Building a successful team for your startup, including advice on hiring and avoiding common founder mistakes. Watch the full video — free, no account needed.
Building a successful team for your startup, including advice on hiring and avoiding common founder mistakes. It features Joshua Silver, a repeat founder with experience in payments and healthcare technology.
Let's say I put you Joshua into a time machine now and I bring you back in time to Georgia Tech. You know, let's say you're in one of those classes, you know, you're now with your co-founder at the time, you know, and brainstorming about a world in which you could bring a company of your own to market. And let's say you're able to show up right there on the spot and you're able to have a chat with the two of you and you're able to give a piece of advice before launching a business. What would that be and why given what you know now? It's hard to distill it down into one um hard to distill it into one piece of advice, but I I think if it if it was anything, I would say ultimately the success of companies is dependent on the team. And I think that's probably the biggest learning I've had over over the 20 years is how do you figure out if someone's going to be a good fit for your startup or
not? Um, and over the different time periods and different phases of growth, you have different needs. But really trying to distill down what does good look like in this role. Is this a zero to one role? Is this a high growth role? Is this someone who's coming to build out the team? Is this a role where you can take a flyer on someone who maybe hasn't done it before and hope they figure it out? Or is this a role in a time where you need someone who's done this 10 times and they're going to come in on day one and know what's going on? And that's probably the biggest mistake that I've made and the biggest mistake I see other founders make is not getting the right people on the bus at the right time. And it it costs you not only a lot of money, but it just it costs you a lot of opportunity because you're foregoing that growth that you could have had. And in most businesses like ours, it
compounds over time. And so you miss a quarter or two. It's not just that you missed a quarter or two, you miss the compounding effect of that quarter or two until you sell the company, which could be a decade later. So it turns out it's it's not just one or two quarters of miss. It it could be 40 quarters of miss.