POSTED ON MEEBO'S BLOG..VERY INTRESTING
Over the last two days I got to talk with students at both my high school and my college. In both cases, the students were all interested in potentially starting their own business some day, and my goodness did they have a lot of questions. One of my favorite topics that usually comes up is how to put together an initial team to actually work on the project!
Those of you who've used meebo for a long while know that Elaine, Sandy and I got together and worked on completely different ideas before ultimately coming up with the idea of moving IM over to the web. We actually started back in 2003, but didn't launch anything until 2005. What this means, though, is that we decided that we liked working together and that we were a really strong team, so even if we started in on one project and decided we didn't like it, we stayed together and worked on the next one.
I tried to start a bunch of startups before meebo...and they all, more or less, failed. A common factor, I think, was that I tried to do them myself...I didn't find other really great people to team up with. The reality, of course, is that any given person is only knowledgeable in a relatively narrow field. Sure, I can raise a round of funding, but I could never actually build meebo. That has Elaine and Sandy written all over it! And then if you look at Elaine's and Sandy's unique skills, you notice that they too are very complementary to each other. Elaine's focus is what you see on the screen (front end) while Sandy's is moving bits through servers really efficiently (back end).
The team that you work with to do a startup is incredibly important. You really want to find people who are NOT like you...who have unique skills that complement your weaknesses (me: attention to detail...not so good!). So make sure you branch out and find folks who complement you, and perhaps above all, make sure you all really love working together...you'll be spending many sleepless nights working together!
Seth
7:13 pm Team work is,i think,the central idea of the article.
Just because we r all equal doesn't mean we r all the same.
Men hv never been individually self-sufficient!
every individual has a unique feature which seperates him 4om the rest of the society and a team is a collection of such brilliant minds!
the path to greatness is along with others which means team work is very essential..its less 'me' and more 'we'!
it sounds good that the genx feels the need of working together.
team work divides the task and doubles the success.
(i hope i m not going out of track)
Henry Ford has rightly said-
"Coming together is a beginning.
Keeping together is progress.
Working together is success."
1:12 pm This comment has been removed by the author.
1:27 pm The thing with teams is that in a partner you also have a critic. Thing is that you dont wanna go on working on something blindly. You need critics and you also need different points of view, which is why you need teams.
On a more practical note - Two Hands/Brains are always better than One - working in teams means that you have a vaster amount of ideas plus each person has to slog less.