“We did good stuff together, we riffed and created together and improved each other’s ideas,” Mallin said. “I don’t think there was a conscious moment where I said, ‘I’m going to be Scott’s business partner.’ It just morphed into that.”
Complementary skills also have fueled their partnership.
“I’m a wild visionary, a 20-ideas-a-day kind of guy,” Mallin said. “And, you know, of the 20, some of them are even good. Scott is details, organized lists, crossing things off, driving the outcomes until it happens. In some way, his job is to help me, help us, select the one good idea from the 20 ideas, five days a week that might have a value in the outcome.”
Two people with technical expertise in engineering or biosciences, for example, might have success in the initial stages of developing a product. But they’ll have to see they need partners or team members with skills in marketing or patenting or seeking funding, said Kanhaiya Sinha, an entrepreneurship professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Labovitz School of Business and Economics.
Sinha also recommended seeking diversity in business partners: people who hold different worldviews, who come from other social and economic backgrounds, who speak different languages, who might be immigrants. Those perspectives can lead to better solutions. Diversity also should mean making a conscious effort to work with people who are different from you and not only those who share characteristics like age, ethnicity or beliefs.
That said, you also should look for compatibility.
