First of all, Co-founder relationships are the most important thing in the entire company. It is difficult to find the best Co- founder for startup. There are some combinations to choose a founder, you can choose someone from your school or University or someone whom you don’t really know or simply be a solo founder. None of these combinations is preferable. A good way to meet a cofounder is to meet in college. If you’re not in college and you don’t know a cofounder, the next best thing is to go to work at an interesting company such as Facebook or Google. Statistics show that a large amount of YC companies almost have at least two founders and only a small number of companies have solo teams.
So, you’re thinking about Co -founder that need to be unflappable, decisive, creative, should know what to do in every situation and should be ready for anything.
You should look for Co-founder, who should believe in mission, love and live with that idea and always keep growing.
You can find this unique person by hiring. It is indicative to get done with a small number of employees. At the beginning, you should only hire when you desperately need to. Later, you should learn to hire fast and scale up the company, but in the early days the goal should be not to hire because the wrong management will kill the company.
In the beginning stages of a startup, the recruiting process is a hard and sometimes continuous long time, cause of the difficulties to convince people that your mission is the most important of anything else. And also there are few employees who understand this fact and willing to wait and work hard to identify the main objective. So, you don’t have to spend much time for recruiting, only 25% is still a huge amount of time for this.
Today there are a lot of channels for hiring such as Linkedin, Telegram, Facebook etc.. The best source for hiring by far is people that you already know and people that other employees in the company already know. Another tip is to look outside the valley. It is brutally competitive to hire engineers there but you probably know people elsewhere in the world that would like to work with you. The required experience is changeable depending on the role of employee. That means that the junior positions are available where the experience does not matter.
Many companies pay attention to the skills of communication. If someone is difficult to talk to, if someone cannot communicate clearly, it’s a real problem for the team work. Also, for early employees you want someone that has a risk-taking attitude.There is a famous test from Paul Graham called the animal test. The idea here is that you should be able to describe any employee as an animal. This test helps founders to choose the right candidate for their startup.
Mark Zuckerberg once said that he tries to hire people that 1. He would be comfortable hanging with socially and 2. He would be comfortable reporting to the roles were reversed.
Provide early employees with large amounts of equity. Be as generous with equity to employees, and be as stingy as possible with investors. Retaining employees is incredibly important and difficult. Three things that provide an employee with pleasure and meaning: autonomy, security, mastery and purpose. Fire fast, it’s best for everyone. Fire people who are bad at their job, create office politics, and are persistently negative. In the other corner if someone is getting every decision wrong, that’s when you need to act, and at that point it’ll be painfully aware to everyone.You don’t get to make their own decisions but you do get to choose the decision-makers.
Execution for most founders is not the most fun part of running the company, but it is the most critical. The way to have a company that executes well is you have to execute well yourself. If you want a working culture where people work hard, pay attention to detail, manage the customers, are frugal, you have to do it yourself. There’s at least a hundred times more people with great ideas than people who are willing to put in the effort to execute them well. Execution gets divided into two key questions:
- can you figure out what to do and two- there are a hundred important things competing for your attention every day, and for deliver everything you need to seperate, and figure out what the one or two most important things are, and then just do those.
- can you get it done- The founders really set the focus. Each day it’s really important to have goals Whatever the founders care about, whatever the founders focus on, that’s going to set goals for the whole company. Growth and momentum are what a startup lives on and you always have to focus on maintaining these.So you want to have the right metrics and you want to be focused on growing those metrics and having momentum.
The other piece besides focus for execution is intensity. One of the biggest advantages that start ups have is execution speed and you have to have this relentless operating rhythm.
Facebook has this famous poster that says move fast and break things. But at the same time they manage to be obsessed with quality. You need to have a culture where the company has really high standards for everything everyone does, but you still move quickly.
Momentum and growth are the lifeblood of startups. Startups have to always keep winning. Always keep momentum, always keep growing. Don’t get distracted by other things. Sales fix everything. If momentum sags, there is disagreement among employees, the focus should be to talk to users, ask them what they want, and do that. Work on small things to create growth. Don’t worry about a competitor until they are beating you with their real product. A competitor’s press doesn’t. ‘The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers you at all, but just makes better products’ — Henry Ford.
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