Why Is the Team the Most Important Factor in Startup Success?

People who surround themselves with others and work in a team, guided by shared beliefs, goals, and metrics, create success. Successful teams consist of partners—people who can share each other's thoughts, hear their ideas, and listen.

How to "fit in" with a team

New teams should have failures under their belts. Why?

I've seen many startup teams that are too optimistic about their game. Optimism is a critical factor in entrepreneurship; without positive thoughts about the future, it would be hard to stay motivated and keep your spirits up when facing uncertainty.

Excessive optimism shows up when people get too attached to the game they're creating. This often blinds them. The truth is, you know nothing until you test the product in the market and get some data. The sooner a team faces the situation where they need to kill their first game, the better they'll align their optimism and motivation for the long term. They can say:

"Hey, we don't know which of our game ideas will succeed, but we can improve our odds by getting smarter and not loving our games too much."

If several people on the team go through the process of killing games, the more benefit the group gets, becoming battle-hardened.

Discipline, consistency, and long-term thinking

Getting a team to work well takes time. That's why teams that have already worked together become great startups.

One of the key ingredients is discipline. To achieve discipline, I believe you need to take the following steps:

• A: Define the company mission, which sounds like: "Why does your company exist? Why are we needed in the gaming world?"
• B: Together with the whole team, discuss all aspects related to the mission.
• C: Create an action plan, define roles and responsibilities, and establish an accountability system.

Create goals and define measurable outcomes. Discuss the timelines you'll operate within.

When you have discipline, you can unwaveringly repeat: "Our mission is X, and it is of paramount importance. We will discuss every issue through the lens of achieving our mission. We will be disciplined in saying what things are important and what are not."

When any issue comes up, you can always ask: "How and why does this enable us to achieve our mission?" That way, you pick your battles and pick the right ones. Consistency creates results in the long term. Managing, working, and growing a gaming company means knowing when to turn the wheel to steer toward the right path.

In the long term, the team will start to suppress new abilities and ideas. These ideas won't appear on their own; it's an organic process where highly skilled individuals generate ideas together with other highly skilled individuals."

Integrity

The last thing I want to say about building strong gaming teams is to bring in people with high integrity. They are not only honest people with strong moral principles. They also listen to others and absorb what they say.

They don't need to answer or rebut the speaker on the spot, but they do the work of gathering information that could be useful. Eventually, it's their turn to speak, and others in the room with high integrity will listen.