
Together vs. Alone: Thoughts on building a team - grwthckrmstr
https://www.preetamnath.com/blog/building-a-team
======
dzink
Very nice article, but I have to disagree with the notion that solo developers
or small teams are limited to small ideas.

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.

~~~
nocturnial
Isn't what you're describing autonomy of team members?

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.

------
quanticle
This article appears to have very little substance. The author and his co-
founder hired an engineer. They don't explain how they found this engineer.
They don't explain how they evaluated their hire. They don't explain anything
about their overall philosophy on how an engineering team should function.
It's just that the founder and co-founder couldn't do all the work they needed
to do in order to execute on their plan, so they hired someone to help with
the burden. I don't understand why this deserves a blog post, much less a blog
post that reaches the front page of Hacker News.

~~~
tomcat27
What you mentioned is the raw materials of the post.. but the nice stuff I
see: experience around these raw materials.

------
xwdv
tl;dr: Go alone when you want to go fast, go together when you want to go far.

------
sergiomattei
Great article!

~~~
grwthckrmstr
Thank you Sergio. Hope you enjoyed the recent roadtrip to the oceans. The
trail looked beautiful <3

