Vince Talbert’s 7 core startup values

“Work with your team that you know how to win with.”

We’ve heard Bill Me Later cofounder Vince Talbert talk before about how important a cofounding team, with domain expertise, is to a startup’s success.

During his keynote at this month’s Incubator Company of the Year Awards, he elaborated a bit more, sharing with the startup founders gathered his seven “core values” for any startup.

1. “Get shit done.” Put another way: ready, fire and then aim, in some cases. Action is the trait, not necessarily precision, in the early stages.
   
2. It’s better to be “street smart” than it is to be “academic.”
3. You’ll need “creative problem solvers” working with you.
4. The team comes first, said Talbert. Obviously, he and his cofounders were a triumphant group, one worth almost $1 billion at the time of Bill Me Later’s acquisition. (But if your cofounder is a lazy, do-nothing jerk-off, you might want to dump them.)
5. Always be doing and producing. (Your product. Not your startup-branded t-shirts.)
6. “Humility is key.”
7. This dovetails off of number six: you don’t want any big egos. You just want “people who rally together and stick together,” said Talbert.