Team Building - Your singlemost important driver for success.

Your team defines your survival and success of your company and dreams!

So, your first goal should be to motivate and hire your core team.

The early startup days process:

U need to think execution, and build out your team. Assign responsibilities so that u can focus outwards on investors, partners and customers who will buy into your vision. Think what all skills u need. U can do many things, most are not as exciting as some others u'd like to do, many are waste of your time if u can find the rest person to do it. So make a list of what skills your company needs and what all u have in your team/people involved. Then, u can look for more people and bring them in as a parallel process.
But most important is to expand your core team with people who can grow your company and offer alternative skills and perspective t yours. Its likely this is a person who has worked with you or knows you well and your styles complement each other.

Difference from traditional team-building in a company:

If u are like me and have worked in a large company, u are pretty spoilt.
The main difference is the motivation style in a startup. You want people who take ownership in their jobs and are proud to be part of the vision. Its amazing when u have the right team, the enery flow is so intoxicating!

Your experience level and hiring your team as startup Founder/CEO:

I thought I was in management in my corporate jobs till I really moved to senior management roles in 1999.
The key difference is this. You are in middle management if u think of your team as people u can delegate work and u manage them. In companies you have lots of perks and jargons to keep this game alive.
When u are in senior management, your butt is on fire for delivering something that you have to figure out a way to get done and keep finding such projects and results with a big picture as your goal, mostly your bottomline, unless you are in too cosy a job that doesn't track it and lets you get away from it.

As a startup CEO, founder, you are in senior management even before you start. Your bottomline is survival and success. So you need to expand your core team to complementt your skillset and grow your company leaving you to do well, what you are good at.

Getting Started - terminologies and incorporation

Here is a nice site that will help you learn VC Terminologies.

I am a big fan of starting out a straight C Corp. Here is a checklist of all that needs to be done as part of incorporation. Read this before you look for pricing from any of the incorporation sites which offer you cheap packages.

It is important to incorporate and stay in compliance with all the neccessary paperwork now than to worry about surprises when you try to exit.