Startups Need Both Mercenaries And Club-Style Generalists
Over lunch with a fellow entrepreneur, T-kun, at the Gakushi Kaikan in Hibiya, he told me, “You know, what I wanted to build was a startup with the atmosphere of a college club.”
I answered with a wry smile, because his company’s current state was nothing like that at all. So I offered him the opposite phrase I’d coined myself: “mercenary startup.”
His company matched exactly what he himself described as “nothing but battle-hardened old guys.” He added one more line: “I was just focused on keeping the company from going under, and it naturally ended up this way.”
Here’s another story.
There’s a member named E-kun at a company where I serve as a director. He came from a law background but somehow ended up starting his career at a small engineering company. By the time I joined that company, he’d drifted along without properly developing his skills, and my impression was that he’d be hard to place.
In a one-on-one, he himself acknowledged that he hadn’t developed any specialty. So I thought: why not grow him into someone who could fill a gap the company actually needed? The trouble was, he didn’t yet understand how to approach the work. So we brought in a veteran from that field externally, part-time, to serve as his running partner.
About two years have passed since then, and E-kun can now handle his assigned work almost entirely on his own. People around him have naturally come to rely on him, saying things like, “If it’s about such-and-such, isn’t it faster to just ask E-kun?”
I had a one-on-one with E-kun recently, and he asked, “What does the company want from me next?” — hungry for growth.
That’s the spirit. For him, learning new things and acquiring new skills is simply a given. It’s a wonderful mindset.
Everyone should ideally be like this, but specialist-type “mercenaries” often lack this kind of flexibility.
Both examples point to the same, rather mundane conclusion: it’s about “balance.” In fact, T-kun from the opening story has recently hired a young member whose career has nothing to do with IoT. Specifically, someone with a special qualification or work experience in the target domain, but who knows nothing at all about engineering. It’s not an exaggeration to say that how these people grow will determine the future of T-kun’s company.
The content of this post is an excerpt (original text) from the following book. If you’re interested, please consider purchasing it.
The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup
The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup
Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/09/1192/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.