Entrepreneurs are this particular kind of people who decide to eat their fears up, raise their faces and go and try to conquer the world. For doing this, a lot of help is required, so being with partners or by hiring collaborators, the road can’t be traveled alone.
It’s very common that when an idea arises, a group of people joins around it, so they can contribute with complementary talents. However, the knowledge required to manage a startup is too wide, so unless the startup has a lot of founders that work on it, sooner than later it’s going to be needed to hire more staff.
We can split entrepreneurs into 2 categories:
Technical passionate entrepreneurs
These kinds of entrepreneurs can be found in people with a technical background. They are very focused on what the startup will do. For example, it’s natural that a fashion designer decides to create a clothing startup due to the knowledge he/she has on these matters. Other examples could be engineers, doctors, lawyers, who are going to be more prone to involve in startups related to their expertise field.
Business passionate entrepreneurs
These kinds of entrepreneurs can be found in people with a background in business or investments. They are not focused on what the startup will do, but on what the startup will generate in terms of profit or ROI.
A good match for a partnership in a startup would be business passionate + technical passionate founders.
Strategies to get complementary knowledge in the startup team
Sometimes, when the founders are only business passionate or when the founders are too technical, it’s common that they decide to get the complementary knowledge by strategic hirings. This has 3 approaches:
Hiring strategic collaborators as regular employees
This approach is good when the knowledge required by the startup is not scarce. That means, founders can substitute the collaborators easily if something goes wrong with them.
Hiring strategic collaborators as founders.
This approach is very useful when a startup wants to retain a strategic collaborator as part of the team. That means that it can be useful when the know-how provided by the collaborator is really scarce and hard to get.
In this approach, it is common to offer a small amount of equity to attract collaborators. Other times, no equity is offered but the right to enjoy a defined percentage of the profit as if they were company owners.
Hiring a third-party company that provides the service.
This approach is useful when there are team members who can supervise the quality of the deliverables and the performance of the team that’s providing the service. It may be a good approach when the budget of the startup is tight.
It’s an approach very used to let the startup grow while taking advantage of the third-party provider experience.