, and he
was very clear that the online system cannot handle team formation from 30,000
students (at least not yet).

~~~
ph0rque
Thanks for this info. Was there any mention on how those who are interested
will be selected?

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akg_67
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.

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Killah911
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).

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TristanKromer
I agree.

But since Steve is eliminating one of the biggest team factors from his class,
I doubt he'd be able to get a good vantage point.

Having a shared methodology seems to be necessary, but not sufficient, for a
good team. If the team can't agree on how to judge progress towards their goal
(whether that's lean startup or a "field of dreams" approach) then it's almost
guaranteed to implode after the first big hurdle.

Worse still is if they don't have any mechanism for judging progress. Could be
dollars raised, lines of code, written, or hypotheses validated...but there
has to be something to provide the team with a shared sense of accomplishment
as they struggle.

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b2hack
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.

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

