POTENTIAWhat "requisite variety" means for a founding team — and why it predicts survival
"Requisite variety" is a systems-theory concept, not a startup one originally: a system can only handle as much complexity as its internal variety allows for. Applied to a founding team, it asks whether the range of skills and backgrounds on the team actually matches the range of problems the business is going to hit.
A two-person team that's both brilliant engineers building a product whose real challenge is regulatory and go-to-market complexity has a requisite-variety gap, regardless of how strong the code is. The gap doesn't show up in the product demo. It shows up eighteen months later, when the problem the team is worst-equipped for turns out to be the one that actually mattered.
This is a factor that's easy to check and easy to miss, because pitch decks are optimized to showcase strengths, not to volunteer the range of problems the team hasn't covered yet.
See how a consent-based check actually works.