The team #1
There we were, in mid-May, me and Carlos Neto, my colleague in the tech trench for years, refining our plan to take over the world (which, in our case, this time, is to change the way the market buys and sells agricultural commodities).
Like any obsessive person, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a crazy plan in my head. And this is a plan with many details: Agriculture is already complex, and trading is the most complex part of it.
We’ve been there for over an hour, with the board full of boxes and arrows and we’re already half lost with so much to execute, when Carlos says:
‘Luiz, you want to rob the bank, but first you need to put a team together’.
It’s a clear reference to that formula in movies where the protagonist spends half of the script finding people with complementary skills to make an unlikely partnership and the second half doing something impossible (in many scripts, it’s robbing a bank). If you can’t remember, there are several out there, like Seven Eleven.
The team (or gang) will need a henchman or two, the guy who opens the vault, the escape driver, the hacker (or, in older variants, a problem solver), the guy with sophisticated guns, the social engineering specialist, and so on.
To create a tech business, you need a starting team, team 1.
Informally, the tech world calls these people ‘team 1’. Then you think: so there is a ‘team 2’? Yes sir: The ‘team 2’ is the leadership that we see in the scale ups: the ‘Cx0’. People focused on developing talent, directing teams’ efforts and strategies in a business that triples in size every year.
Although ‘Team 2’ is formed, in part, by people who came from ‘Team 1’ (I’ve written about this before), the dynamic is completely different.
While the former lead platoons of stormtroopers and jedi in full-scale frontal planetary attacks, the latter are a handful of jedi and padawan infiltrated on that suicide mission to save the entire world. (I know, I know… another star wars fan… forgive me those who aren’t….)
The team to rob the bank is a team of doers, there is no space for titles, positions and meetings longer than 10 minutes. They’ve got each other’s backs, but each one will need to carry their weight, they’re already there doing the impossible, you can’t carry anyone. There isn’t much room for amateurism: it’s a chain, if a link loosens, everyone’s effort is lost.
It seems that the dynamics of a team with people that can be counted on both hands, struggling to fix a big problem, is such a common pattern in our history as humans, that we were kind of programmed to be interested in it. There is a natural curiosity that draws us to these narratives (cleverly captured by the screenwriters).
The book, ‘the culture code’, which, in my opinion, should be on the shelf of any startup HR, speaks brilliantly about the dynamics of these teams. Another, the ‘billion dollar coach’, also tackles the same theme.
By now, you might be starting to wonder what a ‘Team 1’ is like creating a tech company from scratch. HBO’s ‘startup’ series shows a great version, but I’ll risk describing mine here.
Remember that, in the real world, two or more roles can be rolled into one person, or two people can be combined to form a role. We are talking about archetypes here, not a cake recipe.
Team to rob the bank to make a tech company
The guy with the vision: the guy with the plan in mind. They are always putting the pieces together. They may seem a little distant when things are moving forward, but when you realize it’s all going wrong, the plan for the counterattack is already in their hands. When you look at the team, they are the ones that look kind of crazy, sometimes it’s hard to understand what they are talking about.
The hustler: the champion of charisma, from their hand will come the most important partnerships and the first customers. They are street-smarts. They are also a powerhouse, when everyone’s tired, they’ll still be paddling.
The explorer: the sharpest mind on the team. If you leave the explorer alone in the jungle, the next day you will find a little house and a fire, in the following week, a square and a church. They are versatile, generalist, an effective learner and super analytical. The explorer is the company’s main learning channel.
The evangelist: the storyteller. On a team of nerds, They are the only ones who think in narratives, not systems. For some reason, everyone starts repeating what they say, and how they say it. They have an eye for the details: they are going to complain about the way the company logo was printed on the mug, the design of the sales collateral. When the evangelist explains, it seems that everything starts to make more sense.
The builder: those are people with their sleeves rolled up and the hammer in their hand, because someone needs to put the warhorse on the road. A practical person who needs to transform reality and has no time for frills. Builders are fans of the master/apprentice model (I won’t say Jedi/Padawan again so I don’t piss you off). They are excellent talented developers and enjoy forming teams. Some are a bit grumpy.
The organizer: they are the ones who make sure things that already work keep working. They see the company as a tuned machine, with oiled gears: you do not what to be the one who messes up his work. If the explorer is a path opener, the organizer is the road paver. They have hundreds of spreadsheets that no one can understand and they keep increasing the company’s software expense with a bunch of three/four-letter systems (CRM, RMS, BPMS) without which, they say, the company would explode in a week.
The hands on the safe: someone needs to keep their hands on the tap, the cash in the first year is low. This person has no shame in saying ‘no’, they know that there is always a cheaper way to solve the same problem. From their judgment on releasing or holding the expenses, comes the company’s balance between efficiency and speed. He also has a lot of worksheets, but, this time, people can understand them. They are the preferred channel for investor dialogue.
The captain: he is the one who sets the momentum, the rhythm. This person is in a rush. They will help everyone coordinate their efforts to realize the vision they have in common. One way or another, everyone respects him. There will be support for difficult conversations and emotional support to get out of crises.
The elder: this person, in practice, is not part of the team. They can be someone from the board, a partner, or simply someone where the team will seek the collective knowledge of many people who have gone through this journey in the past. The old man has a broad repertoire that only his years in the trenches can provide, but now he has a lighter vibe.
The apprentices: will be spread out everywhere, learning and being useful, in a way that is only possible in teams like this one.
The examples of team #1 I know, can incorporate all parts of a group of between 8 and 15 people. As I said, people are much more complex than archetypes.
In addition, ‘team 1’ members tend to have a T-shaped profile: they are very good at one thing but do sufficiently well at all the others. So it’s common to see role shifts and adjustments in these teams as they struggle to find the long-awaited product-market-fit.
Finally, imagine this class having a beer at the end of the day? I hope you enjoyed it.
