We often think of entrepreneurs as lone geniuses, grinding away on breakthrough ideas. But there’s a reason why top accelerators like YC and EF rarely accept solo founders. A single person simply can’t wear all the hats a successful venture demands.
Trying to go it alone risks burnout, dilutes your efforts, and blinds you to gaps in your business.
Teammates offer new perspectives, complementary skills, and extra hands. But if not built and led properly, a founding team can collapse under pressure, putting your entire startup at risk.
Over the last four years, I’ve led multiple teams through moments of both chaos and achievement. In this article, I’ll unpack the three essential ingredients of a great team:
- The people
- The culture
- The leader
1. Recruiting the Right People
A friend of mine studied international politics and was a passionate student of Machiavelli. In one of our conversations, he explained a metaphor that stuck with me.
Machiavelli described three kinds of troops:
- Mercenaries: skilled but loyal only to themselves.
- Auxiliaries: helpful, but not independently driven.
- Soldiers: ambitious, loyal, and committed to the mission.
Founding team members often fall into these same categories.
Your goal is to recruit soldiers, people who believe in your mission and are ready to walk through fire to make it happen.
When interviewing potential co-founders or early team members, ask yourself:
- Do they align with our values?
- Are they joining just for the salary or equity?
- What’s their greatest strength?
- Where do they struggle?
- Can I see myself solving problems with this person at 2am?
It’s not about hiring the “best” person on paper. It’s about building a team that clicks, that shares purpose, and that can thrive in the unpredictable terrain of a startup.
2. Importance of Team Culture
When investors evaluate pre-seed startups, they look beyond the pitch and product, they look at the team. Yes, they want to see skill, but they’re also assessing something less tangible: the team’s culture.
When a group of people come together around an idea, they form what Seth Godin calls “a tribe”, a shared consciousness capable of making collective decisions and taking bold action. At its best, a tribe can emerge to be greater than the sum of its parts.
Team culture is the glue that holds the tribe together, especially under stress. When deadlines loom, engineering backlogs pile up, and investors start asking hard questions, it’s culture that determines whether the team pulls together or falls apart.
A team with a weak culture will start to fracture. People revert to self-interest, communication breaks down, and individual survival instincts take over. Maybe your team is made of exceptional people, but even then, with 23% of startup failures attributed to team issues, the odds aren’t in your favor.
That’s why culture isn’t something you can afford to ignore. Founders must nurture a sense of belonging and trust. Without it, even the best plans can unravel.
Defining Values in a Value-Driven Economy
Before recruiting anyone, you need a clear sense of the kind of team you’re building, and the values that will guide it.
Values act like a seed crystal. They shape your company’s identity from day one. But not all values are equal.
- Vague values lead to a weak, diluted team culture.
- Misaligned values create toxic, oppressive environments.
- Strong, authentic values attract aligned, motivated people.
One exercise I’ve found helpful is this: think of a moment in your life when you felt deeply fulfilled. Record yourself talking about it. Then, an hour later, listen back. Write down the words or themes that resonate, and rank them. Your top five? Those are likely your core values.
3. Leading Teams to Victory
Once you’ve built your team, the final ingredient is leadership.
There’s no single model. Apple’s spider web, Amazon’s strict hierarchies, Microsoft’s silos, all are valid in their own contexts.
But for me, in a startup context, I’ve found success in a more hands-off, laissez-faire approach.
I invest time upfront in selecting creative, ambitious, and skilled individuals. My job then is to empower them and remove obstacles.
Leadership, in this context, is about asking the team, “What do you need to succeed?” and then doing everything in your power to provide the resources, connections, funding, and space to empower the team to make it happen.
Of course, this requires trust, and it won’t suit every founder. But when it works, it’s deeply rewarding. You get to watch your team shine, grow, and create without gatekeepers slowing them down.
Visionary Leadership, Democratic Decisions
One day I found myself wandering around campus. I entered a room where a woman was giving a lecture on leadership. She spoke with clarity and purpose: “A true leader defines the vision, the mission. But the path, the steps, and the methods must be decided by the people who walk it.”
She explained that leadership isn’t about control, but about conviction. The vision must be bold, clear, and rooted in purpose. But the execution comes from empowered team members, not from the leader. The best outcomes come when those closest to the work shape how it gets done.
She gave an example.
Imagine you’re a university student, and one day you crave soup. You search the campus but find no place that serves it. That craving turns into a purpose: “I want to open a soup shop.”
But you don’t act alone. Instead, you gather insights. You create a poster with the question: “What’s your favourite soup?” and a QR code to an online survey.
As these posters appear around campus, something interesting happens. People start thinking about soup. They feel the absence of it. You spark demand. And at the same time, the answers to the survey become the items in your shops new menu.
This is visionary leadership paired with democratic decision making. A leader ignites the idea, but invites others to shape how it comes to life.
Putting the Ingredients Together
When you combine exceptional people, a resilient team culture, and empowering leadership, you build what I call a “winning tribe”. A team that can take on a challenge far greater than all the individual team members could handle alone.
Leadership is something you grow into. You’ll make mistakes. You’ll overstep boundaries. You’ll have tough conversations.
The best leaders create environments where people feel safe to speak up. Constant feedback from your winning tribe creates a positive feedback loop. It’s how you improve. It’s how you turn lead into gold.
In the next article, we’ll dive deeper into the building blocks of a great team, including practical frameworks to structure roles, responsibilities, and decision-making.
Until then, think about your own team.
- Are the people commited and loyal?
- Does the team have strong authentic values?
- Do the team members have what they need to succeed?
- Do you bring purpose and conviction to empower people, and transform the team into a winning tribe?
Emilio Garcia Padron is an MSc Applied Mathematics student at Imperial College London, specializing in Computational Dynamical Systems. He is a full-stack software developer and founder of NEA Studios. He is also a founder of RE:GEN @ Imperial, a project aiming to protect and expand Green Spaces on Imperial grounds that raised over £39,000 in funding.
Image: DALL-E
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