'We rise by lifting others' ... Robert Ingersoll

I love this quote and feel it's very relevant to all of us. Gone are the days when a business was about individuals and their skills and personality. Today business is about teams and teamwork, and not about individuals. Certain individuals will always perform better than the others within teams, but only a good team as a whole can take a project towards completion/success.

Hiring Challenges a Startup May Face...

A startup is as good as it's team driving the idea. Getting the right people on board is very critical and often tends to get very challenging for entrepreneurs.

Some of the typical mistakes startups make are highlighted below:

Pick the right team – Founders often have little to no experience in building a competent team of employees. The key is to pick a combination of talent, experience and innovation. Team leaders are just as important as programmers or rebel innovators.

Network – That’s the byword today. Don’t be bound by traditional channels of hiring. Look among family, friends, old classmates and past colleagues. Spread the word on social media. Be open to referrals as much as to unsolicited walk-ins.

Manage your weakness – Bolster up weak areas. Bring some stability to your development team by hiring somebody with experience, or throw the caution to wind by hiring some young blood for their bizarre ideas and joie de vivre.

Lack of expertise – In a startup, the founders’ plates are overflowing with a bevy of tasks. Furthermore, it is not necessary that they are an expert at everything. A founder may be good at many tasks, but not necessarily hiring, which may lead to bad hires.

(taken from www.eazyhire.in)

Finding a spouse or a co-founder, is it any different?

A co-founder is like a spouse in many ways. You need to form a healthy relationship with both to ensure longevity of the same. Some similarities include:

- both demand and deserve attention and respect
- ideally you and your partner should have complementary skills (for the sake of the child or the startup)
- to sustain either relationship, you and your partner should have aligned goals and visions
- overall, there should be a good personality fit in either case or else there would be conflicts
- before being a partner, either should be a friend you can trust

Keep looking till you find a good fit in both cases (also it would be great if your co-founder and your spouse can be the same person. saves time :))).

The Importance of a Good Founding Team!!!

This is a very sore point for me. I cannot emphasize enough how important a good founding/management team is. Currently I have some good ideas in my mind and have this great urge to start out again on one of them, I am just staying back because I don't have and am not currently being able to build a good team around the idea. I believe that ideas contribute around 30% of a startup's success, the rest comes from the ability to execute the idea. And to execute well, you need a 'good team'!

Let's take an analogy to understand this. In raising a child, the mother and father both have a significant role to play. The mother can provide the child with the warmth, love, care and the finer things in life. The father is more responsible for the safety, comfort and the more basic needs of the child (this is generally the case and differs totally from case to case :). Hence, the parents need to jointly complement each other and provide the child an environment where the latter can fully grow and realise his/her potential. Same is the case in a startup as well. Founders, with complementary skills, need to come together and create a structure and culture in which the business can grow and flourish. Skill sets of the initial team are key. For example, in the case of a Online Tea Retailing company, ideally founders should have the following skills within the team:
Online - Technology Expertise
Tea - Domain Expertise
Retailing - FMCG Retailing Expertise
Not necessarily will all teams have all requisite skills. But I suggest that each founding team should try to incorporate as many skills as we can within the team as it betters the chance of success.

Startups are all about risk. A good team is a big factor which can help mitigate the risks involved. So the better the team, the better will be the execution and the better the chance of building a sustainable business.

My next startup - Bitequest!

It was 2007 and I was in Oxford doing my Masters. Frankly speaking, the course turned out to be much more theoretical than I thought and I barely used to go to class. As a matter of fact, I attended barely 3 classes over the 9 months I was there :)  I got involved with a host of entrepreneurship activities there. I was interacting with local entrepreneurs and also headed the Entrepreneurship Network at the Business School.

During this time I came across Toptable, a restaurant listing and reservation portal. I really liked the concept and felt that India should also have a similar concept. And hence came up the idea of starting Bitequest. The name was quite easy to come up with and I felt it was catchy. Bitequest - your quest for the perfect bite ends here :)))

I started contacting some website development vendors through email. I came to India and finalised one and got the work started. Thereafter, I started contacting restaurant managers/owners through email to make them understand the concept and get them on board. We were not charging anything. We were just hoping to get discounts from restaurants and wanted to list them with us. The ball started rolling.

I realised that probably I can look at the operations and marketing. However, I was a more 'serious-about-life' type of guy and had hardly frequented any restaurants/bars even when I was in India. I wanted to rope in some people who were more into the social scene as I thought they must have a better idea as to how restaurants run and also had a better social network. Then I roped in a friend of mine who was studying in Melbourne. Thereafter, 2 more friends joined and we started growing the company and really enjoying ourselves in the process. We were able to scale all over Delhi/NCR and had tie ups with more than 300 of the most premium restaurants. Also a lot of the time when we went for tie ups with bars/lounges, we used to end up drunk after the meeting ;)

Came February 2010 or even earlier, I started having differences with my team members about how to scale up the business. I wanted to make it an online restaurant discovery tool and expand the business geographically. On the other hand, the rest of the team wanted to scale it up by setting up a call centre where customers can call and we reserve the tables for them. Due to these differences, I eventually backed off from the business.

The website is still live and being run by a close friend of mine. They some awesome restaurants on it and some great deals for users. Check the website out www.bitequest.com.