Growing Your Business

Choosing Cofounders: Maximizing the New Venture’s Human Resources

As we noted in the preceding section, it is considerably harder to “know thyself” than you might at first assume. With a little hard work, however, it is possible to formulate an accurate inventory of your own human capital—what you bring to the new venture in terms of knowledge, skills, experience, and personal characteristics. This, in turn, can help you determine what you need from other people (e.g., cofounders and employees) in terms of these basic dimensions. Once you have drawn a bead on this issue, though, things do not necessarily get simpler, because knowing what you need is no guarantee that you will find it—or that you will recognize it when you do. Superb cofounders ...