It is extremely important to choose the right partners when looking to start a new venture. You must take the time beforehand to make sure you and your partner(s) are fully committed, or your business venture will be destined to fail at some point before you even get started. As we have talked about in class, bad partners are the second largest reason as to why startups fail. For this reason alone, it shows just how important it is to truly choose your team wisely when looking to startup a company.
I believe that there a few key characteristics to look for in your venture partner. Those characteristics include a shared vision, work ethic, and their passion/commitment to the new business you will be starting. There are probably others that you could name, but I believe these are some of the top ones that make a great prospect for a possible business partner. A shared vision is pretty obvious, as you wouldn’t want to partner with someone who isn’t on the same page as you when it comes to the main idea behind the venture. Work ethic and their passion and/or commitment tie together with one another. If the potential candidate doesn’t share at least a similar degree of these aspects, it may result in you having to do more work than you expected down the line. I’ll discuss this a little more in the next paragraph. Building off these, I believe other really important aspects are honesty and accountability. A partner must be able to be held accountable for any agreements that are made and be honest with themselves and you when they aren’t maintaining their end of the stick. We saw and discussed some of these aspects in last weeks case study, as the characters had agreed to terms at the beginning and then one of them had come up with a new proposal, as he had been carrying most of the workload for the company.
I think the biggest thing to discuss when looking to startup a business is attempting to define roles and contributions for each respective partner. When you make this decision at the beginning, this then allows you to then also discuss equity distribution. Tying this together with the characteristics I discussed previously, will allow for partners to come to a reasonable agreement when discussing different terms. Good partners will also be willing to make small sacrifices for the betterment of the business. Honest and accountable partners will also be willing to look back and examine the agreement to be sure that everyone is holding up their ends of the agreement.
As a group, Karol, Todd and I went to the Udder Bar to hang out, eat some ice cream and chat a little bit. We enjoyed our ice cream and talked a little bit about classes and our respective sports. Todd and Karol played some checkers and Todd won’t let Karol forget it. We also to a look at my pictures on the wall, as I appear on the “Udderly Famous” wall they have in their store. While the main point of the team building exercise was to get to know our partners a little bit better, I don’t think the exercise had as much value to our group as it may have others because we already know each other pretty well. There was definitely positive value in us getting ice cream though!
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