Hooking up Inside a Stealth Plane

The first problem is: how do you locate team members when you live in the boonies? Being the wuss that I am, I contacted Jason Mendelson over on the blog called "Ask the VC" Jason had a great article a while back titled "Do Venture Capitalists Still Invest In 'Old Folks?'" Their schtick over there is to do Q&A for start-ups, so I figured who better than to ask the question "How do you find a team when you live in the middle of nowhere?"

Jason answered right away:

It’s a tough situation. Ideas, no matter how good they are, need execution and execution means management teams. You sound like you have a handle on this, but I wanted to let you know that I agree with you.

As we’ve written in the blogs, you need two things to make a successful company: an idea and a team. I’ve seen successful companies with “okay” ideas and great teams, but I’ve never seen the opposite. No matter how good the idea is, without a fully built out team, it’s a tough road to hoe.

Gee. Thanks, Jason.

So like every other obstacle, I sat on it for a while and then decided to hit the 'net. I figured some kind of personals ad was what I was looking for. "Lonely inventor seeks like-minded for a mutually rewarding experience"

Once I got the creepy feeling that THAT gave, I started poking around through CraigsList for the first time. I had heard about the site many times, but never tried it out.

Sure enough, there were plenty of ads. "Looking for Partner", "Assistant Needed", "Deaf-mute beauty pageant winner who can work with animals"

And also, there were business ads. Those were pretty cool too.

What I found was that it was like starting over. I have spent several years learning what it takes to make a start-up worth my time: a market, a need, a team, timing, execution intelligence, etc. Most of these guys spent their last few years in bars or at family events saying such wise things as "Hey. I was the guy who thought up this whole singing bass idea in the first place. All we need to do is think up some really, really, really, really cool idea and the money will just come pouring in. How hard could it be?"

Somehow over the last week I've managed to form a team. Or maybe, "lose association of people who talk on the phone from time-to-time" might be a better title. I set the meetings up, I try to track the to-do items, I try to bring some kind of order to the bull session, and mostly nothing gets done. Except we talk on the phone again.

I exaggerate, of course. We are making some progress -- enough that I'm considering asking the group to go into "stealth mode". That's where we keep things to ourselves for a while. It would be really cool if it involved a stealth bomber, but no such luck. It just means you _might_ have an idea that's hot enough to keep your mouth shut about it.

Still. There are lots of problems. Seems like with teams there always are. Part of it probably is the "bar girl" syndrome. Let's say you're single and meet a wonderful girl at a bar and go out a couple of times. She might be great, but pretty soon you're asking yourself "Why am I hooked up with a girl who picks up guys at bars?"

It's like the old Groucho Marx routine: "I wouldn't join a club that would have me as a member"

I'm sure some of the folks both posting ads and responding to them on CL probably feel the same way.

So no, I haven't figured out how to form teams using just the web and web tools, but I just got started working on the problem. Give me a few years, and I'll get it working, for sure. Meanwhile, I gotta get somehow get all of these guys into a stealth plane before our next phone call. Anybody seen that beauty pageant winner?