Signs of a Successful Startup, Part I: Good People

Last week I talked about the reasons I view Prolifiq as a startup and what type of mindset companies need to have in order to act and function like a startup.

Being a startup is cool, but what does it take to avoid ending up in the deadpool?

Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator (which has helped rockstar startups like Reddit, Dropbox, Bump, and others get off the ground) and regular blogger, wrote about the ingredients he finds key:

“You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.” 

I’m going to suggest that timing/luck also play a role, and I aim to write a series of posts about these ingredients, starting with people.

The first ingredient Paul mentions is good people. For any startup, you need a solid team, especially in the beginning when the company is in its most fragile state. At Prolifiq, the core team knew each other very well and was dedicated to making things happen. If you look at supernovas like Microsoft or Google, you see a core team of very special people. As Malcolm Gladwell notes in his book Outliers (must-read if you haven’t already), it’s not that Bill Gates and Paul Allen were necessarily geniuses in and of themselves, but that they’d had opportunities to become extremely good at what they did and were dedicated to making things happen (and of course, there were some random happenstances that certainly didn’t hurt, which I’ll cover in a future blog post). The same can be said for Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google – smart people who were agile and worked tirelessly to form a company that even today makes it one of their key focuses to hire good people.

Here at Prolifiq, you’ll notice our business cards don’t have roles or titles. As Jeff Gaus has blogged previously, at Prolifiq we hire athletes – people who are flexible, agile and able to adjust and play multiple positions. People who are not just smart, but have shown a proclivity to demonstrate their smartness in creative ways.

Were all companies who ended up in the deadpool full of “bad” people? Non-intelligent, non-creative slackers? By no means; many likely joined other companies and are having successful careers. With that said, any startup that hasn’t already should look around and notice there’s a talent war going on in the tech industry for a reason – good products have good people behind them.