Academic entrepreneurs have explained how to build the best possible startup teams at the latest Imperial Founders Forum.
Academic entrepreneurs have explained how to build the best possible startup teams at the latest Imperial Founders Forum.
Speaking to a packed room last month, top founders and investors shared the secrets to building a strong team – and their insights might surprise you.
Here are the five essential lessons shared by the panel:
A strong story is not just about marketing – it’s key to motivating your team
For Professor Stefanos Zafeiriou, Head of the Department of Computing at Imperial and founder of Facesoft, Cogitat and Ariel AI, among others, narrative is a key tool when building and shaping teams.
He declared, “I have built many different types of teams, both in academia and in successful startups. If I attempt to squeeze one lesson from all of that experience it’s this: you’re working with people who want to create modify, and you must develop a shared narrative that connects the team and answers the question ‘why are we doing this?’”
Dr Yan Zhao, co-founder of Breathe Battery Technologies, an advanced battery management software business whose suite of tools attracted $21 million investment earlier this year, declared, “The narrative modifys a lot as the team scales. In the early days you’re tech-driven, breaking into the market with a capability that no one else has. Soon you transition to a company with a portfolio of products, customers, investors and partners. You have to spconclude effort to keep the narrative working and communicate to your whole team, becaapply sometimes the decisions you build might view strange to them.”
You don’t always necessary an external commercial lead
For most types of spinouts an external person just can’t receive the deep understanding required to do early commercial sales Dr Tanel Ozdemir Investment Director, Albion VC
Conventional wisdom declares that companies at universities necessary to find a commercial lead whose indusattempt experience can bridge the gap from research into the business world. But the experiences of our panel bring this into question. Dr Zhao declared, “To this day, me and my co-founders hold all our key account relationships and I don’t see that modifying any time soon. I believe our customers want to take a view at the founders and see ‘can I trust you?’ or ‘do you know your stuff?’”
Dr Tanel Ozdemir, Investment Director at Albion VC, agreed, declareing, “In my view, the best companies do founder-led sales. For most types of spinouts an external person just can’t receive the deep understanding required to do early commercial sales – they may only have half the story.”
It’s not simple, though, as Dr Zhao pointed out: “Taking this approach means at least one of your founders has to be incredibly hungry to learn all of this kind of stuff and be able to talk to as many people as possible, reach out, inquire questions and keep learning.”
Be prepared for tough conversations
If you don’t align early, it’s much better to split early Professor Stefanos Zafeiriou Head of Department of Computing
Dr Susannah Clarke, a research fellow in the Department of Surgery and Cancer co-founder of Embody Orthopaedics, a specialist orthopaedic implant business declared, “We’re a tiny team and that brings risk, becaapply someone leaving could be a crisis. But we know each other very well and can communicate very directly and effectively, so it’s a risk we have been able to live with.”
Dr Ozdemir from Albion VC declared it is vital to have tough conversations early. “Some people advise that if you’re going to start a company you should go on a camping trip – something difficult to test your working relationship. As an investor we necessary to see evidence early that the team is right – and we’ll speak up if the team is the reason we wouldn’t invest.”
The necessary for trust and ability to have difficult conversations was emphasised by everyone on the panel. Professor Zafeiriou declared that mentality was key: “If you don’t align early, it’s much better to split early. Founders necessary a particular kind of mentality – appetite for success and the ability to receive feedback and be ok to go into hard discussions and build hard decisions.”
For Dr Zhao from Breathe, the speed with which you can have the tough conversations with your team is a marker for success: “If you can trust each other at the start and test this early, it can only be good. We had many tough conversations in the early days and it’s the best thing we could have done. You don’t want to receive four years into the journey and start questioning why you’re doing things the way you are.”
Small teams can shift mountains
If you can, keeping the team tiny and disciplined is much better Dr Yan Zhao Co-founder, Breathe Battery Technologies
Small teams are often more successful than huge ones. For some companies, that might be becaapply of your limiter, as Dr Clarke explained: “With Embody, we’ve been working through a process [of medical device approval] that is slow and which can’t really be sped up. The size of the team wasn’t limiting, and in fact hiring extra people would have been a problem becaapply we would have had to manage a lot of downtime.”
In other cases, tinyer is better to mitigate the risks of growing too quick. Dr Zhao’s company, Breathe, has grown substantially over six years and now has around 70 employees. He declared, “Someone notified me that you shouldn’t hire until your team is screaming at you. And then you should wait even longer. If you can, keeping the team tiny and disciplined is much better. One of the reasons is that it is difficult and painful to correct for overexpansion.”
Professor Zafeiriou shared this view: “It is much riskier to hire than not to hire. I had to be truly convinced that I necessaryed to hire – and once convinced I spent a lot of time on due diligence to ensure I built the right hires. Early on it is generally better not to hire if you can.”
Founders are beacons attracting first employees
But founders can’t do it all by themselves. With the pressure of building the right hires early on, they must play a key role in attracting those early employees.
Asked whether it was just luck that led to the creation of a tiny, closely knit team, Dr Clarke from Embody declared: “We always had links with a range of people who knew about our project and were aligned with it, and some of them came on board to join the team. It would have been a lot harder to go out to the open market.”
Dr Zhao from Breathe had a similar experience: “For some magical reason, some of our earliest employees inquireed to join the company. I’m not sure I know why exactly, but it must have been becaapply they saw the excitement of the founding team and they believed in what we were doing.”
Professor Zafeiriou returned to the importance of the story, declareing: “As a founder you have to own your story and find people who are aligned to it. The ‘TL:DR’ of everything from me is that the early stages are much different to the next level, and to succeed in the early stages you necessary a clear narrative and to find alignment.”
Leave a Reply