Why your friends shouldn’t be your co-founders, and other hiring tips

Friends as co-founders may not always work. The team of HBO’s comedy Silicon Valley.

Hiring the right people is easily among the three most important things a startup founder needs to get right if he is serious about his business. The other two are having a scalable product or service, and having the right investors.

Matrix Partner’s David Skok says a hiring crisis can cripple a startup’s abilities to get products built on time. It can also starve them of the talent they need to market and sell those products.

Then of course, the wrong hire can leave a bad taste in the mouth – an experience that gets especially bitter in a small company trying to make it big in the bad world.

This week, at the Matrix Partner office in a tree-lined Bangalore street, managing director Avnish Bajaj and Practo founder Shashank ND chatted about startup challenges and hiring.

Here’s a list of practicable solutions to everyday problems startups face with employees.

The friend problem

Besties need not be co-founders. Photo credit: marusya21111999.

One problem a lot of startup founders face while growing is in suddenly realising that the friend – the one who was the “by-default” co-founder when the business consisted of two laptops and two guys – is not really the right person to build a big company with.

The solution is in cutting the cord at the right time. It is also important to not build a company as a friends and family project.

“Don’t surround yourself with friends. Most founders do that because it is easy, and it makes decision making easy. But that could be dangerous,” Shashank warned.

“I have people in my team who worked very closely with me, but now they are doing something totally different.” Shashank said this ensures fresh ideas keep coming in, the company is free of needless hierarchy, and that the founder does not live in a self-created bubble.

The bad hire problem

Are your workers angry? Photo credit: PourquoiPas.

The growing-too-fast problem

The how-to-keep-them-happy problem