Over the years, I’ve been part of three different startup teams. None of those ventures ultimately succeeded, but each failure taught me something different about building companies and working with founding teams.
The first experience stands out the most. Let me share that with you.
It actually started off strong. A few of us met at a startup meetup and decided to participate in a startup competition. We came up with an idea, built a rough concept in about 72 hours, and ended up placing 3rd in the competition.
There were seven of us in total. After the event, we decided to keep working on the idea and try to turn it into a real company. I was the technical person on the team, so I started building the product.
But pretty quickly, I started noticing cracks in the team dynamics.
Small factions began forming inside the group. Instead of working as one team, people started aligning into smaller groups. Couple of month in, one group effectively pushed the other group out. The main point of conflict was who would become the CEO and controlled startup ownership, and that created a lot of tension.
After that, things slowly unraveled. People started leaving one by one until eventually there were just three of us left.
Despite all of this, I kept working on the product. Over the course of about a year, I probably put in 300–400 hours building the technology.
In the end, the remaining two founders decided to remove me from the project.
The startup eventually imploded and nothing really came of it.
At one point they tried to buy the technology I had built. I refused at the time. Looking back, that was probably dumb and immature on my part. I should have just sold the code and walked away.
What do you think I should have done differently?
Have you ever seen teams fall apart like this?
What are your experiences working in startup teams?
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