Smells Like Team Spirit: Startups as a Band

This post is the written version of my breakout session, Smells Like Team Spirit: Startups as a Band, at the Northeast Entrepreneurship Summit, hosted by The Eleven Society, on Sunday, November 15.

I’m also judging the startup competition when eleven schools pitch at the summit. The session is intentionally small and informal: a conversation for liberal arts undergrads from NESCAC schools, not a lecture. More on The Eleven Society.

Startup as a Band

You have ⚪ solo startups where one person tries to fill all roles and play all instruments.

You have ▬ duos where one person does the business and the other the technology.

You have core founder ▲ groups where each has its function, but together they deliver the vision.

A 🔲 quartet gives you more capacity to scale. You can balance more responsibilities, ideate more products or features simultaneously, or engage with customers and investors in more ways so strategic growth becomes more feasible.

There is no perfect lineup. There is only the lineup you choose, and the people you choose to be in it with.

You’re not picking a co-founder for the launch. You’re picking the person you’ll be in a van with for the next five or ten years.

That’s the test. Not “Can we build this?” but “Do I want to be on the road with this person when it gets hard?”

Look for complementary skills, shared values, clear roles, and trust. Not identical tastes. Shared standards. You want someone who will argue with you about the work and still have your back.

Ask yourself:

• Would I want this person in the room when something goes wrong?
• Can we divide the work without keeping score?
• Do we agree on what we’re optimizing for?
• Can we disagree without making it personal?

Who Starts Up Startups?

Can you start a company alone? Yes. Plenty of people do. But you’re playing every instrument. You’re the songwriter, the salesperson, the therapist, the CFO. There’s no one to catch the mistake, no one to tell you the truth, no one to share the load.

The risk isn’t just burnout. It’s blind spots. A solo founder can move fast and still build the wrong thing very efficiently.

Every band needs a dreamer, a technologist, and an entrepreneur. The trick is getting them in the same room.

Some people thrive solo. If that’s you, build a band around you: advisors, early employees, a peer group. You don’t have to be a duo to have a band. But you do need people who will tell you when the song is bad.

Startups are hard. You can’t do everything alone. Finding the right team and having clear roles and responsibilities is key to success.

Talent & Creativity Become a Business

The skills that keep a band together are liberal arts skills: empathy, communication, reading people, understanding context, making an argument, changing your mind. You don’t need to be the best musician in the room. You need to know how to play with other people.

Every startup needs that creative spark and the talent to deliver.

Students sometimes assume entrepreneurship is for someone else. It isn’t. You don’t need to invent the technology. You need to find a problem, a point of view, and a band.

You’ve spent years learning how to think across disciplines, ask better questions, and work with people who see the world differently. Those are the skills that keep a band together when the tour gets long.

What Kind of Band Is Your Startup?

Roles matter. In a band, someone plays drums, someone plays bass, someone writes the songs. The way those roles divide changes with the lineup.

Who’s in the van?

The trio. Three founders, three roles. Fast to decide, close to the work, and easy to keep aligned.

The quartet. Four founders, more capacity. More ground covered, and more relationships to manage.

In a startup, someone owns the product, someone owns the customer, someone owns the money. Ambiguity is where resentment grows.

Bands Thrive on Energy, Grow with Structure, and Compound Success

Startups are a roadshow. Fundraising is a roadshow. Sales is a roadshow. You travel, pitch, repeat yourself, sleep badly, and miss the people you love.

And the pressure doesn’t stop when you make it. It changes shape. After the raise, there’s money in the bank — and a board to answer to, a hiring plan to hit, and payroll that’s real now. After PMF, the customers arrive all at once, and they want uptime, support, security reviews, and the roadmap. The club tour becomes an arena tour, and the songs you wrote for forty people have to fill a stadium.

This is when bands break up. Not on the way up — at the top. The Beatles ended at their peak: touring had become impossible, the business had become complicated, and they disagreed about what came next.

Startups aren’t just ideas – they are businesses. And businesses become complex… fast.

Find your ICP. Find PMF. Find great design partners and people to help you on the way.

That complexity and overhead also present themselves when choosing the technology, architecture, and services needed to deliver on a startup’s vision. What do I use? Who do I trust? Can I afford them? Am I betting on the right partner? That slows a startup down.

That’s why the team matters more than the stack or the deck. The people who can pick up the parts you can’t carry.

Chaos is inevitable. Your team will get you through.

Conflict is normal. Arguments are going to happen. The question is not whether you’ll fight. It’s whether you can fight well.

Bands break up over money, ego, direction, and exhaustion. Startups do too.

The Pixies broke up in 1993 over ego and direction: Black Francis and Kim Deal could no longer share the band. Deal went off, formed the Breeders, and landed a bigger American hit with “Cannonball” than the Pixies ever had. Even the song this post is named after is a Pixies rip-off — Kurt Cobain wrote “Smells Like Teen Spirit” trying to copy them. A breakup is not always the end of the music.

Fight about the work, not the person. Say the thing directly. Assume good intent. Keep decision rights clear. Apologize when you’re wrong. Don’t keep score. Revisit the setlist.

U2 went to Berlin in 1991 to record Achtung Baby and nearly split: Bono and The Edge wanted to tear the old band down and start over, while Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton thought they were losing the plot. They fought about the music, kept decision rights clear, and came home with their boldest record — and “One,” a song about holding together, born from the sessions that nearly split them.

Radiohead nearly came apart after OK Computer, when Thom Yorke was done with guitars and almost done with the band. Instead of breaking up, they changed how they worked — swapped instruments, rotated roles, learned to make electronic music together — and Kid A went to No. 1 with no singles and no videos.

A little chaos can channel creative energy into great things, including many of the best innovations.

The trick is keeping the chaos from becoming the business.

WANTED: Drummer. Tech Co-Founder. Dreamer.

Startups are hard. The road is long. The pressure is real. You will have arguments. You may have a bad gig.

The goal is not to avoid any of that. The goal is to choose the people you want to go through it with.

Pick people you’d want to be on the road with for the next five or ten years. Then don’t break up over one poor performance.

The Beatles let drummer Pete Best go just before they broke big and won the world with Ringo. Nirvana went through five drummers in three years until Dave Grohl — Nevermind followed within the year. The lineup you launch with is not always the lineup you win with — and the van will tell you.

You don’t have to do it alone. And if you find the right four, you can find your Ringo.

The End.

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