How To Create Magic

In my book, building, growing and motivating a team is among the hardest of all human pursuits. But if you're an entrepreneur this art has to be mastered. If you fall prey to the traditional entrepreneur mindset of "only I can do it properly," I've got some advice for you: snap out of it!

Teams aren't just important because it's the first pretty much the only thing investors look at in a prospect. They aren't just important because every entrepreneur needs others to share the load. What makes teams an essential part of any entrepreneur's success is that even a mildly-cohesive team can often generate magic.

I have interacted with many entrepreneurs in various stages of the startup life-cycle - from boom to bust and any everything in between - and those that are more successful often credit their achievements to not being the smartest in the room. This is sometimes a difficult concept for the stubborn, alpha types - who are traditionally thought to be hard-headed enough to achieve the impossible of building something from nothing - to fathom, but it is close to the single most important characteristic to consider when choosing team members.

Think about it: the sheer audacity to believe that you can build a tiny little company into a world-beater demands a requisite level of craziness from the founding team. It also needs an abundance of balls, tenacity, luck and everything, and then some, to go in your favour.

Unless you get funded (and the chances of that happening are slimmer than the width of a hair, see Entrepreneur's infographic below) you will need to build your product or offer using highly skilled team members, who you probably won't be able to afford. You'll also need significant sales, marketing and street smarts. You may possess a few of these traits, but there isn't a single person alive who is a God of all traits. I hear you asking, "so who do I do it?" With a good team, is the answer.

Emotion & Failure

Don't believe the naysayers, creating a team characterised by cohesion and drive WILL help you build that bridge to success. Team members need to possess a myriad of skills, not least of which include a truckload of emotional intelligence and the individual ability to handle constructive criticism and failure.

Why failure? Because building something from scratch requires everyone concerned to deal with and learn from many less-than-perfect results. The process of actually accomplishing this learn-repeat-rinse process is far from easy. From personal experience, it creates many potential points of implosion between team members who may otherwise enjoy great rapport with each other.

The increase in dopamine that results from difficult situations is usually not well handled by most people, particularly the "worriers" among us. Therefore, it's even more important for every team member to completely buy into the assumption that everyone is aiming toward the same goal, despite differing views on how to achieve it, and to collectively reinforce this regularly.  Only then will handling and dealing with failure become easier, to a point where it starts acting as a real motivator and binding force for the wider team.

The Fairer Sex

The question of gender is also an interesting one. I have personally seen in my teams that gender diversity can help bring about a greater degree of emotion modulation, diversity of thought and engagement that may be a real competitive advantage in a largely male-dominated field.

The other reason gender equality is important in founding teams is eloquently explained in the book "Top Dog" by Po Bronson. He explains that the difference between men and women is not so much about Mars and Venus, but about the fact that women are far better surveyors of risk. In the startup world where risk-taking is the name of the game, this ability to better appreciate risk is an even greater asset.

Contrary to popular belief, every unicorn that you hear about wasn't an overnight success. It took each of those companies many wrong turns and dead ends to create the reputations they now enjoy. These unicorns obviously had visionary and instinctive leaders. But the question that begs is, how much smoother could the the paths to success of these companies have been if they had greater risk assessment ability as part of their founding and management teams?

The Small Matter of Investors

Investors talk a lot of shit about team and how it is their first consideration. What they don't tell you is that it is literally their ONLY consideration. All this talk of business models, revenue streams, J-curves and the like is ancillary to biggest question in investors' heads: will this team create magic?

Have you ever wondered why even the worst performing businesses start churning out great results after the management team is overhauled? Why is it that senior executive movements create yoyos out of stock price charts? Companies, no matter their size, aren't incorporated great, they are made great by talented and cohesive teams.

It pays to not always be the smartest in the room. The question is, can you build and grow with a team where you will also have to let others make decisions and shine?

Entrepreneurship 101: Entrepreneurship and the Internet

The most common question asked of me, usually at social gatherings where genuine banter is in short supply (usually because prohibition has been declared for the duration of the event) and in order to break an awkward silence, so what is your one tip for new entrepreneurs?

Just as there are no silver bullets, or unicorns for that matter, there is no one tip to end all tips that will help an entrepreneur an "overnight success." From my point of view, the fault is not in the question, but the perception that there is a formula or a sure-shot path to success. A perception pedalled particularly to gullible millenials, who globally appear to be struggling with the concept that one must actually work and solve real problems with real solutions, in order to be successful.

Back to the question: while nobody is successful just because their parents taught them as kids that they could be anything they wanted, there is one thing that I've learned not to do:

Don't believe everything you read on the internet.

Now, I can almost guarantee you're sitting there going, who the fuck doesn't know this? But think about it, whenever you come across a problem, where do you go? Exactly.

This problem is compounded by the fact that in times of uncertainty, it is human nature to lower our defences and objectivity. It's published on the internet, how can it not be true? Right?

Our ancestors probably turned to astrologers and sages to seek their wisdom. Our parents used to turn to textbooks or their parents when looking for answers. We inherently turn to random people we've never met, who may or may not know what they're writing about, but still manage to dupe us into believing them. At least our ancestors and parents weren't getting their information from faceless men of the Labor party.

Asking Uncle Google for help on how to succeed as an entrepreneur is as futile as assuming the entrepreneurship class at university will teach you all you need to know. Trust me, I've done my fair share of said classes back in the day. I look back at them now and think, WTF was I thinking? How could an academic who has never run a business in his life teach me about how to hire a great team or to teach the team to lock the door on that one night where I'm not the last to leave or even about how to get my first customer? How?

(I apologise to the academics in my family. I wasn't referring to you, only some of your friends who haven't spent a day in the real world.)

In my book, the only thing worse than asking Google for the silver bullet is accepting the advice of the know-it-all that we all have in our lives. The same person who thinks they could actually teach entrepreneurship at university and would've also built Uber 15 years ago, but couldn't because...you know...the government got in the way and their parents forced them to get married and smartphones didn't exist, yaar.

So back to the question again: the only way to learn how to enjoy any success as an entrepreneur is to talk to real people who are or were on a similar journey, face-to-face. To build or be part of a team and networks you can turn to when ideas need a wall to bounce off. To experiment with your options in real-life situations after you've performed the best possible analysis. To trust your gut because every successful business was born out of instinct, and only later was structure added to make the said business successful and repeatable.

The internet is great for making money. Just not for learning how to do it. No?