Diversity; Make your startup great from the beginning
Dynamics of the founding team makes or breaks any startup. Often, we come across good startups with great ideas but when we take a close look, we get to understand the weird dynamics that may hinder the growth of the startup in the long run.
While it’s incredibly important for founders to be able to work together, what startups often don’t do have is diversity. In our experience diversity of the founding team is probably as important as them being able to work together well.
Many of the emerging startup ecosystems have students and young professionals coming together to build products. While there’s nothing wrong with it, what we’ve come to see is that most of these founding teams come from similar backgrounds. In mature ecosystems, this is not so much of a problem because founders can find co-founders/key employees relatively easily. Case in point, how Ryan Graves met Travis Kalanick — both billionaires by the way — through a tweet.
One issue that startups face when they have a single-disciplined founding team can be summed in a picture.
Startups need to be able to do many things at the same time. While most of it involves hustling and team work, diversity can play a major role in defining tasks which helps both these. This is important. Being able to understand nuances from different disciplines helps a startup to move faster. When this is the case, teams begin to rely on each other and that enhances team work.
In many of the Sri Lankan startups, we see engineering-heavy founder compositions. There’s nothing wrong with it. However, chances are that they are not well-equipped to face the challenges when they want growth and traction.
There are also issues unique to the Sri Lankan ecosystem. For example, it’s very hard to find good designers with a keen eye on web and mobile app design. Same goes for marketing, sales and business development. If a startup has founding members from such disciplines, they bring incredible value to the table from the get-go.
Onboarding a diverse set of people creates a lot of interesting challenges. For example, an engineering co-founder would be able to connect with and convince another engineer. But when he or she wants do the same with a marketer or a designer, the context changes. Each of these interactions create a lot of value for the original engineering co-founder to improve his or her pitch and/or understand unique problems that he or she hasn’t seen before.
Likewise, when the initial team come from a diverse background it helps all of them to sound off ideas, get feedback and insights from different perspectives. That is a good thing. In the least, it helps the startup to fail fast. That itself is a win.
So, think about it. Plan on creating diversity in your startups from the beginning. It wouldn’t be easy. But if you are focused on sustainable growth, diversity is a necessity.
