People Picking.

The complexities of early-stage staffing. (If you're running a one-person show, you may think you don't have to worry about the kind of people you're going to pick to join your company - you're only almost off the hook. One of the advantages of working with a team is that you can try to find others with skills you lack. If it is just yourself, you have to figure out how plug the gaps on your own. Can be done of course, but it takes knowing what they are.)

First off, it is really, really hard to do it all on your own, even in the very early stages. Even if you're a super-hero, and can wear a dozen hats (sorry, this kind doesn't get the cool capes) and do everything yourself, you'll find that it just doesn't work. Things take too long, or slip through the cracks. Or, you're busy formulating a square peg for what another set of eyes would have recognized as a round hole. Worst of all, the entrepreneurial spirit starts flagging without others to fan it.

So what kind of people do you pick? Sure, it is good to round out the skill set. But in the very early stages, I think it is almost as important to round out the mind set and the perspectives as well. If you're the one with the everything-is-rosy glasses on, you need someone who is a little more skeptical. If you read a chance headline and see a market trend, you need someone who researches 100 reports to find the numbers before she agrees with you. You need to balance the view.

Do you need someone with experience in the space you're in, or someone with enthusiasm for ditto? Most of the startup gurus push enthusiasm and passion every time. And I agree with them. Though there is a strange disconnect that when you go for funding investors seem to prefer a team with eye-popping resumes, most entrepreneurs would rather have someone's who's all fired up about their venture. I have, in the past, given in to temptation and hired people with great competence but not much emotional involvement, and they didn't last too long. Their vaunted experience didn't make much of an impact either.

Of course, passion alone won't build the company. You need smarts, and not just domain specific smarts like technical skills, but an overall 'quickness of understanding' on top of that. And when you're in the early stage, you definitely can't settle for mediocrity. If someone can't pick up on your idea, doesn't bother doing research about your space, or can't extrapolate on the potential - forget about the stellar resume and top schools, however tempting they may be, that's not who you need now.

There's one other criteria (which surprisingly many experts don't often mention), pick people who mesh with your style, whatever it may be. While the crucible of the startup will meld everyone into one unit to some extent, it is not worth hassling with people who have very divergent approaches to work. If you know you're a micro-manager, you probably also know that you're not going to change anytime soon, so you might as well get folks who can handle that (and you) comfortably. If you're a 'I'll tell you what needs to get done, and you can go away and do it' kind of person, someone who likes the warm fuzzies of discussing and confirming everything up front may be left feeling very lost - and lost is a depressing way to be in a startup.

People who have passion, smarts, compatibility, and complementary perspectives - and the ability to work for peanuts. The perfect startup team.