FINDING AND BUILDING YOUR FOUNDING TEAM | METASTARTUP # 22

what's up guys so in this video we're going to talk about building your core team now without a doubt in the early days of a start-up building your core team is the most important part of building a business your core team is important it's even more important than your idea of business model and early revenues and the reason I say this is because more often than not the early idea for a startup will be wrong right and you might have to go to the market and you'll get some market feedback and you'll have to pivot your idea so you will be doing a lot of idea changing and business model changing this is this process called pivoting so from now on I'm going to use the word pivot and when you do this depending on market feedback you need a good team to be able to switch gears and change directions very fast so setting vision raising capital building your core team is the primary task of any CEO cool so let's set some precedence equity should not be split equally and the reason is because in equal equity situation there is no one that's more accountable than the other person and every ship needs a captain if two people have the same equity and then what happens is that this ship has two captains and that usually ends up in the ship sinking to find out who's your own how much equity instead of just you know arbitrarily deciding use this equity calculator I don't own it I've just used it in the past it's called founders comm you can just click on the link here or go to fo und RS comm and you can just calculate and you know it takes a lot of things like it takes into account you know the connections you bring the who's doing the fundraising who's building the pitch decks all of that so you just check in put those checks in and it will give it'll spit out some equity calculations to is the perfect number of co-founders to I politics of the co level I've said this many times in previous videos but the minute you have you son having three co-founders there's a lot of politics at the core levels which is something that's very human right what happens is people end up in creating groups inside groups and in this case you know when you have the minute you have three people you can create a group of two inside it so there will always be groups of two inside a group of three so try to keep it a group of because that's the minimum number of people that can form a group and you will not face any founder level politics if you have just one more person cool so

first question that a lot of people ask me is Baran where do I find co-founders in India right and the answers are your existing network everyone here uses social media Facebook Instagram so just reach out to people don't be afraid to and what i really suggest is you make a small three slide deck about who you are and what the idea is and just pitch to your potential co-founders the same way you pitched ovc don't waste anybody's time create a pitch and say why you are a good co-founder and why you're looking to have a quick chat and we talk about what you should look at you know co-founder when you have a chat in the next slides but you can also look at your school undergrad and post-grad alumni people you go to school with because let's face it in today's day going to school gives you or going to college gives you an alumni network right you know these people to a certain extent you're friends with them and a lot of people when I start - startup they told me that modern you know how we're going to replicate the alumni network you keep saying that you know this better than Business School where's the alumni network and I'm very cognizant of this fact and I'm very careful that we're building a lot of offline meetup so there is a lot of interaction that I have planned between people who are even watching this video right it's important for you guys to interact which is why I will strongly suggest please go and check out the Facebook group the Facebook meta sort of group and join it because you will be able to find potential co-founders there we're also doing a lot of offline startup events hackathons and building relationships so please make sure you arrive at those events they're all going to be free most of them are gonna be free and they will be branded by my rock we just hosted one very recently so if you're missing out make sure you be present there because you can meet really cool people who are as driven as you go for startup events go for hackathons and keep building relationships with new people you never know when you can start something new with them you can use an app like meetup comp to look for these events I think Avalon has a group on meetup. com as well this is more for the developer meetups that we host but feel free to you know join one or create one or own put up a job posting on I am jobs high rest has jobs Angeles these are popular Indian job boards specifically for like smaller groups of people if you put up a job posting on these places it's very easy for them to reply and say oh okay you know I'm interested in your job but the job posting feature doesn't work too well so you know it's just it's a last resort option but the best option and the option that I am working my ass off to kind of put together is use the meta star of Facebook groups and events right the events that were putting together the Facebook group it encourages discussion go out there make friends that group is specifically built so that you can contact other people in the group so now that you've found the

co-founder say you find like five people who you think are good co-founders for you remember I told you that if you have just tour you know if you're stretching it maybe three people as co-founders have a one week trial mode you need a speed date right you need to look at multiple co-founders at once and see who is the best fit for you have a one week trial mode and what I look for in my co-founders is the ability to sacrifice right if you can sacrifice your short-term gains or your short-term I want to make money for a long-term approach or you know I'm willing to make the sacrifice now to get some rewards for five years later we call this word delayed or we call these words delayed gratification this is what I look for in a co-founder that's my primary concern for a co-founder and this one-week trial mode I basically you know this is I do this for some employees as well now or at least people who want to join the Avalon core team I'm asked them to make small sacrifice to see if they're willing to put a long-term vision ahead of small short-term gains and the one-week trial mode basically you tell the person look let's work no strings attached for a week right let's build something out let's see how you think let's put something on paper so put the business model on papers see how they think and within one week you should easily be able to tell not whether that person is a great co-founder or that person is very experienced but whether you can work with that person their skills must complement yours they must understand normally the long term vision but also contribute enthusiastically on a daily basis right you can't just be like oh you know this is what the company will do this will and then go back into their came for three months right it's important for them to be there every day at least for the first two or three years of a company while you're building it that's what the resting period is for now their skills must complement yours so if you're a techie there they must be a sales guy if you're someone who's really good at marketing make sure you find someone who can do the technology in Avalon is a little different because you know I do both technology as well as sales so my co-founder Shashank complements me in the sense that he does finance so it doesn't matter the actual skills don't matter but you have to make sure that every base is covered and different people have different skill sets that complement each other it's a puzzle you're putting together there are 14 parts to a startup and you need to make sure that every single base is covered usually in the early days one person handles multiple bases but as you get bigger you will keep bringing on people to handle or maintain one base by themselves reject fast co-found relationships are like marriage right and this is an analogy that a lot of people use and you start up is the baby in fact it takes longer for a startup to reach a decent amount of maturity and I've said this before the early days of a startup it's like a baby that's growing right and four or five years later when people sell their startups don't think of it in a way that you're selling this not up sending your kids off to school somebody else is taking care of them and making sure they grow even further right and but you need to be that parent for the first four five number of years and the culture you set at home or in your startup is very important and your co-founder must match those ideas so

before you start working with a co-founder so you've been through the trial period during the trial period there are some questions you need to ask the co-founder to see if you're on the same page first you need to go through these questions that's on slide six and slide seven need to go through these questions yourself and answer these for yourself then ask the same questions to your co-founder and see if there's alignment some of the questions are what goals does each of us have for the startup what goes through we have for ourselves what are the respective timelines for these goals who gets what percentage of the company what will each person contribute to the company what are our duties job descriptions are commitments roles and responsibilities how much capital or cash will be contributing and for what is the vesting length how our key decisions and day-to-day decisions of the business made now the difference between key decisions and day-to-day decisions means that key decisions are one that impact the business or a long-term and day-to-day decisions are obviously the decisions that impact the startup today or tomorrow how are these decisions made is it majority work is it unanimous veto is it just the CEO taking decisions what salaries if any other founders entitled to how can that be modified how do you change somebody salary what happens if one of us wants to leave if one founder leaves this the company or other found I have the right to buy back that share what happens if one of us wants to sell the company raise money or kill the company what happens if one of us becomes disabled or dies what happens if it takes us longer than we expected to get our product up and running give me each launch other startups were working on this project under what circumstances can a founder be removed as an employee of the business what happens if one founder is not living up to expectations how would we solve this situation if it turns out that the business is not taking off and we decide to end our venture can one of us take the idea ahead and try it again these questions in themselves and they might be questions outside this but these are the fundamental questions if you can find alignment on these questions your expectations are set so in my last video I spoke about how you can fire a co-founder well you don't need to fire a co-founder if you and your co-founder are aligned on these questions you know that they won't deviate and plus if they do deviate you could show them this sheet and say you said you do this you said that if one of us wants to leave this is how it happens right and which is why this answering these questions is so important I'm gonna link you to this document the link is in the description is on the - our Facebook groups no surprises there so

all the questions that we answered in the last section these are going to be covered in the founders agreement this is a legal agreement that kind of talks about how each team works with each other so what are the roles responsibilities and vision of each person how does he equity investing work how does the IP ownership work and the meta sort of Facebook group has the founders agreement template so make sure you go take a look at it chain-of-command so in a typical company

you have a reporting structure and even if you're a two-man team we'll still have a reporting structure your co-founder must be your confidant and support system you must be theirs as well right it's very lonely being a co-founder and you need to find somebody who is willing to be there to listen to everything that you have right but the buck still stops at the CEO this doesn't mean that decisions are made jointly it means that our discussion happens and then the CEO or the person who has a little more equity still takes that final decision leaders eat last right which means that the CEO should create the structure in such a way that first the employees of the company are paid and everything that the company does goes towards making the stakeholders and the employees successful before the CEO and the founding team himself become successful and this is why you could have some issues right you're performed I might say you know I'm not being paid enough of salary but the CEO says look you have equity in the company and I want to pay my employees before I pay you right whereas in a joint decision or if you have three or four people there are too many different opinions there and everyone want their own selfish needs which is why I think keep the founding team small and have a slightly bigger core team that works under them but not the founding team the way Avalon works is Shashank and I run the company but we have a bunch of people who are my core team who work right under the founding level the higher the position the more the accountability if a company fails to really regardless of whether it's the CEOs fault or not the CEO still held accountable in bigger companies for example in ICICI Bank if one of the reps who is maybe employee number 2,000 goes and does something stupid with a customer or says something stupid to the customer and the customer sues the company is the CEO that has to represent the company obviously you know most CEOs will delegate the stars to a lawyer but it's still the CEO is held responsible for everything that goes wrong in the company whether from the share capital side from the cash side or whether from the employee said being CEO is very difficult which is why that person needs to have a higher amount of equity than somebody else it's a lonely exercise and a great co-founder is there to help bear the emotional risk of a star if not for me having Shashank in Avalon it would be very difficult for me to run the company not because of the technical skill or the capabilities of the growth but because it's just doing this is so hard and you need somebody who's willing to buckle up when things get rough and I've built like four or five different core teams in my life and it's just very difficult to find or a founding member who will just stay with you when things get really rough and you know over the last 10 years I've been close to bankruptcy almost five times and my co-founders have always been there for me and you know it's just find the right co-founders don't pick on the quitters I think the best thing to see is can they sacrifice and will they not quit those are two most important things for me everything else can be taught that's it for me for this video in the next video we're gonna talk about some more exciting stuff about how to get your product together and I have some very interesting news for you over the next few videos