David Cummings on Startups

The Ideal Startup Team

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David Cummings

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So, you have a great idea and it’s time to build out a team. What’s the ideal team look like? Assuming you could pull together a team of five people that could take little/no salary, or you raised a $500k seed round, here’s an ideal startup team:

  • Co-Founder 1 – Product management-focused domain expert that loves building things
  • Co-Founder 2 – Sales and marketing expert that can bring a new product to market
  • Two Software Engineers – Great jack-of-all-trades engineers that are smart and get things done
  • UI/UX Engineer – Awesome front-end engineer that can build interfaces and relate to the end users

So, the ideal startup team has two co-founders and three engineers with an acute focus on building a great product and achieving product/market fit as fast as possible.

What else? What’s your ideal startup team?

Comments

2 responses to “The Ideal Startup Team”

  1. Gil Benton (@gilbenton1) Avatar
    Gil Benton (@gilbenton1)

    Founder – someone who has the idea and the passion, but does not necessarily need industry expertise (that helps to not follow, but change the existing models)
    Co-Founder – someone who can do the product management, creative and flexible. Rigid methodologies are not what you need early, corners have to get cut, just in a very smart way.
    Software Engineer (with equity) – having skin in the game is key, keeping cost down, and forces the engineer to think business rather than technology all the time.
    SALES (with equity) – again, key to have equity, as there is no big salary/commission structure in the beginning. This person will be selling LONG before there is an actually product, so they have to think about solving the customer issues rather than just listing features. Feedback to the product team is critical to success.

    Reply
  2. Jeff Anop Avatar
    Jeff Anop

    Great post. I also think that someone in the intial group needs to understand how to analyze product and business data. For example:
    – What is the usage of product?
    – What is the churn of the product?
    – What are user pain points? How can they be solved?
    – What is average revenue per user(ARPU)?

    These data points can help drive feedback into the product team, ultimately creating a better product and user experience.

    Reply

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