And what do to if you don’t fit the ideal model

If you ask a venture investor for the 3 most important factors in deciding what startups to invest in, they’re certain to answer: team, team, and team.

But what do investors mean when they claim “team is everything” and “we invest in teams, not technology”? What are we actually looking for and what should you do if that’s not you?

If you think we enjoy getting pitched by bright young kids, straight out of college, with incredible enthusiasm and drive, hyped on how they’re going to change the world, you’d be right.

We enjoy those pitches. We love interacting with those founders. We’re delighted by hearing the crazy, impractical, and sometimes downright ridiculous ideas fresh founders come up with that they expect will somehow will solve loneliness, turn waste into gold, or fix our broken health care system. They’re a lot more fun than yet another boring pitch about improved reverse osmosis membranes.

But then, when all is said and done, we invest in the reverse osmosis founder.

Why? It’s true the young founder might actually change the world. And my cat might win a Nobel Prize. But it’s very unlikely.

Even if the young founder has a great idea, she is likely to fail in execution. Has she ever worked at a job other than Starbucks, much less hired and managed the 250 people the startup will need in a few years?

Has she ever sold a $200,000 piece of software to JPMorgan Chase or convinced a hospital to change their patient management processes? Just knowing what can be delegated to trusted lieutenants and what has to be actively managed takes both good instincts and real-world experience.

Knowing the gaping difference between prototype software that might work under controlled conditions and commercial-quality software that can’t fail under any conditions (and if it does fail, avoids a catastrophic crash allowing hackers access), takes years in the trenches.

Even more importantly, knowing what customers really need, what they’ll pay for, what will convince them to buy it, and how they’ll learn about a new solution takes more than a few customer discovery calls. It takes years of industry experience.

If this sounds like a rant against young, inexperienced founders, it’s not. I’m an equal opportunity ranter. Just as challenged as the kids who know nothing about the industries they’re intent on disrupting are the grizzled corporate warriors.

They know everyone and everything the industry. They have deep experience. They have impressive titles at impressive companies. Can they manage a 200 person team? Check. Can they run a billion dollar P&L? Check. Big is no problem, but how about small? Can they make coffee themselves? Can they book their own travel? Can they do the accounting, file tax forms, write social media posts, and stand in a tiny trade show booth for 8 hours a day? Can they live off a salary barely enough for a shared apartment with 5 other founders?

Corporate warriors know how to do one thing very very well. They’re great at managing a $100M budget with corporate functions to handle everything from marketing to finance to HR. But can they wear the hundred different hats required of a startup founder? Can they build a product themselves on a shoestring budget? Most can’t, so they raise a lot money and burn through it quickly by hiring a big staff.

So what, exactly, are investors looking for when they invest in team, team, team?

  • Deep industry experience: Do you know the customers? Have you lived their pain? Do you know how to build a product that meets a critical need?
  • Strong technical expertise: Do you know how to build a product? Even if most of the coding is nothing but ChatGPT or a band of coding hamsters on contract, someone who knows what they’re doing needs to be responsible for architecture and important product decisions. The CTO role can’t be ignored and can’t be outsourced. Even a startup making an organic protein bar needs a head baker to manage the contract baking operation or it’s certain to go awry.
  • Built and scaled successful startups: Startups sound easy. Write a pitch deck, raise money, hire a few people to write software, hire a few more to sell it. Not much different from a college project, right? Well, there’s a reason, or actually lots and lots of reasons, why 90% of funded startups fail, and more like 99% at earlier stages. If you haven’t built and scaled a startup before, there’s a lot of mistakes you’ll be lucky to miss that will be obvious the second time around. We’d prefer you do your learning on someone else’s money.

If you have both deep industry experience and strong technical expertise, and have already built and scaled successful startups, congratulations. Funding should be a breeze.

For everyone else, which has to be north of 95% of startup teams, how are you going to convince skeptical investors who invest in team, team, team to invest in you, you, you when your LinkedIn profile shows nothing but a college degree in business with a minor in music and 3 months working at McDonald’s?

How to Build an Impressive Startup Team

There’s lots of ways to overcome a less than all-star founding team.

  1. Work at a Startup. Instead of building your own startup from scratch, begin by joining a Seed stage or Series A startup. Be an early employee but not the earliest. Get paid a salary while learning the industry. As the company grows, you’ll gain experience building and managing a team. If the startup is successful, you’ll be able to fund your own startup yourself without having to beg from pesky investors. Even if the startup isn’t successful, you’ll exit with valuable experience and industry connections, and you’ll have a team of people you’ve already worked with ready to jump onto the next opportunity.
  2. Assemble a Founding Team. Instead of picking your college roommate as your co-founder, find someone who has the skills you’re missing. If you’re a young programmer, find an experienced business person from the industry. If you’re a corporate warrior, partner with someone who’s built a startup from scratch.
  3. Hire an Executive Team. The technical, industry, and startup expertise the company needs doesn’t all have to come from founders. Missing skills can be added with hired executives. And they don’t even need to be working at the company at the time you’re pitching for funding — you only need to be able to say they’re advising you now and planning to join full-time as soon as the company has funding.
  4. Add Advisors. If you’ve never built a startup yourself but have Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, and Sam Altman on speed dial, guess what — you won’t have difficulty raising. If you’re building a startup for mining and have VPs from Rio Tinto, Glencore, and BHP on the board (and cap table), VCs will be begging to write you checks. That said, we see a lot of pitches listing a lot of advisors and generally ignore them. To make a difference, advisors need to be relevant to the business and deeply involved, not just an occasional check-in. Get them to invest and put them on the board (the board of directors, not some fictional and useless “board of advisors”) and we’ll pay attention.
  5. Build Traction. Investors always say we invest in “team, team, team.” But that’s not really true. We invest first and foremost in customer traction. Get to $10M in revenues and suddenly nobody cares about team. $1M in revenues shows the product works, customers are buying it, and you’ve built the core of a viable business. Even a few initial clients moves the discussion from “Do you know what you’re doing?” to “What will it take to scale?” The more traction you have, the more you prove that your team, no matter how much it deviates from the investor ideal, is generating success. And in the end, what investors are looking for is evidence of success.

If you’re having trouble raising from investors because they’re not impressed by the team, the best strategy may be to not raise from investors, at least not at the start. Scape by with friends and family funding, get government grants, and best of all, get customers to pre-pay for the product. Prove you have what it takes without venture handouts and investors will beg to be allowed to climb aboard.