Lesson: Idea Execution with Noor Siddiqui

Step #4 Recruiting: It's important to create a team that believes in your company's mission

There are four people on our team right now: my co-founder, who is on the clinical side; our engineer; and I guess two people who are part time. One does design and one is engineering.

My co-founder is actually my sister, so after her fourth year of medical school, I spoke to her about this and she had similarly worked in hospitals and had seen technology fail miserably and was like, "Yeah, we should definitely try to fix this," so she came onboard and is putting her residency and things like that on pause to work at this company. Engineers have just been friends of ours. Currently, we're working with someone who is my friend, who we convinced to leave Goldman Sachs Engineering to work on our product.

Whenever you're trying to do something ridiculous, you have to think: who would want to do this with me, and whose interests are aligned to do this? So there are lots of incentives to why you want to join a startup. You really want to build something that no one else has ever built before, so there's certain people who that appeals to.

There are certain people a huge exit really appeals to. So, “Okay, I'm going to offer you this much equity and we're going to have a six million cap, that equity is worth this amount right now and if we get this series A or series B, we have this exit. Look how much that equity would be worth.” Some people are really motivated by the financial incentive.

Other people are really motivated by the team, so if you bring on lots of really smart talented people who have a really interesting culture, some people would thrive in that environment, so that's something you can just bring people on.

I think the fourth thing is probably mission. What's your company's mission? What's your company goal? It has to resonate with people because right after the financial incentive is gone, you're going to give away a lot of your equity to your co-founders. People want to have to join because they share this vision with you.

I think Peter Thiel has this really good question which was how are you going to get the 20th person to join your company because it's no longer prestigious because you're not going to be a co-founder or a first engineer, and you would be paid more if you worked at Google or Apple, so why is that 20th person going to come onto your company? And I think that it's pretty well tied to what your vision is and how well articulated you've described this is a future we can create and why your time is better.

Like I said, when you're starting a company, you have to think where’s the space where you have an unfair advantage where your time is being highest leveraged similarly like everyone who joins your company should feel that their time is highest leveraged at your company. They should feel like because of the resources you've brought to the table and because of the distribution networks that you've figured out or the product that you've created, they are spending their time best, they are making the most impact in the world, and they're helping the most people by sitting at their desk every day or being out in the field and coding or whatever it is they're doing for you.