Definition (1):
A founding team is referred to as a team of individuals chosen to start a new venture; has an advantage over firms started by an individual because a team can give more talent, ideas, resources, and required contacts to a start-up than can a sole entrepreneur.
Definition (2):
An ideal founding team is one of the most important elements for a successful new venture. It is more important than a brilliant idea or a great model. Even a great idea in a dysfunctional team’s hands will fail. On the other hand, a brilliant team can begin with a bad concept or idea and finally reach the correct business model.
A founding team should be kept as small as possible. Two members are good because it helps you distributing the essential workload and the trust level is high. Three members allow more diversity of specialized roles and skills but can introduce more possibilities of unnecessary drama. Four members mean theoretically getting more work completed, but the trust level is usually lower and even, politics may start playing its role.
An ideal founding team should have the following four elements:
- Mutual trust: This is one of the most crucial elements of any team. The partners should have full trust in one another.
- Complete Confidence in one another: This indicates complete confidence in the abilities and skills of one another for successfully performing the respective roles.
- Shared motive and success objectives: It is best to establish a shared motive and success objectives for the business early.
- Symmetric commitment level: An asymmetric commitment level means when one of the members is completely committed to the new business venture, functioning full-time for moving it forward, with no or minimal salary, but another member is performing part-time and still continuing his regular job, with benefits and full salary. This situation cannot be expected and several start-ups failed because of this issue. So, the commitment level should be symmetric.