Research about Founding Team

My view is the Platonic startup has a founding team of a developer, a designer and a distributor.

The perfect startup has all three founders: 
someone who understands how to build technologies and systems to solve problems;
someone who understands the human factors behind those problems, why they exist, what it takes to fix them and how to shape the experience;
someone who understands how to reach, talk to and sell to the people whose problems are being solved - and keep finding more of them

Initially Marketing vs Product: 5% to 95%
Later Marketing vs Product: 80% to 20%

The typical answer as Michael Thomas, Forbes, and Steve Blank pointed out: 
Hacker
Hustler
Hipster
(Visionary)

• The designer is responsible for desirability of the product. Talking with customers, understanding their needs, making sure the experience doesn’t suck.
• The engineer is responsible for the feasibility. S/he must determine if the product can actually be built, how, and for how much.
• The business person is responsible for the viability of the business model. S/he acts as the scales of justice when feasibility conflicts with desirability. The business person also takes care of the profit & loss statement and often manages the personalities involved.

Knowledge Sharing:

1. Designers today have to be technical in front-end development and understand human-centered design approaches. In short, it doesn’t suffice to just use Photoshop when you have an entire product to build!

2.  This role is especially important in the early days because without a product the hustler can’t sell and without a backend to tie into, the designer’s front-end is useless. Here are five things the hacker should be focused on:

3.  The case can be made for single founders as well, but I'd argue that two is best and three, four or more is too many. 

4.  A Founder is the one with the original idea, scientific discovery, technical breakthrough, insight, problem description, passion, etc. 

5.  A founder typically recruits co-founders and then becomes part of the founding team involved in day-to-day company operations. (However, in some industries such as life sciences, founders may be tenured professors who are not going to give up their faculty positions, so they often become the head of a startup’s scientific advisory board, but aren’t part of the founding team.)

6.  The founding team includes the founder and a few other co-founders with complementary skills to the founder. This is the group who will build the company. Its goal is to take the original idea and search for a repeatable and scalable business model– first by finding product/market fit, then by testing all the parts of the business model (pricing, channel, acquisition/activation, partners, costs, etc.)

7.  The two tests of whether someone belongs on a founding team are: “Do we have a company without them?” and, “Can we find someone else just like them?” If both answers are no, you’ve identified a co-founder.  If any of the answers are “Yes,” then hire them a bit later as an early employee.

8.  Key attributes of an entrepreneur on a founding team are passion, determination, resilience, tenacity, agility and curiosity. It helps if the team has had a history of working together, but what is essential is mutual respect. And what is critical is trust. You need to be able to trust your co-founders to perform, to do what they say they will, and to have your back

9.  dealistic founders trying to run a venture with collective leadership, without a single person in charge, find that’s the fastest way to go out of business.

10.  In addition, the founding CEO thrives operating in chaos and uncertainty. They deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers.  And as the reality of product development and customer input collide, the facts change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out product plan becomes irrelevant. While the rest of the team is focused on their specific jobs, the founding CEO is trying to solve a complicated equation where almost all the variables are unknown – unknown customers, unknown features that will make those customers buy, unknown pricing, unknown demand creation activities that will get them into your sales channel, etc.

10. The reality distortion field makes people believe an insane idea might come true, and they’re willing to quit their jobs and join you on a quest.

11. “With an early-stage venture, things don’t go per plan,” he explains. “If you’re not comfortable operating and leading through that, you might be a good co-founder … but not a good CEO.”

12. “A ‘founder’ is somebody who you can say, ‘Would you have a company without them?’ ‘Is this the best person for the job?’ If no, they should just be employees,” he explains.

14.  every team needs a hacker, a hustler and a designer. “These are the core skills. If you don’t have this, you’ll be at a competitive disadvantage,” says Blank, especially in the tech space.

15.  “The hacker should be someone who’s great at writing code – better than anybody else, and the hustler tends to be the CEO person, with the reality distortion field, who can run experiments,” says Blank. The designer figures out user interface, which is especially important for both the web and mobile.

16. Blank says outside the tech industry, the exact specifications may vary a little bit (“If you’re building a drone, a designer isn’t a big deal,” he says) but the fundamental message is clear: members of a founding team should have complementary skills, rather than similar attributes.

17.   “These are execution titles for companies with known business models and known customers and known pricing structures,” says Blank – very different from a startup, which has to constantly test new ideas, throw out the bad ones and figure out a solution that works. “If your founding team starts looking like IBM? You’re out of business,” he says.

18. In many cases, a startup is only as good as the people behind it. The success of a business can heavily depend on whether the people involved are doing their jobs well.

19. If you have a strong technical background but no experience with sales and marketing, hire someone who knows that area inside and out, and vice versa.

20. 

Hustler

Every team needs a visionary that is really good at one thing: selling. Whether it’s selling the idea to investors, or pitching your product to customers, the hustler's role is integral to the success of any company. 

Many people think of this role as someone with an MBA, but nothing could be further from the truth. A hustler should be hungry, curious and willing to do anything and everything to move the business forward. Here are five things the hustler should be focusing on in the very early stages:

• Customer Development - In the early days the hustler should be talking to customers and prospecting. Your goal should be to talk to at least 10 people everyday when you are doing customer development. 
• Product Management - The hustler’s job is to relay customer needs to the technical team. He/she should be identifying “must have” features and plotting them on a product roadmap.
• Selling - After you’ve done customer development you should focus on selling your product or if you’re building a consumer app the focus should be on fundraising.
• Blogging - One of the best ways to drive adoption and build your sales pipeline is to blog about problems in your industry. Mint exemplified this strategy perfectly when founder Aaron Patzer started blogging 6 months in advance of the product’s launch. How Mint Grew to 1.5 Million Users and Sold for $170 Million in Just 2 Years 
• Recruiting - Assuming that your business is growing, the hustler should be focused on recruiting. While this person may not be able to interview for technical skills they can set up interviews and decide whether applicants are a good culture fit during the first call. 

Designer

A designer in a startup shouldn’t just know what looks good. Designers today have to be technical in front-end development and understand human-centered design approaches. In short, it doesn’t suffice to just use Photoshop when you have an entire product to build!

Here are five things the designer should be focused on:

• Building a Sexy Landing Page - I probably don’t need to tell you that the majority of people discover new products on the internet, but I will anyway. Because of that, it is incredibly important to build a landing page that shows what you’re building. The page should include a product description, beautiful images or screenshots, pricing (if applicable), an about page, a link to your blog and most importantly a place to capture email addresses of interested visitors.
• Design the Product (duh) - The designer should work with the hustler to design the “must have” features you decide on as a team. Often times this is done using a wireframe tool like Balsamiq, Prototyper by JustInMind or Keynote.
• Test those designs - Once the designer has built mockups, he/she should put those designs in front of real users or customers. 
• Branding - After deciding on a company name and brainstorming a logo that represents your team and product, the designer should create that logo and all other brand assets. 
• Get Technical - If the designer isn’t already technical (HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, JSON) then get technical! There’s almost nothing more valuable to a company than a designer that can get their hands dirty. 

Hacker

Last, but certainly not least is the role some argue is the most important in a startup: the hacker. This is the person that is most technical. The hacker loves to chat about new technology stacks, he/she has been using GitHub since it’s early days and the most visited site on their computer is likely Stack Overflow. 

This role is especially important in the early days because without a product the hustler can’t sell and without a backend to tie into, the designer’s front-end is useless. Here are five things the hacker should be focused on:

• Product
• Product
• Product
• Product
• Product

Founder, Founding team, Founding CEO all have word “founder” in them but have different roles:

Founder has the initial idea. May or may not be on the founding team or have a leadership role

Founding team – complementary skills – builds the company

Founding CEO – reality distortion field and comfort in chaos – leads the company

References:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-perfect-startup-team