One such company was Cambrianhouse. I met Mike Sikorsky a few years ago at the Canadian Venture Forum (a now dead venture forum) and absolutely loved where he was trying to take his company. In the last week, though, it seems the Cambrianhouse model (hopefully not the company!) has been relegated to the deadpool. The reason: Team.

In this case it was not the company’s team, but the teams meant to commercialize Cambrianhouse’s crowdsource-developed products.

As Mike commented:

The limiting reagent in the startup equation is not ideas, but amazing founding teams.
A key assumption for us, which proved out NOT true: given a great idea with great community support and great market test data, we would be able to find (crowdsource) a team willing to execute it OR we could execute it ourselves. We needed amazing founding teams for each of the ideas – this is where our model fell short.

What we learned: it would have been better to back great teams with horrible ideas because most of the heavy lifting kept falling back on us, or a few select community members… Trying to find people willing or capable to take on the offspring (our outputs) of the CH model was hard and/or incredibly time consuming.

This is a well documented fact: the TEAM is the MOST important aspect of any start-up company, NOT the technology or the idea. Though technology might be an enabler, according to a study conducted on Morgenthaler’s companies that failed, only 10% failed because of the technology or idea compared to 60% failing because the team couldn’t make it happen.

So, let Cambrianhouse’s lesson, and that of hundreds of other start-ups be a lesson to any and all entrepreneurial companies: Technology or a great idea are good to have, but, whatever you do, concentrate on ensuring you have a WORLDCLASS team.

As for Cambrianhouse, good luck, Mike, with your efforts to keep crowdsourcing alive – I still believe the concept (and your tool to make that concept functional) has a role to play in the future of innovation, especially given the recent acceptance of open innovation and network-centric innovation/commercialization.