Imperial founders reveal five ingredients to build the strongest startup teams

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 said, “I have built many different types of teams, both in academia and in successful startups. If I try to squeeze one lesson from all of that experience it’s this: you’re working with people who want to create change, 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, said, “The narrative changes 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 spend effort to keep the narrative working and communicate to your whole team, because sometimes the decisions you make might look strange to them.”

You don’t always need an external commercial lead

For most types of spinouts an external person just can't get the deep understanding required to do early commercial sales Dr Tanel Ozdemir Investment Director, Albion VC

Conventional wisdom says that companies at universities need to find a commercial lead whose industry experience can bridge the gap from research into the business world. But the experiences of our panel bring this into question. Dr Zhao said, “To this day, me and my co-founders hold all our key account relationships and I don’t see that changing any time soon. I think our customers want to take a look at the founders and see ‘can I trust you?’ or ‘do you know your stuff?’”

Dr Tanel Ozdemir, Investment Director at Albion VC, agreed, saying, “In my view, the best companies do founder-led sales. For most types of spinouts an external person just can’t get 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, ask 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 said, “We’re a small team and that brings risk, because 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 said 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 need 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 need for trust and ability to have difficult conversations was emphasised by everyone on the panel. Professor Zafeiriou said that mentality was key: “If you don’t align early, it’s much better to split early. Founders need a particular kind of mentality - appetite for success and the ability to receive feedback and be ok to go into hard discussions and make 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 get four years into the journey and start questioning why you’re doing things the way you are.”

Small teams can move mountains

If you can, keeping the team small and disciplined is much better Dr Yan Zhao Co-founder, Breathe Battery Technologies

Small teams are often more successful than big ones. For some companies, that might be because 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 because we would have had to manage a lot of downtime.”

In other cases, smaller is better to mitigate the risks of growing too fast. Dr Zhao’s company, Breathe, has grown substantially over six years and now has around 70 employees. He said, “Someone told 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 small 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 needed to hire – and once convinced I spent a lot of time on due diligence to ensure I made 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 making 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 small, closely knit team, Dr Clarke from Embody said: “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 asked to join the company. I’m not sure I know why exactly, but it must have been because 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, saying: “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 need a clear narrative and to find alignment.”