Having the right talent is key for the success of any start-up.  A recent report from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge highlighted the crucial role the management team plays in the successful ‘scaling up’ of a start-up.

“Most SMEs experience zero or little growth,” the report says. “Although ‘gazelles’, the companies that grow turnover by 20 per cent for three consecutive years, are much talked about they are in fact a rare species: they are responsible for most of SME growth but they amount to only two per cent to four per cent of SMEs.”

Last year I looked at the kind of people that are key to the success of a start-up after a study that was published in Science explored the issue.  It found that whilst we tend to romanticize certain characteristics of start-up founders, those same characteristics are also present in a much wider pool who would happily join an existing start-up.

“Most university programs designed to foster entrepreneurship—such as courses, workshops and incubators—focus on training people to be a founder,” they say. “But founders make up a small share of the entrepreneurial workforce, and we do very little to train the larger share of people who will work in startups as employees rather than founders. For example, many programs focus on how to write business plans and secure funding, while less attention is paid to how to work effectively in a small startup team.”

Finding your joiners

Finding such individuals can be challenging however, especially when your cashflow is tight and you can’t offer the kind of salaries that such expertise would normally require.

This is where a new platform is hoping to step in and offer assistance.  The service, called EquityOwl, aims to connect up start-ups looking for talent with people that are happy to work in return for equity in the business.

The process is pretty straightforward, with start-ups creating a profile on the site and sharing the genesis of their venture.  This includes financial details such as their business plan, and the level of equity they’re prepared to offer to people to fill the roles they need.

A professional can then browse these opportunities and contact any start-up that they like the look of.  If an agreement is reached, EquityOwl takes care of the paper work and ensures everything is official and above board.

I suspect that the venture will live or die based on the quality that it can attract on both sides of the fence.  With something like 90% of start-ups failing, going to work for equity that is unlikely to ever be transferred into hard cash is a tough sell.  The better caliber of start-up that the site can attract, therefore, the better they will able to offer a reasonable proposition.

Time will tell how effective they prove to be.