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Ask HN: How would you build the perfect team?

8 points by hammerdr ↗ HN
I'm in a unique position where I have an indefinite amount of time to build a highly skilled team piece by piece. This team would essentially be small, agile and not specific to a domain. It needs to be able to handle everything from development to business to marketing.

Given as much time as you needed, how would you seek, identify, assimilate and grow a team such as this?

7 comments

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lisp123
The ideal time comprises 3 ninjas, 2 rockstars, and a level 10 archmage.
adrianwaj
Go out and meet people. Ask them what they would want in a startup, and see if you can cater to their needs in your own. Ask them what they'd ideally like to be working on. Ask for referrals to others. Try and get everyone doing what they want to be doing and personalities won't matter as much. Better if you can laugh at their jokes.
tom_b
Your "not specific to a domain" part scares me. I currently work with two extremely talented people with completely different backgrounds - one is a top-notch, get it done engineer, the other a smart startup minded person who has a MBA (don't worry, I tease him mercilessly).

I specifically picked these two from my personal network based on the skills I needed for my current effort. The top-notch engineer could work with minimal spec and teach herself tech as needed for web apps (I had her move from Java/J2ee to RoR and completely assumed she'd crank it out, result=homerun), the MBA guy had real tech skills but possesses a real (and non-slimy) way of interacting with our users that engenders trust and commitment (and people in our environment are now recovering from a period of plain dislike for working with our group).

Neither would have made sense if I was building a team to write graphics drivers.

I guess the answer is something I alluded to - personal network.

hammerdr
Personal network is something that is very powerful here and will be the top (if not only) means of recruitment for me. How did you go about recruiting and assimilating the members of the team?

Just as a curiosity, what is your role? Are you a technical guy?

The "not specific to a domain" part is something that is definitely sort of outlandish. My idea does involve that (though it could be narrowed in scope). Perhaps that requirement is just too demanding of any single team.

Thanks for letting me pick your brain!

tom_b
I worked at a previous job for about 1.5 years with the engineer and had subjected her to what must have been a terrible interview back then. Timing worked in my favor - her contract wasn't renewed by the company she was working at when I got permission to hire two contractors. I had been staying in contact and gently recruiting her for a couple of months. She became unexpectedly available, she called me up and we brought her in immediately. I know a handful of great hackers and I've pretty much added her to the group.

I was socially connected to the other person and knew he was smart and committed. I wasn't sure if his tech skills would be too rusty (he had been working on software outsourcing business development, working with overseas dev shops for an app outsourcer here), but I knew he'd work twice as hard as anybody else. Plus, he's the kind of guy who spent time learning Vietnamese when he was working with a Vietnamese software shop remotely. How can you doubt that someone willing to go that far just to make sure that communication is good? It's been a real win with him as well, he's picked up the medical research side of things much better than I have and has more than exceeded what I expected from a technical perspective.

My role is a little weird. I am a tech guy (MS in CS) with a background in SQL hacking for the last few years (lots of low hanging fruit in the enterprise db world) with a side of presentation side stuff. I originally came into my role expecting to do pure db dev work, maybe some lightweight (tool-based) report dev occasionally. But then the two original team members all left the organization and I had to become kind of a de-facto admin/project manager/technical lead.