You will make mistakes leading your startup. Everyone does. Each mistake costs you precious runway. Will you make more mistakes than your runway can bear, or will you break through? Every distraction takes your time away from making better decisions. Yet everyone expects your business to magically operate like “a proper company” without the comfort of having teams to take care of accounting, payroll, corporate services, HR, legal and compliance. Back-office work is quite simply a runway eating grind. Then there are the hard-to-execute items like vendor selection, defining the product roadmap, software delivery and go-to-market strategy where you need a bit of luck, careful timing and, most of all, the right team in place to execute successfully. And finally, every new-to-you situation is an opportunity to rise or fall. It is a very thin boundary between success or failure. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a funding event, or the negotiation of a complex commercial agreement, or cementing a strategic partnership – these are all hurdles that you have to find a way to jump over. At these moments your position will always be as the underdog, but access to the right experience and contacts will tip the scales in your favour.
Getting the right people around you
The biggest risk within your control as a start-up founder is to assemble the right management team around you. If you can’t get the right people in the key seats quickly you simply won’t be able to move fast enough. Most VCs will tell you that the first thing they look at once they have decided whether your idea passes the sniff-test is the quality of the leadership team. It’s a war for talent and there simply isn’t enough of it to go around. This is why [Y]our Partners exists. Our mission to find the best way to symbiotically combine your expertise with our own to create a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. With [Y]our Partners your time is spent on what counts. With us, you can bring years of experience to bear on the hardest make-or-break problems you face.
Learn from our mistakes
Each of our partners has many years of experience working with start-ups. We all have a slightly different perspectives and the benefit of battle scars and war stories to share with you. Making mistakes is part of the fun of working at a start-up, but sometimes it really pays not to have to make the same mistakes twice.
