{"id":14,"date":"2010-12-12T13:04:07","date_gmt":"2010-12-12T13:04:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.inospito.net\/?p=14"},"modified":"2015-08-19T21:28:36","modified_gmt":"2015-08-19T21:28:36","slug":"the-importance-of-the-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.inospito.net\/2010\/12\/the-importance-of-the-team\/","title":{"rendered":"The importance of the team"},"content":{"rendered":"

Naval Ravikant<\/a>, entrepreneur and angel investor, answers the unavoidable \u201cWhat do you look for in a startup?<\/a>\u201c. Although his answer doesn\u2019t differ much from others I\u2019ve seen before, he\u2019s very direct and touches really good points:<\/p>\n

\u201cI look for two things that are paramount above all:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Great team. It\u2019s obvious. It\u2019s a tautology. Everybody says it. You have to be working with some of the best people in the industry you\u2019re in.<\/li>\n
  2. Huge market. Niche markets just don\u2019t work because the first idea never works. You always have to change the idea, so you need room to maneuver in a big market.”<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    Nice! He goes on saying:<\/p>\n

    “There are three more factors that I look at. Not all three of them are required but I prefer a company to have at least two of them:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Difficult technology that is compounding over time.<\/li>\n
    2. A proprietary distribution channel. A clever viral marketing, or SEO, or partnership, or whatever strategy that gives them a leg up over competitors.<\/li>\n
    3. A direct monetization model. Something more than throwing up 10 cent banner ad CPMs.”<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n

      In this era of feature-less<\/i> applications supported by ads or other indirect business models, it\u2019s refreshing to see factors like \u201cdifficult technology\u201d<\/i> or \u201cdirect monetization model\u201d<\/i> come up on this list. I still don\u2019t get those applications that anyone can replicate in a weekend in PHP and for which is impossible to understand the business model (e.g., don\u2019t have a \u201cpricing\u201d or \u201cbuy\u201d link in their home page).<\/p>\n

      \"photo-1433785124354-92116416b870\"<\/a><\/p>\n

      But what I really wanted to write about is his first point. I\u2019m always telling this to my colleagues and friends, but I realized I had never written it clearly in this blog, so here it goes:<\/p>\n

      To create a great product you mostly need a great team<\/b><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      From my experience, people give credit to a lot of irrelevant stuff around the project, instead of recognizing that, besides the team, the rest are mainly \u201cdistractions\u201d. \u00a0Managers who happen to be fortunate enough to manage great teams are sometimes led to believe that a certain \u201ccool\u201d managerial style (e.g. card sorting prioritizing meetings, getting the whole team out for the cinema, etc.) is responsible for their successes. It is not. It doesn\u2019t matter. Switch your management techniques at will, because the team will probably continue to deliver great results.<\/strong> When those managers are given a different team (not as good as the previous one), they try to use the same techniques but the outcome is not the same.<\/p>\n

      The canonical example of this phenomenon is the C3<\/a> project, the project that gave birth to the famous XP methodology<\/a>. The project was running late on schedule so they brought in Kent Beck<\/a>, Ron Jeffries<\/a> and a few others who were able to ressurect the project and deliver it (nearly) on time. Many people attributed the sucess of the project to its revolutionary methodology (XP) but didn\u2019t realize that the team behind it was comprised of programming top stars, who would do a great job no matter what. In fact, many subsequent XP-style projects have proven that this methodology works best in small teams with highly competent and experienced programmers. No kidding, hein?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Naval Ravikant, entrepreneur and angel investor, answers the unavoidable \u201cWhat do you look for in a startup?\u201c. Although his answer doesn\u2019t differ much from others I\u2019ve seen before, he\u2019s very direct and touches really good points: \u201cI look for two things that are paramount above all: Great team. It\u2019s obvious. It\u2019s a tautology. Everybody says […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7ZDEQ-e","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inospito.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inospito.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inospito.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inospito.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inospito.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.inospito.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22,"href":"http:\/\/www.inospito.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions\/22"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.inospito.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inospito.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.inospito.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}