Abstract
While much has been written about how startups work to develop their product, this paper focuses instead on how to manage the startup team. Based on a systematic review of current research, I present actionable insights about startup team characteristics; who they are, how they work, and how they stay together. I explain how these characteristics imply both opportunities and threats for the viability of the teamand discuss how startup teams can bemanaged to increase the likelihood of their survival and growth. Given that the majority of startup failures are attributed to the team, not to the product, these insights are valuable both to aspiring entrepreneurs and to their external stakeholders.
Highlights
In the past decade, we have witnessed a surge of interest in how to manage startup companies
Popular methods have had a fundamental impact on new ventures across the world, describing how to develop minimum viable products, how to find product-market fit, and how to pivot a business
The core reason for why many startups fail is not because of problems in their business; it is rather because of problems in their team. This is well known, and across different surveys (Gorman & Sahlman, 1989; Kaplan & Strömberg, 2004), venture capitalists attribute between 60-65 of failures to problems within the startup team
Summary
We have witnessed a surge of interest in how to manage startup companies. Results are mainly directed towards an academic audience They are divided into fairly narrow subdisciplines, such as sociology (Ruef, 2010); strategy (Eisenhardt, 2013) or social psychology (Breugst & Shepherd, 2017), and as such, typically not accessible to practitioners. Given how much we already know about how to manage startups, it is time we pay attention to the fundamental issue of how to manage collaborations with and within the new venture team. Addressing this need for knowledge, I present in this paper actionable insights about startup teams; who they are, how they work, and how they stay together. My core purpose is to offer practitioners research-based knowledge about how to organize and manage startup teams, with an aim of complementing the abundance of literature that focuses on how to organize and manage new ventures
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