One of the biggest decisions for an early startup is the composition of its team. There is no bigger headache later on than having to deal with removing dead weight team members from the picture.
I like to assemble an early team through a gradual ramp of working together. Do some work together on the startup. Enough to be meaningful. Not enough to require hashing out all the details of how the equity split will occur.
It is hard to know exactly how to split equity and cash until you are working together for some time.
My new Brinktop co-founder, Ben, and I decided to spend the summer working together without hashing out the details. Our goals were to both do enough customer discovery to substantiate the business while also getting to know each other to determine if we would work well together. It worked well and gave us the information we needed to move forward with a solid operating agreement and legal structure.
We are also looking for a technical co-founder to join. We have a series of projects we are dishing out to technical people so that we can get to know them in baby steps. Ultimately, we’ll find the right person and make a substantive arrangement. But we are not trying to jump to the serious agreements without working together with someone for a while first.
What are your thoughts on assembling an early startup team?
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