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What do you feel constitutes a startup? What’s the so called DNA of a startup? Is it the product or the service? Is it the idea? Is it the promoters in the background? Is it their experience? Their individual qualifications? What do you feel it is? – It’s ‘The Team’ which makes a startup, yes it is indeed ‘The Team’! That’s their DNA, the genes of the company which will either drive it to success or drive it apart.

People may ask, what’s the definition of a startup team? Am I a one-person startup or a two-person startup? I do not have a team, so does this mean we will fail or what does it mean? By ‘The Team” we do not only mean the promoters and the creators. By ‘The Team’ we feel it should be every individual person in the company who shares the dream, the vision and has “a do or die” attitude, the undying passion for the organization – such an individual should essentially form part of ‘The Team’ in that startup. Many will question that, why is a team required? What difference does this make? This is what we believe, kindly share your views too:

1) The biggest difference, if you have a team within the startup is that you will not be taken as a one-person company. Trust me, many do not feel “a one person” company is professional. Neither an investor or a customer. The presence of a professionally distributed team with their respective tasks well-defined, will have a great impact on one and all.

2) Another big impact will be that your startup can scale, as it has already got a team in place and all of you can function well together! A one-person or a two-person startup can awaken fears in an investor or a customer’s mind, as to will he or she be able to work in a team or will they be able to scale?

3) Another impact of ‘The Team’ will be when you talk about your services or ideas or products to any individual, investor or customer. When one person talks or four people talk the same, the perception is quite different, especially in the impact on the opposite observer. How does this translate in perception, what do you think?

4) Task division becomes quite simple and everyone can work more focused. A one-person company has to look into a lot of things including non-core activities however a four-person company can have their tasks well divided and work more organized, focused and quite efficiently. Specialization within the core team does pay off!

5) We would also recommend that one should try to make ‘The Team’ a part of your ‘Core Management Team’ as a ‘Core Management Team’ can act as a binding, cohesive force which can leap ahead with agility over competition and deliver compelling solution to their customers!

We feel that even though ‘only one’ cannot be a team, it’s much the effort of ‘that one’ to start building a team and often the team needs ‘some one’ to lead the team, but ‘only one’ without a team could well be a ‘no one’.

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Tags: entrepreneurs, team

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 2nd, 2010 at 7:16 pm and is filed under How to invest in startups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.