Things to Think about when building a Team

Created on August 23, 2026

2026   ·   Teams   ·   Reflections

Before we understand what are some key elements to look at when trying to create a team, let’s first understand:

Q) Why would one need a team ?

We humans are bound by space and time. Given that all of us want to do something big in our lifetimes. We need to understand that this can’t be done alone since we have a limited amount of context which can ingest information and limited amount of focus we can exert on a specific day (with a few exceptions). This is similar to how LLMs start to hallucinate and function ineffectively after the chat reaches a certain limit, I believe the same theory applies to us.

Now that we have understood the need for building a team or being part of a team. Let’s look at some of the more important aspects that we would need to ace to play well at this game. Everybody wants the star players/ A players on their team. However there is only a finite number of such players in this game. These players are either trained and mentored to be A players by A players or innately start off as A players.

These A players have a lot of options, a lot of options on which teams they want to be a part of and what big initiatives they want to achieve or help achieve. These A players exist everywhere. They are present globally, we just need to have the ability to sense their power levels.

Given the above context, as of now to the best of my knowledge, some of the key areas to optimise for when looking at getting an A player to join your ship are:

  • Compensation: this is the most obvious and straightforward dimension. You can get creative with how you structure this out though. It can be more of stock and less of cash, or cash based on outcomes or just plain cash the entire way. Needless to say higher the pay, higher are the chances for the player to join the ship. This only works to a certain extent though.

  • Challenge: a lot of A players end up making more than what they need for basic sustenance and so what motivates them post compensation is what is the challenge they are being brought on to solve for. How big is this problem ? what is the greater mission of the ship ? where are we trying to sail to ? things of this nature. With the recent Anthropic hires we are seeing multiple C level executives leaving their ships to go join and be a MTS at Anthropic. My take on this is that it is happening since the mission statement of Anthropic is really challenging, big and revolutionary. This in a way also ties to the scale of impact they are going to have. Naturally harder the challenge is, better are the players that are interested in solving for them.

  • Companions: You would have seen a lot of players move around ships to just play with other players they either know from before or genuinely like working with. This is where as a captain of the ship one needs to make sure the environment is conducive for players to meet each other and create these companions. These companions later on very quickly become one of the reasons for the player to come and work. This could be made possible by having free happy hours every Friday evening on the house or organising events such as hackathons to force such connections to take place.

  • Culture: An extension of companions is the culture of the ship. Culture is a set of unspoken rules and behaviours that over a period of repeated actions have ingrained themselves to be an automatic subconscious response to events. This is a more complex puzzle that even I am trying to understand but a simple example of culture can be that the players in the ship always show up 10 minutes ahead of any meeting.

  • Compassion: If you find the optimal answers to all of the above dimensions and somehow screw this up, there is no way you can build a big ship. This is the single most important one of them all. You need to make sure that the ship has an environment where players can trust each other, fail and pick themselves up. You need to give players the space and time to figure things out. This is sort of a byproduct of the above two i.e. Companions & Culture.

While the above dimensions help one build a ship. The fine balance of the above tends to work when you are of a moderate size i.e. when your culture is starting to define itself, when you have enough resources to pay some of these A Players etc etc.

When you are just starting off and it is just you and the other captains some of the dimensions you want to focus on should be (still figuring this out :P ):

  • Conviction: How serious are you about the problem you are trying to solve. What’s the motivation for solving this problem. What is the story you tell yourself and others ? Why should they come and work with you ? Who are you ? What is your credibility ? these are some questions one needs to have answers for.

  • Velocity: A lot of A players are interested in moving fast and if you can show them a possibility of moving quickly with a proper direction and a tight feedback loop then chances are this will interest a decent number of them.

This article is my current understanding of the space. Naturally with time these frameworks are going to evolve. I am eager to know what you, the reader think about this. If you have made it this far, reach out to me and tell me where you see gaps in this. I am actively trying to shape this to be better.