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Teams Don’t Matter
Marc Andreesen has some great insight on The only thing that matters:
Hopefully a great team gets you at least an OK product, and ideally a great product.
However, I can name you a bunch of examples of great teams that totally screwed up their products. Great products are really, really hard to build.
Hopefully a great team also gets you a great market — but I can also name you lots of examples of great teams that executed brilliantly against terrible markets and failed. Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are.
In my experience, the most frequent case of great team paired with bad product and/or terrible market is the second- or third-time entrepreneur whose first company was a huge success. People get cocky, and slip up. There is one high-profile, highly successful software entrepreneur right now who is burning through something like $80 million in venture funding in his latest startup and has practically nothing to show for it except for some great press clippings and a couple of beta customers — because there is virtually no market for what he is building.
Conversely, I can name you any number of weak teams whose startups were highly successful due to explosively large markets for what they were doing.
Finally, to quote Tim Shephard: “A great team is a team that will always beat a mediocre team, given the same market and product.”
His broader point is that market/product fit trumps some notion of “great team”.
Of course, teams do matter (pace my title), but I tend to think that the best teams are ones that are molded to the market, just as the product needs to be. To that end, I don’t look for deep experience in my people, but rather extraordinary talent. A good subject for another post.