Early-Stage Startups Need Generalists

Early stage, this is where I am. This is where we see most of our companies. It's probably less than 20 people on the team. There's not necessarily product market fit. Here it's really great if you're a generalist, if you're enthusiastic about the product and the company, and you're comfortable with extreme ambiguity. Again, you do not know what you're doing day in and day out. You have a general sense of what the goals are, but things are changing really fast, and so this needs to be something you're okay with. The super skill here is being a jack of all trades because you actually can be the operations person and the customer service person and the marketing person because there's only 5 people on your team. The hard part is over time you have people join the team that take over parts of those responsibilities, and so you might feel a little bit frustrated that everyone's changing the rules of the game and now you don't know what your job is. So there's some drawbacks there. Ask me questions if you have deeper questions. The drawbacks are the moving targets, the lack of formal training. I would say the small network is a really important one. People don't think about. So when I went to Bain, there's 20 people in my own class, 300 people in the office, thousands of people worldwide. I know a lot of people within my network now. If you join a class of 5 in a startup company, there's 4 other people that know you. So that's what you have as your network. And I think that it is very different. If it's the right 4 people, you're okay. But if it's not the right 4 people and you don't like each other, It's not okay. It's really hard. And so I said the right timing here is when you're passionate about the idea and the team, because you need that passion to fuel you forward.