Building The Dream Team
Who do you need in a dream software team? If you had enough money to set up a software startup, would you spend it all on developers? How important is management and sales and marketing and HR? Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge look at which parts of a company are the most important, and what to do if you win the lottery. Join the conversation to tell us what you think!
9 Comments to “Building The Dream Team”
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In looking at the situation, If you could only hire say 5 people, I am considering myself as the 6th member, since my income will depend on the work of these people, I would have to be hands on. Something I do not think was considered in the Original Discussion. I am by no means an expert in any one field, so I would need to hire the right people.
I would say the first person to hire would be a Marketing/Business Person with Marketing Abilities, they should know proper ways to promote the business, or else you will never make any money. This is probably one of the most careful hires that you would have to do.
I would say hire at least 2 coders, to work on creating the software. I would also hire one person for Information Systems, doing database work, and keeping all of the information that is needed. It is also good to have someone who could do needed database work. These people generally could also help build promotional websites and such.
The final person to hire would be an accountant of some kind. With all of the tax laws and such, you want to make sure that everyone gets paid that needs paid, otherwise you will end up where many start ups end, and have an unfinished product, that works slightly, but can’t finish because everyone walks out, or your assets are freezed.
As far as upper management, I would take that role on myself, as I could have final say, since I would be footing the bill.
I have to agree that having some software is not the same thing as having a software business. Writing great software is one thing. Convincing people to part with their money for it is another thing altogether.
One advantage that an open source / free software approach has however is that you can build up a large user base without an enormous advertising and promotion budget. Turning a user base into a customer base however can be a real challenge.
I’d hire 0 dedicated developers given an idea and a budget for five people. I deal with mostly largish enterprise type things so most of my ideas revolve around that sort of ideal.
Five people would include * Myself as Project Mangager / CEO * An integration engineer * A Sales / Support Engineer * A PR / Sales person / Account Manager * An accountant with deep understanding of law.
The first three folks would all have a general idea of specs and would do code review. I’d outsource the whole darn development side to someone like EdgeCase who I’m confident has good design and testing principles in mind.
A startup needs a product and support for it. That’s how closed an open source works. A room full of programmers makes code and generally is a pile of egos.
There’s a great book which dedicates an entire chapter to answering exactly this question. The Beermat Entrepreneur by Mike Southon & Chris West, specifically the chapter called The Seedling Enterprise.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beermat-Entrepreneur-Turn-Great-Business/dp/0273704540
They talk about a business plan which you can write on the back of a beermat (elevator pitch, mentor and first customer) and list the five people you should have in your founding team:
1) Entrepreneur 2) Technical Innovator 3) Delivery Specialist 4) Sales 5) Finance
The Entrepreneur is the person with the vision and a lot of charisma and the other four are his/her “cornerstones”. The Technical Innovator is the brains behind the product and future CTO. The Delivery Specialist is another technical person but who specialises in actually finishing stuff while the Technical Innovator is dreaming up the next version of the product. The Sales specialist concentrates on turning the user base into customers and the Finance specialist focusses on cash management and dealing with capital providers (they might be part time at first).
I’m currently involved in a startup which sort of approximates this pattern and if I ever start my own business (which I’d like to), I would definitely try this approach.
Reilly not my area, but just as a wild guess I would say 3 programmers, a marketer/finance and manager. Coders do all the development and product design, marketer manages marketing and finance and the manager manages everything else.
The role of a manager, as I think Joel Spolsky has said, is to keep everything else out of the hair of his managees. You need someone to protect your (probably two, if the total is give) tech guys in that way. I like the Beermat Entrepreneur stuff given above – sounds pretty good to me.
Gerv
businessman sysadmin
rest would be developers
build it (make it good) and they will come.
I would regularly contact a lawyer but not as a paid employee.
Oh, boy, there’s a question… If you were creating a Linux distribution, which system level programs do you need? The answer, to some extent, is all of them.
A business is a system, an organism, and having the necessary roles filled are some critically important bits. Miss any of them and you’re in trouble.
I speak from direct experience. I’ve been (trying) to do this for the past 5 years, first with money, and now without. And there’s so much that nobody realizes before getting into it.
First place to start, for any business: The E-Myth Revisited, by Michael Gerber. He identifies the 3 main roles: the entrepreneur, the manager, and the technician. The entrepreneur has the vision to carry the business forward. The manager makes sure the work gets done/delivered as promised to the client. And the technician does the work.
What you’re describing is the most common way businesses get started — by technicians who decide they can do a better job than their current employer, so they strike out on their own–completely missing the importance of the other two areas. I started out this way myself. And most businesses die out either through lack of vision/ability to sell in the marketplace, or through not delivering what the customer’s willing to pay for. Classic trap of the technician who starts up a business.
Lots more to it than that, though. Next, you can look at the business’s digestive system, how it eats: It starts with marketing, making the world know that it exists and provides your particular service. Then it’s sales — developing the relationships with your customers to the point they open their wallet and give you money. I then group most of the business into Operations — all the stuff you need to do to deliver your product or service. Next comes Finance, who sends the invoices, files the tax returns, and makes sure you stay in business. Finally, you’ve got the strategic part, the reporting/evaluation of what services actually generated the best profits, so you can close the loop, modify your marketing plan to do better next time around.
That’s just scratching the surface of the anatomy of a business. There’s also the business phase–I’m really enjoying Les McKeown’s take on the different stages a business can be in, hoping to get beyond the early struggle phase real soon now: http://predictablesuccess.com.
And then there’s the more progressive forms outlined in The Company We Keep, by John Abrams, and Monty Widenius’s Hacking Business Models. My (very open source) take is here: http://www.freelock.com/blog/john-locke/1/reinventing-business
Cheers, John
I’d hire 0 dedicated developers given an idea and a budget for five people. I deal with mostly largish enterprise type things so most of my ideas revolve around that sort of ideal.
Five people would include * Myself as Project Mangager / CEO * An integration engineer * A Sales / Support Engineer * A PR / Sales person / Account Manager * An accountant with deep understanding of law.
The first three folks would all have a general idea of specs and would do code review. I’d outsource the whole darn development side to someone like EdgeCase who I’m confident has good design and testing principles in mind.
A startup needs a product and support for it. That’s how closed an open source works. A room full of programmers makes code and generally is a pile of egos.