Desh Deshpande and Jud Bowman: Assembling Teams

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From the course by The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

What’s Your Big Idea?

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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

What’s Your Big Idea?

129 ratings

Whether your interest lies in solving the world’s biggest problems, creating the next commercial success or addressing something closer to home, this course will give you a toolbox to vet your ideas and test them in the real world.

From the lesson

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To make your big idea into a reality, you’ll need the personal, professional, and financial resources we discuss in this module.

Jud Bowman: Control in His Ventures1:56

Desh Deshpande: Solving Problems with Processes1:26

Desh Deshpande and Jud Bowman: Assembling Teams4:13

Shazi Visram: Disciplines to Avoid Crisis Mode2:06

Meet the Instructors

Professor Buck Goldstein
University Entrepreneur in Residence and Professor of the Practice
Economics
Dr. Holden Thorp, PhD
Provost and Professor of Chemistry and Medicine
Chemistry

So everyone built teams, and they have advisors, etc.

when, at this point, as you think about assembling a team, what are the

strengths, what are the components

and I'm sure it, it, maybe, why don't we pick something in the social sector.

How do you think about assembling, currently, the strengths, what do

you look for, what are you, in terms of building a team?

>> In the, you know, if you're looking

for a team in the social sector, compassion

is, is the most important thing because if

people don't have compassion, they just can't do it.

So, you need people who have a huge amount of compassion because that's what drives

them to actually get the solution done.

Now, you know the other part of it is teams actually, recruiting mentors.

The teams actually, not every mentor is the right mentor.

And so the teams have to get very good

in terms of finding the mentors because if you get

stuck with the wrong mentor, you just, you just keep

spinning your wheels and you don't see eye to eye.

You don't really get the value but at the same time, just because

the other person is so senior, you can't get rid of them and

the, and the entrepreneurs, the teams have to get very good in not

only embracing the right mentor, but fighting

the mentors if they're not getting along.

>> So, switching gears a little.

Knowing what you know now, tell us what you think about teams and

the kind, the kind of team you have to assemble to be successful.

>> The, I think the most important thing

about, building a team is, it starts with

being introspective on yourself, and sort of looking

and saying, okay these are the things I'm, I'm

good at, but more importantly these are the

areas where I'm not strong, and having the confidence,

the self confidence, to hire people that are

far better than you in those areas of weakness.

>> And what would be the,

the skill sets that you look for in your, in your team?

>> Well, if you go back to the very beginning of when

I started the first company, Motricity, the very first thing I did was

recruit my co-founder, Taylor Brockman, who was the technical

genius to be my right hand man, and I think that goes to the, to my weakness.

Which was I wasn't a good coder. I wasn't

all that technical.

And if you look at any point along my

entrepreneurial adventure between the dorm room to the beginnings

of Motricity, to today with Epia, I am always

looking to bring on the absolute best people I

can to build out the team, to, to shore up the area where I'm not as strong, whether

that's finance or my CFO or whether that's with

sales or my Chief Revenue Officer or, you know,

my heads of engineering.

>> So, as a 17 year old in science and math, I mean, where everybody, sort of

the hierarchy was based on, you know, how good a mathematician you were,

how fast you could win the whatever competition.

How did you deal, were you okay with the fact that you were not a very good coder?

>> Yeah I was fine with that. I knew that I wasn't a good coder.

I think the beauty about being young is that

you, you know that you don't know a lot.

Certainly from a business standpoint, there were a

million things I had no idea about and

I think in a lot of ways that was one of the advantages of being young.

I knew that I didn't know these things and I wasn't scared about that.

And I didn't have this false sense of, I, I don't know

what the word is, pride or something, where I

was opposed to bringing in people to help out.

>> Wendy Kopp called it the advantages of inexperience.

>> Right. I think that's perfectly said.

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