Inside Meroxa’s Team Building Strategy: Why Technical Founders Need to Build Around Their Weaknesses
Technical founders often fall into a common trap: trying to excel at everything. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, DeVaris Brown, CEO of Meroxa, shared a different approach – building teams that complement founder weaknesses rather than mirror their strengths.
The Self-Awareness Challenge
The first step in Meroxa’s team-building strategy was brutal honesty. DeVaris admits: “Me and my Co-Founder, best in the world at building… The thing that we’re not great at is selling.” This self-awareness became the foundation for their hiring strategy.
Breaking the Technical Founder Mindset
Many technical founders believe they need to master every aspect of the business. DeVaris challenges this notion: “A lot of founders, we buy into this call the personality that we have to be the last stop for everything. But really, it’s like your job is to build the best team possible to get the objective done.”
Building Complementary Teams
The key to Meroxa’s approach is finding people who share core values while bringing different skills. DeVaris explains: “You have to find people around you that have the same hustle mindset, that have the same work ethic, that have the same intellectual curiosity to go out and do those things, that have expertise in the area that you just don’t possess.”
Learning from Early Mistakes
One of DeVaris’s biggest regrets was not building the support team faster: “Build the ancillary team around me faster… me and my Co-Founder, were trying to do a lot of things ourselves, and we should have been able to build the support around us a lot faster.”
The Cost of Delay
The impact of delayed team building was significant: “I wasted so much time dealing with things that should have just been handled automatically.” This experience shaped their future approach to hiring and team structure.
From Individual Excellence to Team Success
Early in his career, DeVaris focused on individual achievement: “In my twenty’s, I was a really good engineer, but I made sure everybody else knew that I had to be the best.” Reading “The Peter Principle” changed his perspective: “You won’t ascend because you think it’s all about your work output, but it’s really, how did you make the people around you feel right.”
Building for Scale
The team-building strategy had to support Meroxa’s ambitious goals. As DeVaris notes: “We have the ability to build multiple billion dollar verticals in the commercial enterprise space as well as the government space.” This required building teams capable of operating across different markets and customer segments.
Key Team Building Principles
Based on Meroxa’s experience, several key principles emerge:
- Start with self-awareness about strengths and weaknesses
- Hire for complementary skills, not just technical excellence
- Look for shared values and work ethic
- Build support teams early
- Focus on making others successful
The Future View
Looking ahead, DeVaris sees team building as crucial for scaling across markets. With projections of “60% to 70% government, 30% to 40% commercial” revenue split, having teams that can operate effectively across different segments is essential.
For technical founders, Meroxa’s experience offers a valuable lesson: the fastest path to growth often comes from building around your weaknesses rather than doubling down on your strengths. As DeVaris puts it: “If I would have learned that in my 20s, man, I feel like the bars you see could have been a whole lot better.”