Five tips for DeepTech entrepreneurs starting their scale-up journey

In this week’s Full-Stack Leader podcast series I was in conversation with Ryan Williams. We discussed the vision and mission of BLUESKEYE AI, and how our leaders deal with the complications of building ethical AI solutions to measure medically relevant behaviour. Towards the end of the podcast, I was asked to give five tips for DeepTech entrepreneurs who are just starting on their scale-up journey. Here I provide them again, in writing:

🔭 Tip 1: Trust your own expertise-grounded vision to build competitive advantage

If you are a true domain expert creating new-to-market technology, you have to trust that you know what you're talking about, and that you can see a future others find hard to accept or even imagine. Use this to build a competitive advantage, making decisions today that others simply can’t see are necessary for months or even years to come.

You will probably receive lots of criticism from short-term thinkers. This is why it’s important to surround yourself with advisors, investors, board members, and executives that share a forward-looking approach during the start up and the early scale-up phases of your company.

📏 Tip 2: Learn how to communicate clearly and concisely

It is one thing to build a detailed, well-thought through technology, product, and go-to-market strategy. However, as you enter the scale-up phase of your company, it is no longer enough to have this documented - the company has now become too large, with pockets of specialisation that mean that you cannot rely on everyone reading and understanding everything. That means as a leader, or a leader of leaders, the onus is on YOU to remove the detail, to clearly and concisely communicate these roadmaps. Forget the detail, be reductionist.

This can be hard for technology-led founders. It certainly was for me. For years you pour all your effort into creating all this detail. To filling in all the blanks. And suddenly, the detail has become a curse - at least in some contexts. This stage of a company favours leaders who can transition between levels of detail in their thinking and communication more than any other stage of a company.

🚧 Tip 3: Create a culture where failing is celebrated

Learning can’t just be from success - it must also come from failure. And if you never fail, you’re not taking enough risk - not good for a startup. So, you must create a culture where failing is celebrated. Not in the sense that you seek to fail, of course, but in the sense that people accept that things will go wrong and that when that happens, it’s a golden opportunity for learning. And talking about it with your team provides them with an opportunity for learning, and of course, talking about it openly gives an opportunity to leaders to point out follow-on risks of things going wrong, to highlight why it’s important to escalate things that went wrong.

For small teams at startup scale it’s easy to put this in place, as it’s easier to feel safe enough to own up in front of people you know well. For bigger companies, this is harder. One thing that works well enough for us is that we turn it into a game - on Fridays 15-minute end-of-week standup I start with my biggest win, my biggest fail, who I helped, and who helped me (a single person). That single person is then the next one to own up. This game-like structure means we can control duration and because no one knows who will end up being called up, everyone needs to have their wins and fails in mind.

👥 Tip 4: Regularly ask personal questions during your 121s

Startups and scale-ups are messy. You and your direct reports are constantly putting out fires. So it’s natural for your 121s to go all over the place, if you’re not careful. And in that lies the risk of missing longer-term, bigger problems that are hard to fix if left unaddressed. So, at least once a month, ask a set of fixed questions. The regularity of these questions means that people will get familiar with them.

We ask 8 questions, four of which are task-related, and four are personal. But boy, are the personal ones useful. We ask about their workload, their general wellbeing, their personal development, and… their relationships in the company. And boy is that last one revealing! You learn about side-relationships between teams, what works, and what doesn’t, and generally just get to learn a lot about the team that you would otherwise never know about.

💬 Tip 5: Meetings matter - so treat them that way

One way to think of the trajectory of your scale-up is as a series of decisions. And unless you run a dystopian company, these decisions will be made with a degree of consensus often arrived at during team meetings. If viewed this way, team meetings are one of the most important things to optimise in your company. Personally, I am a big fan of some of Jeff Bezos’ thinking on this topic: small meetings, that are well prepared with ideally a one or six-page memo. Small, because you are in a phase where you need to move fast and make decisions. Well-prepared, because a crisp document clearly articulating the problem, the potential options and a recommendation of a decision means everyone can be on exactly the same page after 10 minutes of reading, have a well-informed debate, and then feel a decision can be safely made.

In addition, I am a big fan of scheduling time to action your decisions after a meeting. There’s no point in having back-to-back meetings if you can’t execute the decisions made.

I hope these are of use. In the Full Stack Leader podcast I expand on them - go have a listen!