The Resource Guide is created by Grace Liu and Gabriella Velazquez
Updated on Janurary 8, 2022
Team recruitment or management and co-founder relationships are some of the most frequently encountered issues by student startups (Oh, 2017, p. 110). This Guide introduces resources for you to learn how to recruit and build a productive team. It covers topics ranging from finding co-founders, building high-performing teams to managing human resources.
The courses selected can be audited for free and you can find the audit instructions for Coursera and Edx courses.
Startup CEO (Kauffman Foundation)
In this series, Matt Blumberg coaches entrepreneurs through the crucial transitions that turn a startup into a sustainable business and a founder into a CEO. Blumberg explains how thoughtful processes help shape operations, talent development, financing and work-life balance.
Founder’s Dilemmas (The Kauffman Founders School)
As a founder you ignore “people problems” — your own and those of your team — at your peril. Understanding your own decisions, where your instincts can mislead you, and how choices about when to found, with whom to found, and how to share equity could make the difference between success and failure.
Should I Co-found? With Whom? (The Kauffman Foundation)
Once a decision is made to found a company, one of the first and most important decisions concerns whether to “go solo” or to form a founding team. There are good reasons to form a team, but it is essential to address the question: with whom should I found?
Leading People and Teams Specialization (University of Michigan)
In this specialization, you will learn essential leadership skills, including how to inspire and motivate individuals, manage talent, influence without authority, and lead teams.
Culture-Driven Team Building Specialization (University of Pennsylvania), including:
The Power of Team Culture
Behind the success and failure of teams lies team culture. But what exactly is culture? How and why does it contribute to success and failure? In this course, you learn how to recognize aspects of team culture of which most people are typically unaware.
Building High-Performing Teams
Teams are essential to the modern organization, but most never reach their potential. Co-workers miscommunicate, and groups struggle to adapt to changes in the market or their organizations. When teams lack self-awareness about these challenges, performance suffers.
Optimizing Diversity on Teams
By drawing on social science perspectives, this course enables you to learn what diversity is, and how to use it to maximize team performance, innovation and creativity. You also learn how to draw out the collective wisdom of diverse teams, handle conflict and establish common ground rules through real-world cases and peer-to-peer discussions.
Creating a Team Culture of Continuous Learning
There is mounting concern that organizational groups and teams often fail to learn from their past experiences. It’s pertinent to address this issue as groups and teams are often the main ways that work gets done in organizations.
Teamwork Skills: Communicating Effectively in Groups | Coursera (University of Colorado Boulder)
In this course you will learn to: make better decisions, be more creative and innovative, manage conflict and work with difficult group members, negotiate for preferred outcomes, improve group communication in virtual environments, develop a better overall understanding of human interaction, and work more effectively as a team. Our goal is to help you understand these important dynamics of group communication and learn how to put them into practice to improve your overall teamwork.
Teamwork Innovation: How to built teams that can thrive post-pandemic (Strategizer)
Alex and Stefano, authors of our new book “High-Impact Tools for Teams” will be discussing key lessons from working with teams during the pandemic. They will present a new generation of simple tools to improve team performance and share insights on how to balance on-site and remote teamwork.
Entrepreneurship Team Building and Management (University of Massachusetts)
In this webinar Michael Ciuchta, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Manning School of Business discusses his research and class practices on how to create a venture, how to select, how to establish roles & responsibilities, equity and compensation and many other very relevant topics.
Startup Secrets: Hiring and Team Building (Harvard i-lab)
iRobot's Senior Vice President of HR, Russ Campanello, and Acquia's Global Manager of Talent Acquisition, Eric Gaffen, will talk about the importance of hiring and team building at their companies.
Videos
How to Build and Manage Teams (Stanford Online)
Anu Hariharan, Partner at YC Continuity, sits down with Vinod Khosla, Founder of Khosla Ventures and previously the founding CEO and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, to talk about belief systems around hiring, and how to manage your company’s growth internally.
Talent Management: From Startup to Scaleup (Stanford Online)
This webinar will teach you how to tailor your hiring decisions for each stage of the company lifecycle, from startup to scaleup. Get practical solutions to help you manage growth, elicit exemplary performance, and create a vibrant and enduring culture.
How-to Find the Right Co-founder (Y Combinator)
YC Partner Harj Taggar shares advice on how to find the right co-founder for your startup. This lecture was filmed for the future founder track of Startup School 2020.
How to Find a Technical Cofounder (Y Combinator)
Michael Seibel talks about how to find a technical co-founder.
Hiring & Team Building 101 (Founder Institute)
Discuss with AbstractOps' COO Adam Spector and company systems designer Nick Hofmeister, about how to optimize best practices for hiring and team-building for startups, including the key pitfalls to avoid, and more.
The Startup & Venture Capital Club Series: Building a Winning Team (Silicon Valley Forum)
Sam Hodges is Co-Founder and CEO of Vouch Insurance, a venture-backed commercial insurance business focused on serving the needs of high-growth companies. He will take you on an interactive discussion on real life lessons learned and share strategies for building your own 'A' team!
Save your Innovation Team from Chaos
The authors of the book High Impact Tools for Teams (Stefano Mastrogiacomo and Alex Ostweralder) will share how to reach higher levels of team alignment and psychological safety in innovation teams. They’ll show you how to successfully kick off your innovation projects using the Team Alignment Map and the Team Contract. You’ll also learn how to assess alignment rapidly to avoid future problems. And, you’ll have some fun exploring what’s hot or not in teamwork today.
LinkedIn Live: From Startup to ScaleUp - Talent ScaleUp Strategies
In this session, hear Operating Partner and leader of the Talent Center of Excellence, Jason Ewell, detail what some of the most common talent pitfalls we see software leaders fall into on their ScaleUp journey.
How To Design An Innovation Culture
Strategyzer co-founder Alex Osterwalder and XPLANE co-founder Dave Gray talk about intentionally designing your corporate culture -- especially for companies hoping to tackle innovation challenges. What does it take to create a culture with positive outcomes like happy employees, productivity, and most importantly profitability? Alex and Dave will share best practices, case examples, and walk you through our Culture Map tool to help you capture and discuss your company culture.
Building an Engineering Team by Ammon Bartram and Harj Taggar
Former YC Partner and founder of TripleByte Harj Taggar, along with his cofounder Ammon Bartram discuss a topic startups often struggle with most: finding and hiring the key engineers who will build your product.
Building Your Startup’s First Sales Team
Jason Hawkins, Head of East Coast Sales at Nextdoor, sits down with Tae Kim, Head of East Coast Sales at Branch, to discuss how to get boots on the ground selling your product and best practices on building a successful sales team at a startup. They discuss how to grow a team with lean resources and selling tactics on how to push sales across the line to generate revenue much earlier.
Decode SV Startup Success - Team Building & Culture (UC Berkeley)
"Decode Silicon Valley Startup Success" is a semesterly DeCal offered under the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at UC Berkeley. The 7th lecture is titled Team Building & Culture. It features guest speaker Cameron Yarbrough, CEO of Torch and executive coach of Twitch & Reddit.
Building an Innovation Ecosystem with Northumbrian Water’s Innovation Team (Strategizer)
There are very few companies that don’t have at least one or two innovation projects going on. Post Covid-19, the leadership challenge is to build an ecosystem in which innovation becomes a repeatable process. Northumbrian Water is a UK based utility company delivering services in the highly regulated water industry. Join us to learn about how they have been working with Strategyzer to assess their levels of innovation readiness. We will also discuss how they are taking lessons and practices from startups and corporate innovation; and applying these within the highly regulated constraints of their business.
Innovation Journey: From Theory to Practice with Bayer's Corporate Innovation Team (Strategizer)
Strategizer founders talk to Bayer’s Corporate Innovation team to learn how they took a portfolio approach to investing in new ideas, how they conducted experiments in spite of being in a heavily regulated environment, the obstacles they faced and the measures they took to overcome these. This is an opportunity to learn the practical experience of a team that has worked relentlessly on bringing business model innovation to a global enterprise.
Choi, J., Goldschlag, N., Haltiwanger, J. C., & Kim, J. D. (2021). Founding teams and startup performance (No. w28417). National Bureau of Economic Research.
Lopez Hernandez, A. K., Fernandez-Mesa, A., & Edwards-Schachter, M. (2018). Team collaboration capabilities as a factor in startup success. Journal of technology management & innovation, 13(4), 13-23.
Weber, Maura and Sunleaf, Zev (2019) "Building a Successful Startup Team," Academic Entrepreneurship for Medical and Health Scientists: Vol. 1 : Iss. 1 , Article 4
Lazar, M., Miron-Spektor, E., Chen, G., Goldfarb, B., Erez, M., & Agarwal, R. (2021). Forming Entrepreneurial Teams: Mixing Business and Friendship to Create Transactive Memory Systems for Enhanced Success. Academy of Management Journal. And a short video explaining the research.
Guide to Managing Human Resources (UC Berkeley)
How to Build a Successful Team (New York Times)
How to Create a Stellar Startup Team: An Ultimate Guide (CEU iLab)
How to Build a Better Startup Team (Stanford Graduate School of Business)
How to Build a Team that Attracts Investors for Your Startup
How To Build an Amazing Software Development Team for Your Startup? (LinkedIn)
Hiring to Win: How to Build a Startup Team (Silicon Valley Bank)
You can search Harvard Business Review to learn more articles on this topic. You can also check if your university library has a subscription to the Business Source Complete database, which provides full-text access to Harvard Business Review articles, or use the library’s interlibrary loan service to access the article.
Leading Learning Organizations: The Bold, the Powerful, and the Invisible
A Dedicated Team of Problem Solvers Can Help Big Companies Act Like Lean Startups
How a Fast-Growing Startup Built Its Sales Team for Long-Term Success
More Harvard Business Review article on Meeting Management.
Co-founder Matching Program (Y Combinator)
YC's free online platform for finding a high-quality co-founder. Match with co-founders based on your preferences for interests, skills, location, and more, and start building your company.
Project Guides (skysthelimit.org)
The project guides will help you achieve your business goals. Connect with a mentor on our platform to get advice and encouragement as you complete each step.
Click the link to find a Worldcat book record; enter a zipcode to check which library nearby has the book you can borrow. When the record is not available, a link to Amazon is provided.
Mastrogiacomo, Stefano, Alexander Osterwalder. High-impact Tools for Teams : 5 Tools to Align Team Members, Build Trust, and Get Results Fast. Wiley & Sons Canada, Limited, John, 2021. Print.
Smart, Geoff, and Randy Street. Who: The Method for Hiring. 2008. Print.
Brikman, Yevgeniy. Hello, Startup: A Programmer's Guide to Building Products, Technologies, and Teams. 2016. Print.
Carasco, Marie, and William J. Rothwell. The Essential Hr Guide for Small Businesses and Startups: Best Practices, Tools, Examples, and Online Resources. 2020. Print.
Feld, Brad. Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors. 2014. Print.
Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business Review on Finding and Keeping the Best People. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011. Print.
Osman, Osman, Aditya Agarwal, Alex Allain, Jose Guardado, Jennifer Kim, Aline Lerner, Viraj Mody, Kevin Morrill, Jason Wong, Scott Woody. The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring: Align your team to avoid expensive hiring mistakes. Holloway, In., 2020. Print.
Wasserman, Noam. The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2012. Print.
Edmondson, Amy C. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. 2019. Print.
Johnson, Whitney W. Build an A-Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve. 2018. Print.
Laloux, Frederic. Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage in Human Consciousness. Brussels: Nelson Parker, 2014. Print.
Rogelberg, Steven G. The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance. 2019. Print.
Senge, Peter M. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York, N.Y: Currency Doubleday, 2006. Print.
Singh, Arun, and Mike Mister. How to Lead Smart People: Leadership for Professionals. London: Profile Books, 2019. Print.
Read More Books on This Topic and more about building a learning organization.
SCORE mentors offer human resources-related consultation via video, email, phone, or in-person.
Oh, Y. (2017). Student Entrepreneurship at Cornell University: A Case Study. [Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University]. Cornell eCommons. https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/47827