December 9, 2024 by Andrea Stramondo
The team is any startup’s fundamental asset and it is no mystery how a good team is substantially more important than any other aspect of a new venture, startups included. Our recent talk with Nicola Mei highlighted too how finding a good team, and one that is really enthralled with the problem at hand and seriously diversified with tackling the latter in mind as well.
A good team is fundamental because the team’s approach and its different proficiencies and collective skillset are often the key to making something that works, often independently from the idea the project stemmed from (assuming there was indeed market need for the idea). It happens frequently that investors keep working with teams that technically failed a certain project because they saw the potential in the way the members worked together and the way they approached the problem. Investors often invest in teams, rather than in ideas.
“Not the right team” is also why 23% of startups fail, the third place behind “Ran out of cash” and “No market need” in second and first place respectively. Although the roles may vary widely depending on the problem the venture wants to tackle or the solution it proposes, some roles are often represented and quite indispensable to a good outcome for the startup.
The decision maker, although quite different from their corporate counterpart, has to be a strategist, a bit of a jack of all trades and, most importantly, must understand what the point to the project is, they have to have a vision.
While a corporate CEO will often tackle different challenges, such as balancing the proprietors’ will and managing large teams, a startup CEO keeps together a smaller group of people and has to mediate interactions with investors. Although management is at the core of both, the latter is often required to be even more enthralled by the culture, values, behaviours and, most importantly, the problem at hand, with the solutions the startup proposes for it. There is also the need to understand, even vaguely, most or every aspect of the startup’s activities, hence the urgency to be a “jack of all trades”.
While strongly resembling their corporate counterparts in their role of decision makers for what concerns technology and informational structures, strongly adapting to the company’s specific endeavors, CTOs in startups also play as the core of the development team (often representing a large part of the team itself) and have to focus on what the customer wants, how should they iterate on that and use it to increase satisfaction and, obviously, revenues.
Startups’ CTOs have to work side by side with the visionaries to make those dreams a reality, assessing feasibility and inventing as the ideas gets developed, producing MVPs and setting up infrastructures in the early stages, then managing the infrastructures and coding cultures while the product is brought to market fit, up to joining the visionaries in their creative job as growth will start to approach the project’s horizons.
While C-level roles, Product and Project Managers are often those keeping the day-to-day afloat at all, and that is due to their key role in directing the team, organizing the daily, weekly, monthly activities to ensure success.
Product Managers have the additional responsibilities of thinking through every aspect of the product itself and its product-market fit, imagining a good positioning, creating personas to understand who buyers and users are, studying pricing so that it feels compelling to buyers but sustainable to the business.
While Product and Project Managers should never resemble mini-CEOs, their guidance role is even more prominent in startups, highlighting the fundamental importance techniques such as SCRUM or Lean bear in the company endeavors’ success.
Remember when we mentioned the second way startup fails is – statistically – “Running out of cash”? If 29% of all startups fail due to unwise spending (or unsustainable pricing structures) it could appear somewhat evident how a good CFO might be crucial for new ventures.
Although not challenged with handling enormous accounts for multimillionaire companies, the CFOs working in startups are tasked with a difficult goal, that of keeping afloat a boat with high stakes and, most importantly, high risks. They are responsible for growth, for creating financial processes and reporting the financial status (which is often interesting not only as a data point, but to investors, particularly corporate VCs, too). They ultimately deliver the metrics and results information that are able to make or break the board’s decisions towards carrying through certain strategies rather than others.
Article by Andrea Stramondo, edited by Andrea Stramondo
