Startup founding teams: From pals to professionalization

The life of a startup founder is no picnic. It can be extremely stressful, demanding, and hard. To create a successful startup is a Herculean undertaking that takes guts, passion, and perseverance. Becoming a startup entrepreneur often implies a rigorous break with one's past, the need to acquire new business skills, and the challenge of facing a highly uncertain future. It often involves a total reorganization of one's private life. Startup founders must cope with painful mistakes, wrong judgments, and lacking expertise. Most new venture entrepreneurs cannot fall back on previous experiences, so they cannot rely on availability heuristics. They know that most startups fail, and financial worries dominate their daily concerns. Startup founders must secure company funding, develop the basic startup idea and turn it into an innovative and competitive product, come up with a solid product/market fit, effectively profile its customer segment, define a convincing marketing strategy, and take timely pivoting decisions. Furthermore, founders need to invest in the professionalization of their new business venture: recruit and coach employees, structure the organization, budget its activities, control the cash flow, and create an energetic and positive business culture. They have to survive in an ultra-competitive market with numerous rivaling businesses that all aim high and all want to have their share of the pie. Startups, in short, are vulnerable ventures that face a multitude of barriers and dilemmas. It takes a lot of mental strength to maneuver new ventures through this early business stage. Research has shown that the first two to three years of a firm's life cycle are the most risky and precarious episode and determine the startup's survival chances.1 On top of all these tough hurdles, our non-US sample of startup pioneers had to deal with extra constraints as they moved to Silicon Valley from abroad and had to adjust to a new environment, to a new culture, and to new rules. Moreover, they had to build new networks and a new customer portfolio. And did so mostly from scratch.

Startup entrepreneurs need to operate strategically at different levels and at different playing fields. Startup management is like simultaneous chess. Beginning a new business on your own, without co-founders, is usually not a good idea as it generates many difficulties.