How to build effective startup team

I believe startups are best built by high agency individuals focussed on a joint goal.

Why? The nature of a startup typically involves:

1. A market opportunity - a problem faced by some set of people that is not being solved at scale.
2. A non-obvious solution - although the founders are typically in a place where the solution seems somewhat obvious to them.

That means often the path to take is not exactly clear and the primary thing that determines a startups success is the rate of experimentation.

Experimentation often involves a combination of figuring out technology, logistics, education, and network. All this requires high agency to find non obvious solutions to a variety of problems to maximise the speed of iteration.

One problem with high agency people is too much exploration. Everyone’s experiments must converge.

So it is a founder’s primary job to communicate clearly what the focal point of the enterprise is. This involves setting clear goals and cutting off experiments that don’t move towards the goal.

Then you get out of the way, keep collecting high agency, keep pruning bad branches and let the controlled chaos play out.

With enough experiments, and some luck you win; If you don’t experiment fast enough or get unlucky you lose.