3 Strategies to Build a Highly Functional Blockchain Startup Team

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.” Michael Jordan

Blockchain technology is already changing the world, but we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the true power of decentralization across finance, governance, healthcare, education, agriculture, retail, and possibly any other industry you can think of. McKinsey lists Blockchain as one of the top 10 tech trends that will shape the coming decade. 

Yet, behind blockchain protocols, cryptocurrencies, DeFi startups, DApps, and DAOs are teams of people working to achieve common goals. And unless those blockchain startup teams function optimally, they may not be able to deliver on the promise of decentralization. 

So distilling the knowledge that I’ve acquired first hand as an entrepreneur and with more than 20 years of leadership experience in operations and marketing across the property, hospitality, and technology sectors; below are three factors I think are most important for building a highly functional blockchain startup team.

1. Determine the hiring needs of your blockchain startup

When building a blockchain startup team, you want to be clear that you are hiring the right people in relation to what skillsets are required to reach the next milestone in your startup journey. People working in startups typically wear multiple hats irrespective of whether they are the founders or employees. Nonetheless, it is important that you identify the core job functions that need to be filled and make sure that you hire someone for those roles; or at the very least, have someone who is responsible for that job function - this resource from Founders Institute provides a great guide to founder roles in a startup.

However, there’s no one-size-fits-all advice on who to hire or when to hire them; you’ll need to make that decision based on your business plan, marketing plan, as well as what the industry standards are per time. For instance, you may only need an engineering team when you are building a proof of concept for your blockchain startup. However, as soon as you open the product up for alpha or beta testing, you need to start thinking beyond the engineering function to design, growth, and community development among others.

I’ve observed that it is easy for technical founders to focus on hiring the best technical talents without giving much thought to non-tech roles. Similarly, non-technical founders could also underestimate how much technical talent is required to build their visions. High-performance startups are made up of complementary teams of builders, organizers, and sellers; sometimes, the builders could also be the sellers - the most important thing is that you should not build at the expense of selling, or sell at the expense of building. 

Competitor research is an especially valuable way to determine what team members you need in your blockchain startup. If the customers of your competitors are complaining about a lack of customer/tech support, it might be an opportunity for you to build your competitive advantage with a rockstar customer/tech support team.

At Precog Finance we have a heavy emphasis on innovation. Innovation in tech, innovation in marketing, innovation in collaboration and ideation. To ensure we have a well mapped out team, I work closely with the department leads to build a detailed roadmap, and forecast the labour requirements needed to achieve the highest level of project success.

2. Find and evaluate talent for competence, character, and culture-fit

Once you’ve determined who you need to hire on your team, the next line of action is finding, evaluating, and hiring them. In finding the right talent, I have found LinkedIn and Twitter to be incredibly useful resources. A simple post or tweet about the mission we want to accomplish with the startup and what people we need to join us often yields tons of connection requests, messages, and recommendations that provide a larger pool of candidates. 

You should also leverage your network of friends, fellow entrepreneurs, and investors to get recommendations on potential candidates. And then, there are tons of general and industry-specific job boards where you can post your openings. If you’ve already shipped your product/service, your community of users might yield some great candidates, especially for community education, advocacy, and management. I’ve always found that candidates that are referred from existing networks usually produce higher quality candidates. Interestingly, it works both ways because the employer can have more trust in the character of the candidate referred from a trusted contact, and also, the candidate can trust that they will be joining a great company when coming through referrals.  

As a startup entrepreneur, you probably won’t have a dedicated HR team yet, but even if you have someone else helping with the hiring process; it would still be in your best interest to get involved, at least in the evaluation process. Depending on what roles you are filling, you may have the competence to conduct the evaluation process, leverage your network for subject-matter experts who can assist you, or completely outsource the hiring process. 

Competence is important when hiring talent, but similarly important is the need to ensure character and culture fit for cohesive team dynamics. The founders of blockchain startups alongside the very first set of hires often shape the culture of the startup, and they pass along the culture to subsequent employees down the line. Hence, if you fail to hire for a culture fit, it might be harder to build a cohesive culture within your organization as it grows. 

However, while hiring for a culture fit, you need to be careful that you don’t mistake culture fit for bland homogeneity. Early in the days of Google, Page and Brin reportedly only hired candidates whose elite educational background mirrored theirs in terms of graduating from Ivy League schools, SAT scores, and CGPA. However, Google’s People Operations team did some serious data crunching, and the results suggest that the best hires aren’t necessarily Ivy league graduates. Building a diverse team of people from different backgrounds could infuse your startup with the richness of multicultural experiences that widens the appeal of your product/service. At Precog Finance I have built a talented global and remote team, each from diverse backgrounds and life experiences. More importantly each individual is fiercely passionate, incredibly self motivated, and deeply forward thinking.

3. Manage the team for high performance 

After hiring the right people, the next course of action is providing them with excellent management that empowers them to do their best work. You’ll need to figure out your management style - I often advise gravitating towards a democratic leadership style and avoiding being autocratic or laissez-faire. 

Another important part of the management function is to create an atmosphere in which your employees don’t see themselves as working for a paycheck; but rather, as contributing to the success of an important mission. A few years ago, I was reading a Harvard Business Review article in which Dr. Christine M. Riordan, an internationally recognized expert on leadership, discussed some studies that explore the close bonds among soldiers and how those bonds are formed. The main factor behind the close bond among soldiers is that they “believe in the purpose of the mission, rely on each other, and share the good and the bad as a team”.  

Likewise, you should be mentally prepared for conflict as your team goes through the forming, storming, norming, and performing stages of group development. Your startup team won’t become highly functional straight out of the gate and it will take some time for new team members to understand the team’s purpose, personality differences, and intra-team relationships.

Every member of your team should feel valued, respected, supported, and empowered. Hence, your team members should have a sense of autonomy in delivering on their roles once you’ve done a good job of hiring the right people and communicating what needs to be done.