Founder-idea fit and the “First Five” - some tactics on startup team building

Building a strong founding team is critical to success and can often be the make or break of startups. At Pioneer Square Labs (PSL), we create startup teams many times per year.  As part of our process, and as we develop and validate a new idea, we need to find a founder/CEO and map them to the idea (unless a founder/CEO brought us the idea, at which point we evaluate the CEO and the idea together).

The most crucial person is the founder/CEO.  We develop and post a job description, partially to align ourselves internally on the key attributes and partially to find people not already in our network.  As we find candidates and start to interview across many areas, we also ask them the question "Why Me" (of the CEO), trying to get to a crisp 3-5 bullet points of why this person is the best founder for this particular idea. Often, this translates into a “founder-idea fit” narrative for other team members, customers, the market, and investors. 

In addition to the CEO, we develop a “first five” org chart with key roles and responsibilities. We also include specific LinkedIn profiles we think generally match each role. This recursive process of hypothetical and actual people helps us narrow in on what we think would make a great team, at least regarding skills, background, and past success. 

Once we have the CEO, we recalibrate the “first five,” augmenting the CEO's skills and aligning with their updated vision for the company. For each role, we continue to ask the “why me” question, and the overall company and “founding team” narrative gets stronger.

In addition to roles, responsibilities, and backgrounds, we're working with the CEO to identify what will make your company stand out in the minds of the future team. Obviously, this includes the market, product, and GTM focus…but it’s also the beginning of culture and principles that will lay the foundation of who and how they hire and how they might work together. For the most talented people, they are interested in “what you do and how you do it.”  Good examples are Amazon’s Day 1 Culture and Netflix's Culture Memo. This is so critically important and is also iterative; the more you interview and hire, the more you can refine the overall process. Below are examples of great founders who interviewed a large number of early employees to make sure they get the best people who align and work well together;

• Sergei and Larry at Google personally interviewed the first thousand people.
• Aneel Bhusri at Workday, interviewed his first 500 employees, demonstrating a hands-on approach to hiring and ensuring that the company's culture was aligned with his vision.
• Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr and Hunch, personally interviewed many of her first employees. 
• It's rumored that Elon Musk also personally interviewed the first 3,000 people who work at SpaceX.

If you’re a founder, what are your 3-5 bullet points on “founder-idea fit”?  Who are your “first five”? And, what are the core attributes of your culture that set you apart from the pack? It’s worth the time to answer these questions (over and over again)!

If you get the team right, many other things take care of themselves!