What's up everyone this is Alex Lieberman co founder and executive chairman of morning brew welcome back to founders journal my personal audio diary where I give you the business builder the tools you need to think better in order to build better whether that's building a business a team or new product in today's classic episode which was originally released on November 8th 2021 I talk about the most important thing to get right as a startup founder let's hop into it

so with any startup and any company for that matter there are three key elements that make every company similar the market the product and the team and what I want to talk about is what an exceptional team product and market look like and which is most important to get right with any early stage company

I also want to first say that this episode was inspired by a 2007 blog post by Mark Andreessen who's one of the greatest startup investors of all time so if you want more background on what I'm talking about I've linked to the original post let's start with a great startup team what is a great startup team very simply it is a team that is comprised of founders senior leadership and key people who have the skills and chemistry necessary

to accomplish the vision of the startup full stop and so when you talk about something like founder market fit this is generally what it's referring to how well does the founding team fit the opportunity that the team is going after

now once we've talked about great team we can talk about great product and a great product is all about asking is the product great in the eyes of the beholder which means the customer simply how impressive is the product to the customer and how much better is the product for the customer then their alternative choice

so let's use a real example how much better was the iPhone or the personal computer or the peloton or Netflix when they got into streaming then the alternative we're talking 10x better maybe 100x better and then finally you have a great market and a great market is one in which

there are many hungry customers for your startups product and the rate at which that number of hungry customers is growing is very very fast a great market is a big passionate market that's getting even bigger quickly so now I have a question for you

if you want to maximize the probability of a startup success and you can only optimize for one thing team product and market which one are you choosing I'm going to pause and let you think about it.

Now once you've locked in your answer in your head email me with what you chose and why just Alex at Morning Brew.com I want to hear what your choice is now let me tell you how I think about it and how my thinking has evolved over time especially after reading Mark Andreessen's post for the longest time I believed the most important component of a startup is its team hands down

the quality of your product is only as good as your team so at Morning Brew if we didn't have amazing writers we wouldn't have had a differentiated product that now millions of people read

and on top of that your ability to learn and adjust is only as good as your team why do Amazon and Google and Netflix continue to dominate in their respective industries because they have the most talented people in the world

I still believe that team is absolutely vital but I've recently taken a more nuanced approach based on the blog post by Andreessen Mark goes on to say that the most common answer to the question I just asked is team which is the answer I just gave you

and he said it's the most common answer for a few reasons one because team is most in your control as an entrepreneur and you know the most about your team when starting a company you know a little bit about the market you know very little about the product but you know most about the team because you've put together the team

second we've been taught in our culture in American business culture and startup culture to value people and team over everything else

and at the same time we are taught to feel icky if we don't say that people are the most important thing in building a successful startup it's almost frowned upon it's thought of like we're not empathetic leaders if we don't say people are the most important thing

but what Mark argues you know seeing thousands of startups both succeed and fail that he's invested in and not invested in is that nothing is more important than he startups market

not its team not its product it's market he says a market that fast growing that has a ton of potential customers will pull forward any startup

and you don't have to look for to find evidence of this so last week I spoke to a startup that has created a wallet where you can store your crypto specifically Ethereum and NFTs non-fungible tokens

and they've been working on this company since 2019 but in the last year in 2021 the company has 100xed its user base

this is the definition of a large getting larger market the market cap of Ethereum which is the cryptocurrency that the wallet focuses on has 27xed in the last three years

and the NFT market in the third quarter of this year was 30 times larger than the entire market in all of 2020

now this doesn't take anything away from the amazing entrepreneurs who built this software wallet but simply by serving a need well enough in a market where the number of customers has grown by orders of magnitude

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