Travails of team building: Learning from startups

It’s a professional journey. And it’s a personal journey.

Starting up a venture takes more than just an idea or capital – it takes your passion, skills, vision and dreams and definitely teamwork.But it is also like hitting the bullseye. You either hit it or you don’t. And in this game, one’s success depends on a number of factors – assessing the target, reviewing what you need, skill, vision and finally luck.   

So what essentially makes a successful startup? A successful startup is an organization that has a vision, built from very limited resources; a very able team created with patience, by scouting talent from unconventional sources, being frugal yet innovative in its approach; an organization driven by like-minded individuals who may not necessarily be superstars individually, but complement each other’s abilities to create a superstar team; an organization that has had to travail to build a winning team, but that tread has reaped extraordinary results for them. 

This Cover Story talks about startup entrepreneurship – both transactional or transformational – it is about the stories of these entrepreneurs, how they have fared in their paths – where they succeeded and where they faltered, especially their secrets of building winning teams, against all the odds. But this cover storyis not about what a successful startup is; it is about creating winning teams. This story brings together how these entrepreneurs got it right and assembles their strategies under two main sections – ‘Attracting, not hiring’ and ‘Enabling, not retaining’.

Behind every idea, there may not necessarily be a team; but behind executing that idea, there always is one.It is about assembling a winning team.

And the first step to assembling a winning team is to identify the core roles that the venture needs. Sometimes it is clear what roles are needed, as in Rajiv Jayaraman’s case, who started KNOLSKAPE while doing his MBA from INSEAD, Singapore. There were two major roles that they had – business development, and product development. “We were focused on academic market and started out with the top B-schools. This helped us to capture other B-schools quite effectively. So business development was not that much of a challenge; but ramping up the development capability was. As we were working with our clientele, we were also flexing our muscles to develop our own products. That capability we built along the way and that is how we figured out the initial set of roles in terms of developers and managers for our products and services,” said the HR technology startup’s CEO and Chief People Officer.

But in a startup environment, can it really be known, especially when startups mostly work in accordance with a Lean Startup approach? When entrepreneurs start with creating a minimum viable product (MVP), and startups are expected to pivot based on the learning, the exact roles and scope of work cannot entirely be defined. And even in KNOLSKAPE’s case, they pivoted and worked towards acquiring a corporate clientele alongside educational institutions. Rajiv admits that the one thing they could have done differently at the start was to focus on customer development as well alongside product development. So the core roles can never really be known. It is about building, measuring, and learning – and then starting again.Eric Ries’ ‘Lean Startup’ methodology is not only limited to the product, but can also be extended to the roles and scope of work of the core team – because as the product pivots, the nature of work also has to pivot.

So there is never a fixed role, a crystal clear job description, and well-defined boundaries within which one’s workstation is limited – one has to hop from one role to another. Sometimes the business demands it, and the rest of times, it is the individual that needs it. Both the talent and the organization need to be flexible in their approach to roles. 

The sources

The second step in assembling a winning team – a step that comes after identification, is sourcing talent for the venture. The constraint, though, for startups, is a lack of resources (both in terms of time and money) to source the people that are required. Most of the entrepreneurs resort to their first, second and even third degree networks for referrals.  

Samar Singla, the Founder and CEO of Jugnoo, was working with his Cofounder, Chinmay Agarwal in his previous venture ClickLabs when they decided to start Jugnoo.They tapped their network at ClickLabs only for talent. 

KNOLSKAPE’s Jayaraman resorted to his engineering college, BITS-Pilani for talent. When he was operating in Singapore along with his Cofounder he offered internships to BITS students. Two students joined the two-member team in Singapore, and after interning for a while, one of them decided to stay with the company.

Sarvesh Agrawal, Founder and CEO, Internshala, infactbuilt his team with interns. 30 of the 45 people currently working at Internshala, were all interns at some point of time. When he started, he had a team of 20-25 virtual interns working from across college campuses in the country. The first full-time member to join Internshala was also an intern.

Ankur Singla, Founder and CEO, Helpchat, though, had no technical network to tap to, as he came from a legal background. He had to wait for one and a half years to get the CTO and Cofounder of Helpchat (then Akosha). “People started joining me once the business started getting traction – so I kept my focus on building the business. The problem of finding a Cofounder or a CTO cannot be traced back to mistakes in hiring; it is infact a problem of traction. If you have enough traction, people will get attracted.”Singla would focus on creating his own presence by writing blogs, being active on social media, alongside developing the business. Nitin Babel, Cofounder of Niki.ai, also saw talent approaching the organization organically once the business got traction and got coverage in the press.

So entrepreneurs agree that it is about investing in creating traction for their business, for their brand – both their company’s and their own. AnkurWarikoo, Cofounder and CEO of Nearbuy (formerly Groupon India), is really active on Quora. “I have been on Quora for a year and a half now. I never used to think of it as a ground of hiring; but overtime, people started reaching out to me asking about Nearbuy and the nature of my work.” It made him realize that it would help if he would be open and approachable, and build some sort of a persona on Quora – both his own and his venture’s. “Over the course of time, that started helping a lot. Last year, a lot of winter internship applications came in, and we took about eight people,” he says. One of them has been interning with them for six months and he today manages the entire student ambassador program for Nearbuy, handling more than 600 virtual interns across the country.

Sourcing talent is about networks and traction in business. And investing in creating traction for the brand – both as an individual and as a company is paramount.

Creating that value proposition

The real test though, comes later for entrepreneurs – creating a value proposition for talent. The discourse surrounding talent is not anymore about hiring it, but about attracting it in face of fierce competition from across industries and geographies, and not enough fight left in startups to offer in terms of compensation, attraction comes as a challenge.

But in hindsight, startups do have a strength – the idea and vision that they stand for, the offer to do something bigger, the chance to learn, grow and take responsibilities. They offer a chance to be co-owners of the business. And that often is a very compelling value proposition. Fahad Moti Khan, the Founder & CEO at Technology 9 Labs, says, “I do not look at myself as being the sole owner of the business. Everyone who adds value to the business is the co-owner.” And people get drawn to it, for the proposition is to be a joint owner of the business. “There are seven companies incubated at T9L and almost all the people working on these projects have some kind of share in the company. The people who have just joined, do not have the shares as of yet, for their value is not known. But that too will materialize with time,” he adds.

Even Facebook paid their first office’s painter in stocks. Back in 2005, when Facebook was just starting out, Sean Parker, the Founding President of Facebook, invited David Choe to paint the walls of the office. Instead of money, he was offered stocks. As of last year, they were valued at $200 million. T9L’s Fahad uses this story to attract people. But he also warns of not promising, but to simply paint a scenario – “highlight the possibilities and give people a vision of glory and ask them to be a part of it.”

But it is about being able to articulate that story, make people believe in the vision. And it should be “a pull, not a push”, says Sairee Chahal, Founder and CEO at Sheroes. Choe took a “gamble”, he said in an interview with Howard Stern, but not everyone does. To ensure people bought the vision of the company, Qilo’s Cofounder VipulMathur actually made a presentation about the organization’s vision to the core team members before they got on board. The vision presentation highlighted what the venture had in mind, the potential of the market, what they have already achieved, the time and investment they have made, the current structure of the team, the people who have come on board, and the skills they need for future talent. 

Attracting talent native to tier 2 and tier 3 cities has not been a big challenge for the educational startup Superprofs because this particular pool can relate to the problem that the startup is trying to solve.Piyush Agrawal, Founder & CEO of Superprofs, cites it as the company’s value proposition. He argues, “I have seen cases where people have had offers from the big names out there but they instead chose to work with us.” And he attributes it to the larger goal of the organization and the potential social impact they are making.

Superprofs has had a better experience with people who came with a clean slate, rather than people who came with some years of experience behind. “The willingness to learn is important. Anyway, in today’s world, the skills that an individual hones now, become archaic very soon. So chances are that talent will anyhow have to learn new skills. So it is better to have talent that is aware of the fundamentals and has the willingness to learn,” says Piyush.

People get attracted to startups, when they find the idea compelling. And it is only when they find the idea compelling, do they perform well. Vision-centricity is vital for people to stay motivated and keep working towards propelling the organization forward. A disconnect with the vision of the organization is one of the biggest derailers for startups. Talent does not necessarily have to be the best in class, but needs to be the best for that particular organization.

Getting the top right talent

There are not many employers in the world who haven’t made hiring mistakes – a CareerBuilder Survey conducted in 2013 suggests that 84 percent employers in India reported to have made a wrong hire in 2012.But the cost of a bad hire escalates even further for startups – and more so in terms of intangibles. Qilo’s Vipul says, “The cost of bad hire for a startup is calculated in terms of how much it delayed the product launch, and it is much more severe than the losses incurred in terms of money spent on recruiting, onboarding and compensation.” While the immediate calculation in terms of monetary loss cannot be done, it derails the whole plan and in some cases, the whole product development work also has to be redone. “That is so much more painful than the ‘cost’ per se,” he adds.  

And top talent, is not always the right talent. Prasoon Gupta, Cofounder and Director at Sattviko, had to face severe repercussions because of hiring two senior individuals, very skilled, from big established corporates – a lead chef from a huge hotel chain, and an operations incharge from a popular fast-food chain. He had to let go of them both, for they had adversely affected the culture of the organization. Since the chef came from a different culture, he demanded for a surplus workforce to work in the kitchen, a very strong bench strength and strict working hours of people at the kitchen. All this resulted in having people surplus to the need, and the company burning a lot of cash everyday for disguised employment. They eventually had to let the chef along with many in the kitchen staff go.

So how do startups really get the right talent?

Different things work for different people. Many of the startup entrepreneurs we interviewed followed an array of strategies for hiring the right talent.

Knowing what is right: To begin with, entrepreneurs need to know what is ‘right’ for their venture. The culture or the DNA of the organization may not necessarily be formally tabled for startups, but the founders need to be aware of it intuitively. Qustn Technologies, for instance, requires people with a “get the job done” attitude. For JobsForHer, the ‘right’ talent is the individual connected to the vision of the company and one who cares about the social impact they wish to create. It is also contextual to the stage the organization is in, and the requirements it has. The key lies in knowing what is right in the given context. For instance, KNOLSKAPE would look for developers initially, but as the business has grown, they are also looking at hiring people who can design think, over and above developers.

Assessing it right: Knowing what is right is immaterial unless entrepreneurs can assess it right. Not only entrepreneurs, but everyone who has hired talenthasmade the mistake of wrongful assessment.  

“Some startups feel, ‘abhi le lo, kuch nahihota yaar! (let’s hire for now,it doesn’t matter!),” observes Samar Singla of Jugnoo. And a lot of entrepreneurs do admit to have made this mistake. And it isn’t that they do not understand the implications. They have been very cautious for the critical roles they have at their organization. “When you have been building an organization for 10 years, six months doesn’t seem that long a time – the criticality of the role made it just so important for us to not hurry into it,” reasons Nearbuy’s Warikoo about his persistence to wait for eight months for the now Product Head.Helpchat got a CTO after having operated for two years, and the 109th interviewee was deemed as the right person for the job by the founder AnkurSingla. “When people stop compromising and realize it is critical that every hire is right, then things fall into place,” summarizes Jugnoo’sSamar Singla.

So how do entrepreneurs really assess talent when they do not have the resources to spend on a formal assessment activity, unless ofcourse their own product helps organizations in experientiallearning and assessments, like in the case of Rajiv Jayaraman’s KNOLSKAPE.For those that do not have an assessment tool, they go the old school way, but do it very effectively.

Mrigank Tripathi, Founder & CEO of Qustn Technologies, gives the candidates homework to start an interview process. “80 percent drop out when they see a lot of work is being given to them in a standard Interview process,” he says. That becomes the first auto-screening level. He repeats the sameactivity for a few more rounds, by constantly giving feedback to the applicant and asking her torework on the already completed task. “When I tell people I didn’t like their work, there are usuallythree reactions – ‘1. Let me give it another shot’; ‘2. Why particularly don’t you like it’; ‘3. You arethe boss’,” says Mrigank. The third comment is the end of the line for him, because the organizationis looking for an individual with the ability to continue working until the job is done.

A recruitment analytics company, PiQube, thrives on an open and transparent culture. Jayadev Mahalingam, the Founder or Chief Problem Creator (as he calls himself), asks people to use cursewords on his face during the interview. He says, “I tell the people who come in for an interview thatI will judge you based on the number of curse words you use on my face. Through this, I am tryingto tell them that it doesn’t matter to me if I am the CEO or the Founder of the company – if I amwrong, then you should be able to tell me I am wrong. I can also accept that I can be wrong. That isthe kind of culture we have.”

Balancing it right: But eventually it all comes down to balancing the will, skill and fit of the individual. The degree of fit is also flexible across roles. Some roles require more of skill than a job fit, some require an equivalent of both. Sheroes uses a dynamic model which guides the organization with respect to the requisite balance needed among skill, will and fit across roles. They have divided the organization into three tracks – the ‘startup track’, the ‘flex track’, and the ‘specialized track’. The core team forms the ‘start-up track’, and for them, it is very important to be a cultural fit, which for Sheroes means having a good “attitude, mission centricity and authenticity”. The ‘flex track’ constitutes talent working from remote locations in flexible timelines on particular niche roles. Since they are working virtually and part-time, and their roles are also highly function-specific, they are judged purely based on their skill. For instance, a “Virtual sales associate” should be equipped with selling skills, and does not necessarily need to be a cultural fit. The third track, the ‘specialized track’ is a reverse of the startup track, where what matters the most is the skill, and less the cultural fit. These roles are very niche and specific, and require the expertise of accomplished professionals. Some of them include, setting up the HR department, managing compliance and finance, etc.

As crucial as it is, identifying and bringing together the right team is only the beginningof the journey for entrepreneurs. While a decentbeginning is half done, the other half is all about engaging the people who have demonstrated that capability and shown that level of trustin the entrepreneur’s idea. The next part is about making sure they don’t feel the need to leave.

Also read Part 2 of Travails of Team building: Enabling, not retaining & anecdotes by entrepreneurs