Laurent Gilles: what should be a startup team
There was an opportunity to talk with Laurent Gilles ( video1 and video2 ) - the president and CEO of Viewdle. If anyone does not know, then this startup, founded by Ukrainians, in October raised a $ 10 million investment . So, Laurent shared how he selects employees for the team. Rather courageous, but not without a rational grain approach. Here, in brief, what he said (further from the first person):
It is very typical for companies (especially in Ukraine) to recruit STAFF. But a startup needs just a team of people keen on a common idea, each member of which is an entrepreneur at heart, seeking to find non-trivial solutions to the task. And the lack of professional experience is welcome here, as there is no temptation to repeat previous experience. Repetition kills innovation, and the person from the entrepreneur becomes a performer.
Of course, in any company there are executive positions that are typical and require previous experience. For example, the position of CFO (Chief Financial Officer). From him you expect wise and prudent financial management, and not experiments.
Another thing is a programmer who needs to know how to program, to be an expert in languages. But this is knowledge, not experience. It is very difficult to find a balance in a company between those positions that require experience and those that require a certain set of knowledge.
Speaking frankly, it is not easy to find an engineer who would not have been prevented by experience from remaining an experimenter. After all, in a startup there is no place to create a product “step by step”. This is the way of outsourcing companies, but there is no innovation in this.
Someone may seem very risky to recruit a team of people with no experience. But in a startup failure is normal, this is the way to success. Experiment - it does not work, another attempt - and again not that, experiment - and this is it, it works! Therefore, failure is not a reason for dismissing an employee. Failure says that either this task is too hard for a particular person and this is a question for his manager, or the task is performed by a set of traditional actions. The only reason for dismissal is the lack of interest in the result, personal involvement in the process.
If we talk about Viewdle, we have suffered setbacks many times. Four times we were in a situation when the time of payments came, and there was no money in the company’s account. And the same time we started all over again, because we had a vision, and we did not want to stop. In October 2010, we raised a $ 10 million investment round and launched focus groups on testing our new product for Facebook in the USA and Ukraine. But we are still looking for new members for our team, ready for experiments and possessing non-standard thinking. Finding such people is not an easy task, but it is with such a team that the company will succeed.
Once I wrote a blog post about a team (already in my experience and not only for a startup), which received a good response, it may also be useful to someone.
It is very typical for companies (especially in Ukraine) to recruit STAFF. But a startup needs just a team of people keen on a common idea, each member of which is an entrepreneur at heart, seeking to find non-trivial solutions to the task. And the lack of professional experience is welcome here, as there is no temptation to repeat previous experience. Repetition kills innovation, and the person from the entrepreneur becomes a performer.
Of course, in any company there are executive positions that are typical and require previous experience. For example, the position of CFO (Chief Financial Officer). From him you expect wise and prudent financial management, and not experiments.
Another thing is a programmer who needs to know how to program, to be an expert in languages. But this is knowledge, not experience. It is very difficult to find a balance in a company between those positions that require experience and those that require a certain set of knowledge.
Speaking frankly, it is not easy to find an engineer who would not have been prevented by experience from remaining an experimenter. After all, in a startup there is no place to create a product “step by step”. This is the way of outsourcing companies, but there is no innovation in this.
Someone may seem very risky to recruit a team of people with no experience. But in a startup failure is normal, this is the way to success. Experiment - it does not work, another attempt - and again not that, experiment - and this is it, it works! Therefore, failure is not a reason for dismissing an employee. Failure says that either this task is too hard for a particular person and this is a question for his manager, or the task is performed by a set of traditional actions. The only reason for dismissal is the lack of interest in the result, personal involvement in the process.
If we talk about Viewdle, we have suffered setbacks many times. Four times we were in a situation when the time of payments came, and there was no money in the company’s account. And the same time we started all over again, because we had a vision, and we did not want to stop. In October 2010, we raised a $ 10 million investment round and launched focus groups on testing our new product for Facebook in the USA and Ukraine. But we are still looking for new members for our team, ready for experiments and possessing non-standard thinking. Finding such people is not an easy task, but it is with such a team that the company will succeed.
Once I wrote a blog post about a team (already in my experience and not only for a startup), which received a good response, it may also be useful to someone.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/108975/
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