This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Your leadership team is full of promotions nobody made
Every successful founder reaches a point where the leadership team finally takes shape. The senior roles are filled: someone leading engineering, someone leading commercial, someone across operations and finance. After years of carrying most of it yourself, it feels like the transition from startup to scale-up is underway.
But is this truly the leadership team to take the company to the next level? Was each person selected for that particular role, or did they assume it by default?
In many cases, few of those roles were ever ‘decided’. Someone joined early, took on a little more each quarter, and became head of their function without anyone saying the words. The title caught up with a job they had already drifted into. The role kept growing, and no one stopped to ask whether the person who found themselves in the seat was still the right one to hold it.
Even posing the question feels like a betrayal of the people who got you here. It is not. The role has changed, and asking whether the person has changed with it is not just fair, it is a critical test for the aspiring scale-up founder/CEO.
There are two tests: Can the person stop doing the job that made them a high-value contributor in the first place, now that the senior role is a different job, not a bigger one? And are they able to step up to lead a large, complex function that may be way beyond their prior experience? Willingness and capability are different, and a founder has to weigh both...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Your leadership team meeting is holding your startup back
Picture the regular leadership team meeting. Each function takes its turn. Engineering reports where the build has got to, sales runs through the pipeline, finance walks the numbers, operations flags what is stuck. The founder listens, asks a sharp question here and there, and nods the room along. Everyone leaves informed.
It was a well-run report. It was not a team deciding anything.
Last week's note argued that a set of functional heads each reporting to the founder/CEO is not yet a leadership team but a hub-and-spoke management model: the founder as the one point every cross-functional decision has to pass through. This week is about the single forum where that structure is either replaced or unwittingly reinforced: the leadership team meeting, and what it is actually for.
Here is the most uncomfortable part first. The meeting most founders run, with each head reporting progress to the founder in turn, does more than eat time. It reinforces the hub-and-spoke structure, meeting after meeting, in plain sight. And because it looks so much like worthy diligence, it is almost impossible to see as the problem...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Why founders end up trapped by the leadership team they built
Ask a founder who has just closed their Series A to describe the leadership team and watch what they reach for. They point at the org chart. Head of Engineering here, a commercial lead finally hired, operations and finance each with a capable person in the box at last. After years of carrying those functions alone, the founder looks at the chart and feels something settle. The team is built.
Well, the chart might be complete. But the team does not exist – at least not yet.
More than thirty years ago, Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith drew a distinction every scaling founder should study: the difference between a working group and a real team. A working group is a set of strong individuals who each deliver in their own lane and meet mainly to share information; their output is the sum of individual bests. A real team produces something none of them could alone and holds itself mutually accountable for the result. It meets to make decisions. The two look identical on a chart and behave nothing alike.
Most founders, through the first institutional rounds, build the first and name it the second, in a structure with only one real point of connection: themselves. Each function reports to the founder, spoke to hub. So, every key decision that touches two functions at once has one place to go, up the spokes and back down through the one person connected to everyone. The founder has become the integration point for the whole company. Early on, that is an asset. It is about to become the thing that holds both the company and the founder back...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Your best investor pitch is the one you'll never hear
Ask a DeepTech founder at Seed or Series A what they are most anxious about before a raise, and almost all of them point at the technology. Is the demonstration robust enough. Will the data survive a technical partner's scrutiny. Can we prove, beyond argument, that the science does what we say it does. So the weeks before a round pour into exactly that: the demo, the data room, the technical appendix that answers the question they are certain decides everything.
But they are answering the stated question, not the real one. Yes, the science matters. But an experienced early-stage investor is not, at the very beginning of this conversation, trying to satisfy themselves that the tech works. They have provisionally granted it, because backing that kind of bet is the entire reason their fund exists. What they are testing, first and hardest, is whether anyone will actually need the thing you are building once it does.
And they do not test that by asking you. They test it by asking your early adopters, in conversations you are not in, cannot hear, and cannot stage-manage. You will have pitched. It will have gone well, or seemed to. Then, after your meeting and well before any term sheet, the most consequential conversation of your raise takes place in a room you have just left...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- DeepTech's long timelines, and the excuse they become
Every DeepTech founder learns to explain the timeline. The science is hard, the build is long, and the mainstream market may be years away. You get good at saying this, because it is true, and because the founders who cannot hold their nerve through extended timelines rarely make it. Patience, you are told, is the DeepTech virtue.
The founders who get caught out are not the impatient ones. They are the ones who let that patience become embedded in the company culture.
Because "our timelines are long" slowly becomes the answer to everything. The senior hire that should have taken three weeks drifts into its third month. The first real customer conversation waits until the product feels ready, and the product never quite feels ready. The raise starts late, because there is always one more result worth having in hand first. None of that is the science. It has simply borrowed the same excuse. And while you are being patient about the things that were never fixed, a competitor who saw you prove the market exists is moving faster on every one of them.
That is the trap. Your timeline is really two clocks running at once. One is the external clock: the physics, the regulatory approval, the slow build of market adoption, everything whose speed is set by someone other than you and that no amount of your urgency will move. The other is the internal clock: the decisions you make, the people you hire, the customers you prioritise, the round you run, everything whose speed is yours to set.
Most founders run the internal clock far slower than they think, mistaking a habit for a constraint. The trick is to run the internal clock much faster than feels natural, not only out of competitive necessity, but to be ready for that tipping point moment when the external clock suddenly accelerates...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- The founder skill investors test, but never name
What is an investor buying when they back your DeepTech startup through the early growth rounds?
Not the technology. By the time a company is raising these rounds, the technology is table stakes, proven enough to be interesting, unproven enough to be a bet. What they are really underwriting is a founder who can scale with the business. And scaling means one hard discipline above all others: steadily letting go of the hands-on work that carried the company to this point. Over the coming rounds the company now needs the founder to transition to a new role - a very different role to that needed at the start.
This is the companion question to one we asked in an earlier issue, which looked at the engineer-to-CEO transition from the inside, as an identity shift the founder has to live through. This week we are on the other side of the table. Because the same transition you experience as a private struggle, your investor is watching as a commercial signal. And they are reading it long before you think the test has started...
