Amar Inamdar, Managing Director, KawiSafi Ventures

I think building the successful team is more important than building a successful product, almost.

I think it's one of the hardest things you're going to do, and I think it's one of the most challenging things you're going to do as an entrepreneur.

Mina Shahid, Co-founder & CEO, Numida

We found our first 5 to 10 team members almost entirely through recommendations.

They were either coming from other organizations in a similar space and we were introduced to them, or they were coming from the general social impact world and we were connected.

I do think at the beginning, recommendations are critical because what's going to happen is that the person's role is going to change a lot. They're going to be dealing with the very disorganized workplace with lots of ambiguity.

Often, the reason people stick around through that chaos is because, one, they believe in the vision, and two, there's something connecting the individuals on the team beyond the work. And that could be the network, it could be how they found out about the organization, it could be their prior experiences in the space.

Chad Larson, Co-founder M-Kopa, CEO Kopo Kopo Inc

Well, I would say of all the things we've talked about as far as fundraising, the type of capital, how to scale, bad forms of scaling - the most important one is the team.

If the team doesn't gel well together and have good chemistry, because ultimately, you can have your idea, you can have your great new product, you can have your commission structure for your sales team.

But if the people getting up each morning are not motivated to go in and all pull together and not let each other down as they go to achieve the goal, then you're just probably not going to get there because that ultimately is what matters.

There's a bunch of human beings behind this that need to get along well and respect each other and hopefully have complementary skill sets and hopefully are all learning.

But you've got to be motivated to jump out of bed each morning and get in there because if you don't have that, none of the rest of the stuff - you can have the most clever commission structure in the world, you can put together a killer pitch deck - but if every Tuesday morning, half the team is dreading going in, then you're never going to get there.

Key takeaways 

• Leverage your network to find initial team members

• Look for people who have complementary skills and will work well together

• Seek motivated and adaptable people who can help you drive things forward