The Startup Team « Steve Blank
I have been thinking a lot about this topic and how it relates to our own founding team. Steve Blank, as always, says it better than I could, but I wanted to add a couple additional thoughts around these 4 roles.
1) Tech Visionary: if you are building something technically difficult (ie not something you hack over the weekend), your visionary needs to be high proficient technically and, oftentimes, brilliant. Luckily, we have that in our co-founder Raj. The person in this role sees the status quo and wants to rip it apart. He is willing to tackle extremely difficult problems that oftentimes seem like they have no answer. This vision is what carries him past these hurdles.
2) Business hustler - in the early days (pre-product) this role is “Everything but”, as in do everything but programming. From taking out the trash, getting food to incorporation, testing, legal, biz dev, whatever needs to be done. Once the product is out, add fundraising, marketing, customer acquisition and more to that list. More than the tasks, it is usually a personality type that fills this role best. Someone who is social (above average), communicates clearly and gets shit done.
3) Technical jack of all trades - If you follow sports, people talk about needing a Glue Guy on championship teams. For us, this is Vik, the person that does everything well, understand all the moving parts and brings the team together. This is the person who ships code, meets deadlines, keep the site up and uses every trick in the book to keep the company stable through the lean stages with glue, tape and bubble gum. This person can confidently touch every part of the stack and dive in anywhere to get the job done.
4) Design Guru - driving force behind the look and feel of the company. Creates artwork that is original and compelling. Builds UI frameworks that are simple, intuitive and functional. Most of all, maintains a consistent aesthetic for the company. If you look at the most successful web companies, there is consistency across all elements (web, mobile, stickers, logos, etc). This role, on our team Robin, pushes the boundaries of design to separate your product from the competition.
