Entrepreneurial success rarely comes from the idea. Instead, it comes from the founding team’s never-say-die attitude and relentless execution.
And a startup can only be as successful as its founding team. When there’s rapid scaling up in size and limited resources, the composition of a founding team is especially critical for what I’ve identified as exponential organizations — or companies that have impact (or output) at least 10 times larger than their peers.
The rapid pace of growth of exponential organizations requires an extra emphasis on a fully synergistic core team. Peter Thiel, for example, told his co-founders (Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Luke Nosek, Max Levchin and Chad Hurley) and employees that they should all work together as friends rather than as employees. Not only was PayPal very successful as a company, but the team is now known as the PayPal Mafia, whose members have helped one another on other startups including Tesla, YouTube, SpaceX, LinkedIn, Yelp, Yammer and Palantircompanies that today have a total market capitalization exceeding $60 billion.
While synergy among founding members is important, diversity within the core team is crucial. I’ve identified the following critical roles for founding teams that are seeking exponential growth:
http://needmyservice.com/four-roles-every-entrepreneur-team/