Fred's ideal team is composed of a CEO, a designer, and a couple of engineers. The CEO needs enough project management skills to help the team bring the product to market, and the designers ability to craft a compelling look and feel is at least as important as the engineers’ ability to make the product function.
Fred Wilson is a founder and managing partner of Union Square Ventures, commonly recognized at one of the top funds in the world. Learn more from Fred on his blog, A VC.
We think the ideal founding team: a leader of the team, the CEO if you want to call them that, who is the one has the product vision and has enough product management skills that they can work with the team to actually bring that product to market. That person paired with a couple of engineers and a designer--a four person team--it would be great if the founder was technical and could also write some code, but that’s the ideal founding team for us.
The designer is critical because getting the user experience and the look and feel right is as important as being able to build a product that actually works that can scale and is not buggy or anything like that. So you need the [two] engineers, you need the designer, and you need that person who actually has that idea in his head and is managing the whole process to go from idea to process. And that’s all we’re looking for in a founding team.