Classic Post Archive

This article previously appeared at OnStartups, HERE Note: This is Part V in the Startup Team Building series. Read Part I HERE, Part II HERE, Part III HERE and Part IV HERE. You may not realize it, but your adVenture’s Core Team, the senior executives who make the key decisions which drive the company’s strategic direction, is akin to a primitive tribe. Primitive tribes and your startup both entail a small number of people banded together to battle an uncaring, hostile world. Like the tribe, your company’s survival is always in question and never guaranteed. Success depends upon everyone pulling together for the common good and striving to accomplish common goals. Everyone’s efforts must initially focus on survival before the tribe can prosper and eventually evolve into a thriving, self-sustaining community.

I began publishing my blog in 2007. For the first couple years, I wrote under the pseudonym Uncle Saul. I was hesitant to use my own name, as I did not want my blog to be perceived as a self-promotional vanity project. By early 2010, I found my stylistic voice and identified my audience of emerging entrepreneurs and thus dropped my penname. In addition, my role as Partner at Rincon Venture Partners provided me with a business reason to invest additional time and effort into my humble blog. Last January, I decided to increase the quality and frequency of my blog entries, with the hope that I would generate a corresponding increase in readership. I was not disappointed.

Note: This is part IV of the four part series. Access part I HERE, part II HERE and part III HERE. Marketers have long known that people are drawn to exclusivity. As discussed in Jedi Mind Tricks, scarcity and fear of loss are powerful principles of persuasion. Students expend small fortunes of their parents’ money to attend exclusive, private colleges. Hipster-wannabes routinely wait in line for hours for the opportunity to buy exorbitantly priced drinks in an exclusive nightclub. As noted in Contract Traps Entrepreneurs Should Avoid, exclusivity can kill a small company. Unfortunately, many Big Dumb Companies (BDCs) assume they must unfairly skew the market in their favor by precluding you from freely working with anyone you choose. Exclusivity excludes your startup from taking full advantage of future customer, partner and market opportunities. As such, deals are not exclusive, they are excludesive.