When building a team, it may seem natural to surround yourself with people who have similar backgrounds, experiences, and skills. There are certainly benefits to doing so. People who are similar may communicate more easily, establish trust faster, and experience less conflict early on. However, I believe too much similarity can eventually become a weakness. I would rather build a team where everyone shares the same mission but brings different strengths to accomplishing it. Instead of everyone’s abilities overlapping, their individual strengths can enhance one another and create a more well-rounded and stable team.
In The Founder’s Dilemmas, Wasserman explains that founders naturally gravitate toward people who are similar to themselves, a tendency known as homophily (Wasserman, 2013). Homogeneous founding teams can benefit from faster formation, easier communication, and greater initial trust. However, Wasserman also identifies an important long-term risk: when founders have similar functional backgrounds, their human capital can overlap. As a result, the team may have several people who are strong in the same areas while lacking critical skills in others. He contrasts this with teams whose members possess complementary skills and networks that better match the needs of the startup.
This is where I believe variety adds more substance to a team. Different people can look at the same problem and contribute completely different solutions based on their expertise and experiences. Research on entrepreneurial teams found that demographic diversity within new venture teams was positively associated with sales levels and sales growth, supporting the idea (Chandler & Lyon, 2001). Their findings also revealed an important trade-off: teams with greater diversity experienced higher turnover. This reinforces Wasserman’s point that diversity can strengthen a team while simultaneously making team dynamics more challenging.
The answer, therefore, may not simply be to make a team as different as possible. Wasserman makes an important distinction between diversity in areas such as skills, experience, and professional networks and compatibility in “soft” factors such as values, commitment, work styles, and risk tolerance. Similarly, diverse perspectives alone do not guarantee stronger performance; diverse teams need psychological safety so members can communicate openly, contribute their perspectives, and work through differences effectively (Bresman & Edmondson, 2022).
Ultimately, I believe an effective founding team should be united in purpose without being identical in contribution. If everyone brings the same strengths, important weaknesses may remain uncovered. I would rather have people at the table who approach the mission differently but complement one another along the way. To me, the goal is not for every team member to bring the same thing to the table…it is for everyone to bring something valuable that makes the entire table stronger!
References
Bresman, H., & Edmondson, A. C. (2022, March 17). Research: To excel, diverse teams need psychological safety. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2022/03/research-to-excel-diverse-teams-need-psychological-safety
Chandler, G. N., & Lyon, D. W. (2001). Entrepreneurial teams in new ventures: Composition, turnover and performance. Academy of Management Proceedings, 2001(1). https://doi.org/10.5465/apbpp.2001.6132988
Wasserman, N. (2013). The founder’s dilemmas: Anticipating and avoiding the pitfalls that can sink a startup. Princeton University Press.
