I’ve been listening to David Senra’s incredible podcast, “Founders”, and a general principle across every successful entrepreneur is the quality of a team can make or break a company. As Ed Catmull of Pixar succinctly put it: “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”
Investing time and resources in building an exceptional team is perhaps the highest-leverage activity any founder or private investor can focus on. As David Ogilvy: “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But, if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.“