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You’ll Never Win Without a Good Team

February 11, 2010 - Author: Frederic Kerrest - Founder of SaaSure and former Managing Director of the MIT $100K

“The MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition’s mission is to foster entrepreneurship in the community, help build entrepreneurs and help build companies.”

As I’ve transitioned out of school and back into the real world over the past year, it’s occurred to me that the MIT $100K board should maybe add a last piece to the above sentence: “ […] to help build companies in particular by teaching entrepreneurs how to build teams, and why they should always be selling!” More on the selling piece in a future post, safe to say that you always need to be selling – prospects, vendors, investors, employees, etc. If you’re an MIT student you should not leave Cambridge without taking Howard Anderson and Bill Aulet’s class, 15.387 Technology Sales and Sales Management.

You can’t win the MIT $100K without a great team.

In my experience, teams are what make or break you. It was true in the two seasons of the MIT $100K that I personally experienced. Finalists and winning teams were always cohesive, complimentary, performing teams of engineers and business students, leaders and role players, everyone with a specific position – and the team greater than the sum of its parts.

It was equally true on the MIT $100K organizing teams that I was fortunate enough to be a part of. I was honored to work with some of the brightest, most passionate and most driven entrepreneurial minds at MIT and beyond. We organized a year-long, three contest competition, with literally thousands of student participants, dozens of industry sponsors and 15+ events throughout the year. And we did it all as full-time graduate student volunteers! We worked well together, celebrated each other’s victories and picked each other up when the going got tougher.

In basketball or entrepreneurship, five all-stars do not a team make.

Before you go out and recruit a team of all-star, prima donnas who want the glory but don’t want to do the dirty work, remember the USA Olympic basketball team of 2004? They ended up with the bronze medal and were beaten by supposedly lesser teams like Puerto Rico. Let me repeat that: USA Basketball got a Bronze Medal at the Olympics! Why? Simple: they didn’t play like a team, they played like individual all-stars out for the stats, not the W.

It is a lot more than just putting some all-stars together. It’s about cohesion, culture, leadership and roles. I’m learning this myself all over again at SaaSure, my new enterprise Software-as-a-Service company (http://www.saasure.com). In our case, we quickly learned that all-star coders might write better software in isolation, but if no one wants to work with them they won’t do you much good. Just like in basketball, enterprise software is built as the sum of parts, and if those parts don’t integrate well together, you’ll be going nowhere fast.

Teamwork starts at the top – you must lead by example.

VCs say that they invest first in markets, second in teams and third in products.
As an enterprise software guy, the future in my industry is clearly is cloud computing, so when I was looking to start my next company my direction was an easy choice. But as any VC will also tell you, it’s very hard to be a solo entrepreneur. So when my co-founder Todd McKinnon and I started talking about working together, we quickly dug into “how we’re going to functionally work together.” Hard conversations to be sure, but a necessary task if you want to build a world-class company!

Now that we’re off and running, with our first paying customers going live, not a day goes by here at SaaSure where we don’t think about how lucky we are to have such a great team: Todd runs product and engineering, with a fantastic core group of engineers, and I am focused on customers and operations. Our first hires were key and we spent a lot of our time interviewing candidates and eventually honed in on the right teammates. After a strenuous, lengthy and detailed process of interviews and coding tests, we started all engineers off on a 2-month contractor agreement to make sure that it’s the right fit in terms of culture, vision, work ethic, etc. We want to make sure that “we really like each other before getting married” to put it simply.

Everyone’s process is different and optimized for different situations. At Salesforce.com we often talked about the “double beer test”. After all the credentials had been checked and interviews passed, the hiring team would get together and ask whether a. you’d invite the candidate out for a beer, and b. if they accepted, would you be happy to have them along. At the end of the day, as an entrepreneur at a startup you’re going to spend a lot of time with your colleagues – more than with your wife and children most likely, for weeks or months on end – so make sure you all like each other. As an old sales manager of mine used to say, “we win together, so don’t fail alone!”

Frederic Kerrest is passionate about enterprise technology and has spent the last 12 years helping companies improve their operations by embracing software solutions. In early 2009, Frederic co-founded SaaSure with the vision of empowering businesses to transform their web applications into an intelligent, integrated Cloud Area Network™.

From 2007 to 2009, Frederic attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management where he was the 2008 MIT Patrick J. McGovern, Jr. Entrepreneurship Award recipient and Managing Director of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.

Frederic earned a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University and an MBA in Entrepreneurship & Innovation from the MIT Sloan School of Management.