Culture

With Superbowl XLVIII just around the corner, expect plenty of talk in the days ahead about what makes a great team. And if our Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL) seminar series is any indication, the topic of team building is at top of mind in the high-tech field as well. Many of our recent ETL speakers emphasized that, above all else, a business’s success begins with a great team. Cyriac Roeding, co-founder and CEO of the retail-rewards app shopkick, actually identified four distinct characteristics that lead to a great team: each member possessing “individual brilliance,” shared and inflexible values, extreme diversity and a vision that they all believe in. Roeding, who spoke at Stanford in October 2013, explains why these are the essential ingredients for a great team, and how they fit together. Of course, discussion around a given topic wouldn’t be very robust without some difference of opinion. In her ETL talk on Nov. 20, 2013, Sharon Vosmek cited research by Thomas Malone — a renowned professor of management at MIT — who found that the I.Q. of individual members of a group had no correlation to the group’s collective intelligence. “So it didn’t matter how smart the people you put together, it did not then result in a smarter team,” said Vosmek, CEO of Astia, an organization that supports entrepreneurs through a global network of investors, innovators and industry leaders. Instead, the research that Vosmek praised concluded that the factors that really increase group intelligence on teams were 1) the social perceptiveness of the team members, 2) the evenness of conversation among them and 3) the proportion of women on the team. In his ETL talk, also last November, Mike Olson mentioned diversity and intelligence as traits that he looks for when hiring new employees at Cloudera — a powerful and integrated “big data” platform that allows customers to store, process and analyze various types and formats of data. Olson co-founded and serves as chief strategy officer for Cloudera. And as bluntly as he could, he said all that really matters is the quality of the people in the organization. “Everything that we can claim as a success ties to the fact that we have recruited the world’s best team,” he said. It’s also vital for companies to bring on the best and the brightest right at the start, according to Olson, because it perpetuates excellence. “If you don’t do that early, it’s impossible to change it,” he said. “The reason is, really great people gravitationally attract really great people.”

“Regardless of whether it’s a classroom or the offices of a billion-dollar company, space is something to think of as an instrument for innovation and collaboration,” Stanford d.school founder David Kelley says in the foreword for make space. “Space is a valuable tool that can help you create deep and meaningful collaborations in your work and life.” The d.school — formally, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford — teaches design thinking to graduate students in what many would consider a maker’s paradise in the middle of campus. The book make space chronicles the d.school’s experiences in designing its interior features, instructing readers how to replicate its unconventional furnishings and, just maybe, its extremely creative atmosphere. We at STVP think a lot about space, too. Currently, our office is quite open, and everything in it — from the desks and chairs to the storage shelves — are movable. Over the summer, we plan to reconfigure our space in a way that will both continue to foster staff interaction and designate areas for the various activities that take place throughout the year. We’ll share before-and-after photos later this summer on Facebook and Twitter. So be sure to follow us! Staying Hungry and Humble In the video clip below, Facebook’s engineering director, Jocelyn Goldfein, tells STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig about the unfinished ceilings, bare concrete floors and bold phrases — such as “Move Fast and Break Things” and “Fail Harder” — written all over the walls of the company’s headquarters. “The entire environment is meant to keep you from feeling complacent, or comfortable, or like we’ve won,” Goldfein explained during her May 22 Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders talk. “We never want to feel like we’ve won. We always want to feel pretty hungry.” Being Out in the Open In this clip, Spotify Co-Founder Daniel Ek shares how he manages to lead a growing company with a workforce distributed on multiple continents. “I don’t think the physical experience can be replaced yet,” says Ek, who admits to traveling extensively and sitting out in the open to encourage conversations in his company’s offices. Skipping Extravagance In this conversation with entrepreneur Steve Blank, inDinero Co-Founder Jessica Mah offers a humorous story about the dangers of young startups moving into fancy office spaces. She described how one of the luxuries in hers included a hot tub — a particularly amusing admission to Blank, who invested in inDinero. But Mah went on to say how inDinero then moved much closer to home: into an apartment down the hall from her own unit. “It’s cheaper,” she said. “Everyone’s in a small room together. So you really feel like you’re in it together.”

Just as personal relationships can be a juicy topic of conversation, a rich area to explore in entrepreneurship is the dynamics between co-founders. Indeed, a recent article on Mashable compared the quest for a business co-founder to “choosing who you want to marry.” What holds true for both types of partnerships is the advice — often, wearily given — “It isn’t for everyone.” On that note, here are three videos that feature varying perspectives on the perception and value of working with co-founders. “Yin-Yang” Relationship In the video clip below, Instagram Co-Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger describe their working relationship. Both Systrom and Krieger explain the stages of their relationship, and how the partnership respects each other’s areas of specialty, while also providing a tremendous opportunity to sound out ideas. Because of this benefit, Systrom explains the co-founder relationship needs to be cherished. Krieger also believes honest and direct communication of expectations can prevent the relationship from wearing down over time. Real-time Sanity Check In this clip, entrepreneur Steve Blank asks inDinero Co-founder Jessica Mah about the value of having a co-founder. Mah explains that fellow co-founder Andy Su provides a contrarian opinion to her own, which serves as an invaluable “real-time sanity check” when it comes to making critical decisions. Co-Founder Mythology Yet, while many legendary Silicon Valley companies were founded by teams of two, partnerships aren’t without their problems, venture capitalist Mark Suster asserts in the clip below. Disagreements arise based on personal life changes, business strategies and roles within the company. And yes, the marriage metaphor comes up again: Suster prefers to avoid playing the role of “marriage counselor” between drifting co-founders by instead working with a strong, individual entrepreneur.