1 00:00:01,000 --> 00:00:04,010 - When you think about your founding team, 2 00:00:04,010 --> 00:00:06,070 and you think about your early employees, 3 00:00:06,070 --> 00:00:09,080 experience in the domain that you're operating 4 00:00:09,080 --> 00:00:12,090 is incredibly valuable. 5 00:00:12,090 --> 00:00:15,080 The best entrepreneurs often are scratching their own itch. 6 00:00:15,080 --> 00:00:19,030 They're addressing a problem that they had 7 00:00:19,030 --> 00:00:22,040 in a prior, a prior life, a prior work, 8 00:00:22,040 --> 00:00:24,020 or something that they've run into in the world 9 00:00:24,020 --> 00:00:25,090 that they think just needs to be solved 10 00:00:25,090 --> 00:00:27,090 that they've experienced, 11 00:00:27,090 --> 00:00:29,090 but even if that's not the case, 12 00:00:29,090 --> 00:00:32,060 having people on the team that have a lot of experience 13 00:00:32,060 --> 00:00:35,050 with the product and market that you're going after 14 00:00:35,050 --> 00:00:38,000 is really important. 15 00:00:38,000 --> 00:00:39,080 One of the things that's really useful 16 00:00:39,080 --> 00:00:41,090 when you think about having domain experience 17 00:00:41,090 --> 00:00:44,060 is not just knowing what works, 18 00:00:44,060 --> 00:00:47,020 but also knowing what doesn't work, 19 00:00:47,020 --> 00:00:48,090 and this is often overlooked, I think, 20 00:00:48,090 --> 00:00:50,060 especially in start-ups, 21 00:00:50,060 --> 00:00:53,030 is that navigating towards things that are going to have 22 00:00:53,030 --> 00:00:55,060 a higher probability of success 23 00:00:55,060 --> 00:00:59,040 often means incorporating things that didn't work 24 00:00:59,040 --> 00:01:01,060 in other experiences into that. 25 00:01:01,060 --> 00:01:03,070 Now that doesn't mean that you should fall into the trap 26 00:01:03,070 --> 00:01:05,000 of, well that didn't work for them. 27 00:01:05,000 --> 00:01:07,000 Therefore, it's not going to work for us, 28 00:01:07,000 --> 00:01:09,030 but you also shouldn't fall into the other trap, 29 00:01:09,030 --> 00:01:11,020 which is, well that didn't work for them, 30 00:01:11,020 --> 00:01:13,050 but we're going to figure out how to make it work, 31 00:01:13,050 --> 00:01:16,080 and that domain experience really helps you synthesize that 32 00:01:16,080 --> 00:01:19,020 because on the surface, it's going to be easy to see, 33 00:01:19,020 --> 00:01:20,040 oh well, you know. 34 00:01:20,040 --> 00:01:23,010 That company tried to launch a product like that. 35 00:01:23,010 --> 00:01:24,090 I don't know anything about what happened over there, 36 00:01:24,090 --> 00:01:27,090 but, you know, we're going to go do it right this time. 37 00:01:27,090 --> 00:01:29,020 It's easy to assert, 38 00:01:29,020 --> 00:01:32,020 but it's really hard to build that on top of experience. 39 00:01:32,020 --> 00:01:34,080 So finding people who have that kind of experience 40 00:01:34,080 --> 00:01:36,060 is really useful. 41 00:01:36,060 --> 00:01:40,000 By the way, the domain might not just be around the product 42 00:01:40,000 --> 00:01:42,020 but around how the product is built, 43 00:01:42,020 --> 00:01:45,000 around how the customers are serviced. 44 00:01:45,000 --> 00:01:48,060 Think about, for example, a physical hardware product. 45 00:01:48,060 --> 00:01:50,080 If you have nobody on your team that's ever built 46 00:01:50,080 --> 00:01:52,080 a physical hardware product before, 47 00:01:52,080 --> 00:01:55,000 there's going to be a long list of things that they just, 48 00:01:55,000 --> 00:01:55,090 your team doesn't know anything about. 49 00:01:55,090 --> 00:01:59,010 They don't know how to pick a contract manufacturer, 50 00:01:59,010 --> 00:02:01,040 don't know how to deal with a supply chain, 51 00:02:01,040 --> 00:02:03,050 don't know how to deal with sort of the dynamics 52 00:02:03,050 --> 00:02:05,040 around purchasing and shipping products 53 00:02:05,040 --> 00:02:09,060 from the manufacturer to a distributor to the end user. 54 00:02:09,060 --> 00:02:11,050 Even having one person on the team 55 00:02:11,050 --> 00:02:13,090 that has domain knowledge around that 56 00:02:13,090 --> 00:02:15,030 elevates your understanding 57 00:02:15,030 --> 00:02:18,000 of how to deal with those issues dramatically. 58 00:02:18,000 --> 00:02:20,060 So as you're thinking about how to put the right people 59 00:02:20,060 --> 00:02:21,090 together for your team, 60 00:02:21,090 --> 00:02:24,060 both on the founding team and the early employees, 61 00:02:24,060 --> 00:02:26,020 make sure you're looking for people 62 00:02:26,020 --> 00:02:30,000 that have some domain knowledge as part of the mix.