How to staff your startup team

Every entrepreneur who has succeeded or failed (is there a difference?) has advice about how to get the right people on the bus. What questions should you ask at the interview? What character traits should you seek and how do you do that? How much is science and how much is just going with your gut and whether you click? What kind of compensation should you offer?

Here are some tips on how to staff your startup team and get them engaged

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Likewise, advisors, investors or potential employees want to find the right fit as well. The rules are somewhat different when it comes to the board of directors, the management team, employees, consultants and advisors.

But what is a team compared to other working groups and what are the keys to their performance? To understand how teams deliver extra performance, we must distinguish between teams and other forms of working groups. That distinction turns on performance results. A working group’s performance is a function of what its members do as individuals. A team’s performance includes both individual results and what we call “collective work products.” A collective work product is what two or more members must work on together, such as interviews, surveys, or experiments. Whatever it is, a collective work product reflects the joint, real contribution of team members.

Maybe flipping a coin or a job lottery would save a bunch of time and money and get the same results.

Research shows that while previous experience has often been cited as a key ingredient for entrepreneurial success, results show that experience alone will not lead to success. Instead knowledge, skills, and passion are equally important for succeeding as a new venture. Experience and expertise only lead to better performance if team members share their knowledge and have a common vision for the company. In other words, when we talk about this balance between team member experience (hard skills) and passion and vision (soft skills) there’s a sweet spot where stellar teams seem to live.

I've been on both sides of the table so allow me to share my two cents on how to staff your startup:

1. Hope for the best and expect to fire fast. Give yourself lots of wiggle room.

2. Don't hire hood ornaments (doctors with fancy credentials that you parade on your website and pitch deck) unless you simply need one for credibility and really don't expect them to do much more.

3. Clarify expectations, timelines and benchmarks . Clearly agree on objectives and key results expected

4. Rent advisors, don't buy them

5. Barter, don't rent, if possible

6. Expect most people to put a hand up, not show up

7. Define your next critical success factor (like raising 2M dollars in seed money) and find people who can help get it done. Once it's done, stop and empty the bus, and reload. For example, suppose your company has achievements to date that include FDA 510(k) submission, provisional and non-provisional patent filing (there is no such thing as a non-provisional patent granted by the USPTO), and patent attorney freedom-to-operate letter (here's what that is). You have raised $200,000 from angel investors and are currently raising $1.5M in the current seed round with a valuation of $10M. Who do you want to help, how and how much will you compensate them and for how long?

 8. Don't give away the store early in the game. If you are successful, you'll have to give it away to get the money anyway so keep your powder dry

9. Hire people who are card carrying members of the Get Shit Done Club  

10. Evolve as fast as you can from a knowledge technician to manager, to leader, to entrepreneur to leaderpreneur i.e. work on the company, not in it.

11. Be careful about hiring interns since there are practical and labor law issues that can make your life more complicated than it already is or is going to be. Internships are supposed to be about helping the intern. You want people who primary purpose is to help your company as much and as soon as possible

12. Don't over hire for quality or quantity. Do you really need to hire that expensive CFO when what you really need is someone to keep the books and do payroll at this stage of the game? What about business development, sales and marketing?

13. Figure out whether you are hiring someone, or joining someone, to help with strategy or tactics. At the beginning, it is usually a cacophany of both. As the company validates its model, though, there is the risk of the distraction of traction. For a surgical benefits management company, for example, you need to focus and define your SCOPE.

14. The single most important question you can ask yourself is, "Do I like and trust these people?" The second is, "Can I deliver what they want, or am I just doing this to stroke my ego and make some bucks?"

15. If you had one more day to live, would you spend it in a co-working space wearing a hoodie? How about training and hiring felons?

16.Promote intergenerational collaboration

17. Don't hire doctors to sell your products. They don't know how to do it.

18. Here's some advice on who should be on your board

19. Finding the right key opinion leaders to be part of your scientific advisory board or cofounder is an important step. In most instances, if you are doing drug discovery and development, that will mean finding "the professor" at an academic medical center to work with you. It is less so in medical device. When it comes to digital health, however, few academic centers are leading the charge. Instead, the ideas and technologies are coming from the grunts in the trenches and startup communities. Particularly as digital health becomes more and more a part of medical device development, finding the right KOLs that are physician end users that add value is a challenge. Online dating services generally don't work.

20. Here are some ways to use behavioral interviewing. Here are some more that are specific to startup teams.

21. Consider fractional hires

22. Beware of BS. Many who want to leave one team to join yours are only looking for the big payoff.

Hire slow, fire fast.

23. Here are the 15 biggest legal mistakes you can make as a startup. Many involve HR and consultant issues.

24. The Ultimate Guide To Creating The Perfect Founding Team - Foundr

25. Those with industry experience are much more likely to hit a home run than those who come from outside the sector.

26. How to divorce your cofounder

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This on-demand talent model, dubbed SPEED by the author (Success, Plan, Execute, Evaluate, Decide), is good for the company, and good for all specialized, dedicated, and high performing people in the workforce today. Your company gets the flexibility to adapt quickly to the needs of a rapidly changing marketplace, and workers get to broaden their experience in the work they love.

One empirical analysis shows that companies that are equipped with both business and technical skills are disproportionately more likely to introduce new-to-the market innovations than firms that have only one of these skills. However, not all firms that are equipped with both types of skills are able to profit from them. Firms profit disproportionately from a mix of business and technical skills when the founder has technical knowledge and employs additional business experts. By contrast, we find no evidence of complimentary either when business and technical skills are balanced within a founding team, or when a founder with business skills hires employees with technical skills.

Entrepreneurial startup success is about entrepreneurial startup TEAMwork i.e.finding the people:

1. Who have Talent
2. Who can Execute
3. Who can Articulate a vision, mission, values and strategy
4. Who know how to raise, manage, protect and make large sums of Money

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But, having too many rebels on the team can create challenges for the leader.

That means you will have to find people who play some skill positions like problem seeker, problem solver, money finder, score keeper, product developer, business builder, dot connector, risk manager and story teller.

The startup lineup should also have people in it with these skills and abilities. Those will evolve as the company matures, or, dies.

1. Innovation happens because of people and it takes a village. Whether academic-based like our Hacking for Defense teams or internal organizational Integrated Product or Cross-Functional Teams (IPTs/CFTs), accelerator teams perform best when supported by:
2. Teachers – who can ground teams in a common framework and language for the discipline of innovation and entrepreneurship.
3. Coaches – who can walk teams through the practical application of innovation tools in context with the problem they are trying to solve. You will probably also need a pitching coach.
4. Mentors – who will provide relentlessly direct feedback to teams and challenge them on the quality of the hypotheses, MVPs and the analysis of what they’ve learned, while driving them through each pivot rather than letting them get bogged down in “analysis paralysis.”
5. Advisors – who will provide alternative viewpoints that will enable teams to see clearer pathways through bureaucracies.
6. Connectors – who will help teams rapidly grow their networks to gain new insights from unique partners not yet discovered.
7. Problem seekers-who are good at uncovering unment needs and define customer segments
8. Problem solvers- who are good at product development
9. Business builders- who are good at getting at creating a startup and scaling it.
10. Money finders-who have a network of investors and know how to find more
11. Story tellers-who understand how to brand things and tell your story to stakeholders
12. Score keepers- accountants, lawyers and other service providers to help you track your progress and manage risk

How do you compensate these people without breaking the startup bank? Here are some ideas. Here's how to create high performance innovation teams at scale.

Hiring the right people makes the difference between fun and misery. Plan to make lots of mistakes and fire fast. Pivoting often means taking casualties.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack and Editor at Digital Health Entrepreneurship