This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Going American has a price, and it is not equity
Last September, in The Great Transatlantic Divergence, we gave UK founders with global ambition an uncomfortable piece of advice: stop waiting for Europe to fix itself - and think American from day one. Incorporate in Delaware, hire US executives, raise from investors that can actually fund your growth. For most frontier founders, that still holds.
But there is a category where it comes with a complication we did not spell out then. If you build in dual-use technology, in AI, quantum, space, or advanced semiconductors, and you decide to expand into the United States, you are not making one decision. You are making three at once, and only one of them feels like a business choice. The other two are governed by the national-security machinery of two separate governments, pulling in opposite directions.
The founders who get hurt are not the ones who say no to America. They are the ones who say yes without noticing how many doors that single yes opens, and how few of them open back the other way.
This is the first of a two-part series. This week, the trap: the three regimes that close around a single decision. Next week, the smart structure: how to build so that selling to both governments, and raising the capital to do it, does not quietly foreclose your options...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Founders leading under fire: bringing the board bad news
Picture the board meeting before it happens. Revenue has stalled, a key hire has walked, or a critical development programme has slipped a quarter - and the next board meeting is three weeks away. The instinct of most founders is to wait, to use those three weeks to assemble a fuller picture, a tidier story, a problem that arrives already half-solved. It feels like the responsible thing to do.
It is almost always the wrong thing to do. The board is not primarily assessing the setback. It is assessing how you carry it. Directors expect things to go wrong, because things always go wrong, and a founder who never brings them a problem is not reassuring, they are unreadable. What the directors are gauging, in the days and weeks around bad news, is something simpler and harder to fake: whether a founder under pressure stays open and legible to them, or goes quiet and opaque exactly when they most need to see in.
This is the third and final briefing in our series on operating the early-stage board. The first two were about leading the regular meeting and reading each director in turn. This one is the hardest application of the same principle, because it asks you to lead the room at the precise moment your authority feels least secure...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Your board re-forms at every round. Learn to read it fast
Last week, we ended on a warning: the board you are managing today is not the board you will face in eighteen months. It changes shape beneath you, round by round, as each new investor-director arrives with an agenda of their own.
The shifts are marked. After a Seed round, the board might be the two co-founders and a single investor. After Series A, the founders, two investor-directors and an independent non-executive may form the new quorum. Each major round brings a new lead, and the new lead takes a seat.
That changing structure does changing work. At each stage the board is, or should be, optimised for a different job: early boards, through Seed and Series A, exist mainly to help find and exploit the early market; later boards turn to growth and company-building of a more classical kind, the shift in emphasis we traced in May. Neither is the better board.
The harder truth sits beneath the structure. Each director at the table has their own agenda. They may all carry the same legal duty to the company, but underneath is a private set of priorities that is theirs alone. Reading those priorities, director by director, is the real work of operating a board well...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Founders, your board doesn't want what it says it wants
Ask most founders what their board wants from a meeting and they will point at the board pack: the metrics, the financials, the update against plan. They are not wrong, exactly. But they are answering the stated question, not the real one. Behind every set of numbers, your directors are running a quieter assessment, and it has almost nothing to do with the slides.
The real question in the room is simpler and far more consequential: does this founder have a grip? Are they ahead of the business or behind it? When something breaks, will they see it first, or will the board? That assessment is being made whether you manage it or not, because the board holds the one power that matters most. It can judge and replace the chief executive. Shikhar Ghosh, the Harvard Business School professor and serial founder, is blunt about what this means: your board meetings are a continuous evaluation of you, dressed up as a review of the company.
So the founders who operate their boards well are not the ones with the most polished decks. They are the ones who understand what is actually being assessed, and who lead the room accordingly.
This is the first of three briefings on making your board work for you rather than against you. We start where it matters most: not with structure or composition, but with the unglamorous business of being seen to be in control...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Why DeepTech companies fail even when the science works
Every DeepTech founder works for years to reach the same moment. The science finally works. The prototype runs to spec. The team has crossed a threshold the wider market has not yet seen. And the founder, having poured years and most of their identity into reaching this point, makes a quiet assumption that turns out to be wrong. They assume the technology will now speak for itself.
It rarely does. The breakthrough is one thing. The commercial opportunity it unlocks is another. Investors, customers, even the team that helped build it can usually grasp the science. What they cannot see, without the founder doing the work to show them, is the business that could be built on top of it. The founder, surprised, blames the market for being slow when the cause is closer to home.
Hailey Eustace, founder of Commplicated, puts it sharply. More than half of DeepTech companies fail within five years, not because the technology let them down but because the founder did. They could not communicate the company well enough, to enough people, to keep it alive.
This is the discipline many DeepTech founders learn too late. And the audience they most often forget is already inside the building...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- The ten-year founder in a five-year VC ecosystem
Most published advice on building startups is written for software founders. Much of it is practically useless in DeepTech. The dominant vocabulary, built on the seminal works of Eric Ries's Lean Startup theory and Steve Blank's Customer Development methodology, was created for software businesses that can build, ship, learn and iterate at speed.
When founders are told to "trust the process", it is this loop of rapid iteration they are being told to trust. The frameworks are excellent in their native context, and they have become foundational to how an entire generation of founders thinks about building a company.
So deeply ingrained have these frameworks become in the startup psyche that they have almost become invisible - their heritage forgotten. Founders absorb the assumptions without noticing they are assumptions, and the venture ecosystem has organised itself around them: the advice columns, the accelerator curricula, the questions investors ask in diligence.
For a DeepTech founder, this creates a problem that is hard to name precisely because it is everywhere. The SaaS rapid iteration loop is the wrong shape for the work. What follows is an exploration of two failure modes it produces, one internal, one external, and what the strongest DeepTech founders do about each...
