Mir: Early-stage startups should avoid diversity of thought in favor of alignment
Ari Mir · 20VC: Why You Do Not Want Diversity Of Thought, Why You Have To Build A Sports Team and Not A Family & Why Extreme Cultures Are Easier For People To Understand with Ari Mir, Founder @ Clutter · Jun 30, 2017 · at 13:31
Ari Mir, founder and CEO of Clutter, responds to Harry Stebbings about team diversity, distinguishing background diversity from cognitive diversity in early-stage startups.
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“But what we don't want, which I think is not commonly supported by other early stage startups is what we don't really want at this stage is diversity of thoughts, and I know that doesn't make sense. It's a little counterintuitive, but the reason why we don't is the way I view it is we're playing a football game, and right now we need to make sure that every single person on that team, we're capable of lateraling the football too, and that we're confident they're going to run it across and get us a touchdown as well as we could. And so in this early stage as a startup, whether you're, you know, I would say sub two, 300 people, which is where we're at, what I want is more people, frankly, thinking like myself and my co-founder, because there's too many problems for us to put out ourselves, and so we need to allocate our team members on these problems and give them autonomy to solve them. Now, as you start to reach escape velocity and your organization grows and you're in the hundreds or thousands, that's when I would argue diversity of thought then becomes critical because it will provide you with the next step function that you need to create value as an organization. But early on, when you don't need to reach that final step function, when you don't need, in my opinion, diversity of thought, you're better off having a very homogenous way of thinking so that you can be much more efficient with how you solve problems and how you allocate internal resources to solving those problems.”
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