Inventorium

Swequity has three goals for participants:

• Learn about commercialization
• Networking
• Develop and validate potential business ideas

And after just two sessions, the programme has established an impressive track record: Three participants from Swequity I in early 2012 were accepted on to the NDRC’s flagship LaunchPad accelerator.

I attended Swequity II, and three from that session made it on to the latest LaunchPad. Meanwhile, a straggler from Swequity I got the call for the same programme. Another participant got on to DIT’s Hothouse. Yet another is a top 20 finalist at Wayra. Meanwhile, my start-up Sicknosis has gotten the call for phase one of Invest NI’s Propel Programme. All told, that’s an impressive batting average.

The Swequity process is fairly simple but consists of a number of competitive hurdles. The first is an application process where hopefuls submit their ideas online. For the Swequity II programme in late 2012, there were around 100 ideas submitted.

Around 20 of the “idea owners” made it to the next phase where they were invited to a two-day workshop to fine tune their pitches.

So, in early November, we trooped in to the NDRC’s former warehouse building in Dublin’s historic Liberties for an intensive two-day session to prepare for the next hurdle.

The workshop included some important pep talks before participants stood up in front of each other to pitch their business ideas. Things could have gotten hairy here because we knew we were competing against each other for a spot on Swequity II  where 12 of the 20 ideas would make it through.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere was one of cooperation because, at the end of the day, we all knew that we in the same boat!

The second reason, at least in my opinion, was that there was no point getting upset by awkward questions. We knew they would be asked eventually in a more public forum. Better to get the stumbling or uncertain answers out of the way before standing in front of a larger crowd.

This audience was part of the next competitive phase — the gateway to Swequity proper. The idea owners were given just 90 seconds to pitch their ideas to all of the applicants to the programme. I’m not sure how many attended that but my guess is that it between 70 and 80. Some were idea owners who didn’t make it while others were there to network or join a start up.

I have got to say that this was one of the most stressful pitches I have done. No Powerpoint was allowed, and I spent hours memorizing the short pitch. During that work, it dawned on me that I hadn’t tried to memorize anything that long since I left secondary school, and I can safely say that exercise didn’t bring back any pleasant memories.

The large audience turned out to be quite a diverse group. There were techies, designers, marketers, and sales and business people.

For the idea owners that made it through, five tough but extremely useful sessions lay ahead of us. These generally consisted of a morning talk on some aspect of entrepreneurship. We had successful entrepreneur Anthony Quigley, for example, on how to identify customers. Investor and mentor Diane Roberts drove the point home with her talk on customer validation. Brian Caulfield advised on how to pitch properly to Venture Capitalists.

After the talks, the team workshops centred around the Lean Canvass, a deceptively simple business planning tool. Just one page in size, it seems easy. But the effort required to flesh out a start-up’s proposed business plan takes a lot of work. There was also plenty of homework and a few Saturday meetings to boot.

The final Swequity session was a workshop on pitching because there was yet another competition. This one was in front of the public and an investment panel. At stake here was the glory and some press coverage.

All told, Swequity is a must-do for any entrepreneur with an early idea they want to test. The competitive stages progressively help you fine tune your proposition. They can also help you decide on whether the proposal is even worth pursuing — an important point for people who want to become entrepreneurs but who have yet to find the right idea.

But the environment is equally important. I can honestly say the organizers and participants were a great group of people. The organizers because they were genuinely interested in progressing the start-ups. As for my fellow participants, I came out of there wishing everyone well in their endeavours. Many of us are still in touch and we know we can contact each other for advice or a chat.

Closing the deal

Included in your overheads are sales activities, and Quigley reckons that how you sell ought to be weighed carefully: “If you can realistically expect people to sign up for your app in droves, through a totally automated funnel, you can price a particular way to get the balance right between number of users and price per user. Then just optimise the hell out of your funnel. If selling your app or product takes a phone call, or a series of phone calls and meetings and contracts, you need to price accordingly. Unless you come up with an alternative approach—which is possible!—someday you’ll need a sales team, and you’ll need to motivate them with bonuses, probably as a percentage of each sale. The pricing will need to make it worth their time—and your time.”

Working backwards

Another NDRC Launchpad graduate, Zendoc, takes a top-down approach to pricing. Zendoc aims to provide a subscription-based quality management service (QMS) for SMEs in the thriving Medical Technology sector, and Business Developing Manager and co-founder, Cormac McCarthy, knows his potential market and clients well. He knows that as small and medium businesses, his clients won’t be able to afford the solutions their larger counterparts use (they may not want the same, dense solutions either) and he uses his competitor’s pricing as a benchmark from which to gauge his pricing.

He also examines his target sector’s pain points and calculates how much manpower and how many hours his company’s solution could save an individual company, and works backwards to price his offerings accordingly. “We’re focussed on creating an online, affordable option for smaller companies…They might be paying, say, 25 to 35 thousand for an administrator to handle paper documents and oversee other regulatory processes, and when [our system is implemented]…we factor this down by, say, one-third to about 10K—and we have a target sales price for an average company. It’s by no means a complete pricing strategy and it’s something we’re trying to test at the moment, but at least it’s a starting point ”.

Start low?

Although, Zendoc plans on offering its first customers a discounted rate, McCarthy warns against undervaluing your offering because, he says, a company should aim for longevity: “You’re not out to fleece anyone, but at the same time, you want to make sure your venture is financially viable, both for your own sake and so that your customers’ investment isn’t wasted because you don’t make it past the first year or two in business.” Like many digital offerings, McCarthy says Zendoc’s is a “living, changing, customisable” service, and he also needs to factor the ever-evolving nature of the system into the price—another reason pricing too low can harm your chances of survival. And as even a marketing novice will tell you, it’s a lot easier to drop your prices later on, than is it to hike them up.

The rare egg

But what if, diverging from the Zendoc case, your firm aims to release a product or service unlike anything on the market? You have no competitors and you may not even be sure of who exactly comprises your potential customer base. Some questions to ask yourself in this case are, “Am I offering something of premium quality?”, “Am I saving people money/time/effort?”, “Can I tailor my product to individual requirements?”, “How much would I be willing to pay?”, “Is my technology entertaining/easy to use?”. Not only will your answers help you to develop an appropriate price, but they’ll also give you some persuasive marketing angles.

Still need help?

Although the Internet abounds with pricing models, there is no magic equation for calculating what you can or should be charging for your new tech offering. McCarthy sites Launchpad’s Johnny Harte (twitter) as a resource providing financial mentoring in Ireland, but if you don’t have access to him, you could turn to consultancies or specially qualified accountants or product managers, provided you can afford them. A more affordable option is to undertake some market research, either formally or conversationally, with your prospective clients, testing their reactions to tentative pricing and harvesting any feedback proffered.

The King is in his counting house…

As a participant in the startup realm, you may be more motivated by the excitement of foraying into new territory and by your relative autonomy than by a the promise of fortunes, but it’s important to remember to continue to do what you love, you’ll need more to run on than just blackbird pie.

It’s easier to talk about statistical measurements when you speak of people as entities, but Dorsey points out that you need to really “feel their needs.”

WhatClinic is a web service that connects patients with clinics around the world who can deliver the service they need. Its founder and CEO, Caelen King says that their mission is to create a better marketplace for the benefit of patients and clinics. “It’s not for the benefit of one without the other. Balancing the two of those is the key thing.”

“A two-sided business is inherently complex to run,” says King. “If you overprioritise the person who pays you, or you lose functionality, people stop using it quickly.”

It’s important to remember that the person who uses a service for free is the product. “They consent to be your product, and things fall down if you lose the consent.”

But it’s not enough just to get buyers and sellers into a room together. “You have to facilitate,” he says. “You can serve up banner ads, and that’s fine, but you have to deliver more value.”

One way WhatClinic does this is that if a clinic doesn’t reply to a patient within 24 hours, a workflow of emails and phone calls starts, which helps to connect the two. If the clinic doesn’t respond within 48 hours, WhatClinic will suggest another clinic the patient might try. “There’s real value in it, but it’s not something we can market as a message without insulting our customers.”

That relationship has to be carefully managed because while the needs of the two groups aren’t necessarily in competition, the money and the consent come from different motivations. But, King adds, “If you understand the psychology of the user, that’s very valuable to your customer.”

Liam Ryan runs GetHealth, a graduate of NDRC’s accelerator programme LaunchPad, a product that helps people track their health and fitness goals. They’re aiming it at corporate entities, where they make a business case for reducing sick days and insurance claims.

If company employees get healthier the business runs more efficiently. But those employees have to want to use the product, so it has to have features that benefit them. Where do you start?

“We decided to sell it before we built it,” says Ryan. “For the first 3 or 4 months we just sold it, we didn’t build anything.”

Anyone with a great service can generate lots of users, but first you need to know what people will pay for.

“Jack [Dorsey] knew he got it wrong with Twitter. With Square he made sure he got his customers first.”

Ryan and his team recently went to a conference in Chicago attended by corporate wellness managers and CFOs. GetHealth wanted to get a better understanding of the pain points they could be addressing.

“[The wellness managers and CFOs] wanted to improve communication with employees about wellness initiatives, and measure the return on investment.” Isolating these pivot points helped them understand more about what the paying customers are looking for.

But how do you actually measure that return on investment?

Dorsey argues that seeing people as statistical entities misses the point, and King adds that “praying to the altar of stats” isn’t always as helpful as it seems.

“To get mathematical certainty requires massive volumes of data, unless the change is monstrously large. If you’re looking at a feature that might be 2 or 3 percent better, you need hundreds of thousands of data points to get any degree of certainty.”

WhatClinic has more than a million users a month, but it still takes weeks to test a feature, even with the scale that can help them measure with numbers.

Sometimes, he says, you still have to go with your gut. “And your gut is frequently wrong, but you have to accept that you’re making errors.”

You have to listen to your non-paying users, “You’re already listening to the other people because you’re selling to them.”

But if your gut is wrong, he points out, your users will probably let you know. “I think the users are always going to be more honest to you than the people who are paying you.”

How much does your name matter?

Any name can work if you’ve got enough money, but most people don’t have enough money, so you have to be clever. But your name isn’t as important as getting to the top of the sector you’re in, as a new thing. You need to think, what sector am I in? Can I slice it and dice it down, and define it so tightly that I’m the leading light? That’s when you come up with your tagline. Your tagline is more important than your name.

So what comes first?

Defining your sector is really everything. If you haven’t figured out your sector and why you’re unique, there’s no point in naming yourself. For example, if I’m making a game for iPad, let’s say there are 400,000 games. So I look at educational games, and there are 100,000 of those. So mine is for kids ages 9 to 12, but there are still 60,000 of those. But you choose a niche within that, so now you’ve defined your sector and framed the debate so that you’re going to win.

An interesting example of this is StoryToys,  interactive books based on Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Rather than compete in the big games sector, they’re in interactive books. If you walk into any Apple store in the world, the demo on the front of every iPad is a StoryToys interactive book. They labeled themselves as a game with reading.

It’s about making yourself rise to the top of whatever sector it is you want to dominate. Then you can go to journalists with processed stories and trend stories about that sector – nobody wants to be writing puff pieces, so you’ll actually get more publicity, too.

So basically, your tagline shows you’ve done your homework?

Yes, this three- to five-word line that tells people what sector you’re going to dominate. After that is money and talent, but that isn’t the immediate differentiator. When they go to raise money, a lot of people think that VCs are financial people. But they’re not – they’re marketeers. They want to know that you know your sector better than anyone. That’s what a great tagline tells them. But your tagline exists so that you can murder it.

Why do you need to kill it?

Your tagline is an internal metric that you should try to murder every day. Why? Because facebook had a tagline – I don’t know what it was, but they had one. What you want is to dominate your sector so much that the tagline is no longer necessary.

Your name does matter a little – you need to contextualize your name, but you really need to evolve your tagline and then, if you’re successful enough, you can kill it. If you’re still in need of a tagline after nine months, you might be failing.

So it’s more the overall approach to understanding and labeling your company?

The name isn’t that important, it’s everything around the name. I try to go with the “dyslexic K”. I stole it from Playskool and used it for Havok because I thought it was memorable and playful.

You can pick a name that evokes how you make the customer feel, or one that’s a descriptor of what you do, depending on the business. Havok’s main competitor was MathEngine, which is a really good descriptor of what the engine is. But Havok was about the effect. People wanted to feel cool.

Right now I’m helping a company now called Conker (from LaunchPad), for similar reasons. They’re in the games industry. And then you have the best name around, CoderDojo. They could have called it “computer science school”, which is what it is. But CoderDojo says, “I am The Karate Kid.” A name like that says, “How do I feel about myself when I’m using this thing?”

Do people get a little too far from sensible with names because it’s so hard to get a dot-com domain name?

People sweat the dot-com too much. The reality is that you very rarely will get stumbleupon business. People will hear about you in different ways. People misunderstand how business is won – in business-to-business you really don’t need a dot-com. You have to understand what social media and an online presence really do for you. Traffic doesn’t magically appear – you are driving people to you by pressing about 20 different levers.

What do you need to know before you name yourself?

People are very precious about the name, but your brand is more important, and your brand is how people describe you after you’ve left the room. That can be messy and you won’t be happy with it. It won’t be clean or on-message, but tough sh*t, that’s your brand, and you can’t be in every room.

It’s so much more than your name. It’s your sector, then your tagline, then your name – your name is the third most important thing with your brand.

(Hat-tip to @destraynor of well-named @Intercom for the EatMyBox tip.)

How would you describe a pivot?

It’s sort of an American word for failure. On the positive side, it’s around changing your idea as you get better market validation. You’re going out to market, and solving this problem, but then if you can’t get the validation, you have to rethink it. On the negative side, for some startups, it’s all about changing ideas on a whim, and quite quickly. Pivoting is all about the reason – you should only be pivoting after you have strong market validation, when you know that the direction you need to go in is slightly different than the one you’ve been going in.

Can you pivot too much?

One of the problems with startups is that the first thing they get when they first go out is a whole lot of opinions. Every time they meet someone else or talk to a mentor, they tend to get conflicting information. But you need to start looking at the fact behind those opinions, and only the facts will allow you to validate your idea. If you’re going out and people are saying, “This isn’t going to work,” you have to work out if that person has a fact that could be useful for you in validating what you’re doing.

How common is a dramatic pivot?

Most people will pivot to some degree. A lot of the “grown-up” companies, if you talk about their original idea, they’re probably quite far away from where that started. The secret in pivoting is to do it before you spend too much money. What you’re really trying to do is work out your value proposition for the marketplace, and if you can do that quickly and cheaply, then it’s worthwhile. You want to do it before you spend two million on it.

What are the risks of an extreme pivot, or of frequent pivoting?

It comes back to decision-making. If you’re going to pivot continuously or go after a completely new market, that would suggest to me a lack of ability to make decisions. You’re not really focusing on what the value proposition is. It’s where you’re taking on opinions and moving with the tide. One of the other things I talk to startups about a lot is trying to find the innovators who will use their products. Typically they will go to the mainstream market, and the market will say, “Yeah, if you put X, Y and Z and do all of these things, I might buy it.” That makes people think they have to develop more, but what they are really looking for are the innovators, the people who really have the problem right now and are willing to take on a product that isn’t 100% but solves the problem for them in some way. Eventually they will go mainstream, but for now finding these innovators is the thing they have to work on.

Does it often happen that people pivot beyond what they can be passionate about?

I could see this happening. But is passion the only thing that drives you? I don’t know. The biggest reason to pivot is on the basis of what customers tell you, or potential customers. Do you need the passion behind that? Maybe you do. These are real issues because it’s your life for the next two to three years. So if you lose that sense of passion, maybe it is the time to walk away.

How do you know when you have enough facts, and that it’s time to pivot?

The first reason would be that you’ve found the innovators and you’ve validated with customers. If the customers are saying, “We don’t like it like that, but we would buy it like this,” and there are enough of them saying that, maybe it’s time to pivot. Once you’ve decided, you should do it quickly. Don’t hang around in that limboland of should-I-or-shouldn’t-I.

Is there a particular way of pivoting that’s more successful than others?

There are different types of pivots. Lynne O’Donnell of  Tempity on the LaunchPad programme is a good example of someone who went out to the market and could see the difficulties in her game-changing idea, and yet saw a deeper opportunity in the market that was there. If you look at it, that was over a 12- to 14-week period, not spending two years developing a product and then changing it.
If there was a formula for this everyone would do it – and there isn’t one. There are no right or wrong answers. It’s a secret potion and not everybody gets it right.

What makes a startup successful?

Many things make a successful startup. Market validation early with clients is a key part, but you need all the other things, too. There’s a simple methodology, though: you have to have a product that solves a big problem with customers who have lots of money and a large market, and a team that can execute. If you can get those three, you’ll get the final piece, which is finance, through sales or investment, or a bit of both.

What happens if you find you need to pivot after you’ve spent money?

When people are investing in you, they’re investing in your business plan. Bring them along with you rather than declaring at a board meeting that you’ve gone in a different direction. What happens when you take external investment is that there’s now an extra group of people who are part of decision-making in the company. The best way to do that is to communicate and keep them on board.

What’s the business culture like in a rural area like yours?
In terms of business, it’s a lot of retail and care work. There aren’t a lot of tech businesses. When I was in London and I said I was going back to Colwyn Bay, people said, “There’ll be nothing up there.” But I’ve been here a year now since university, I’ve set up my own business and been asked to become part of a startup. I’ve done no advertising yet, and I seem to be getting work for all sorts of things. I get out and speak to people, and I use my existing network. You can’t be lazy around here.

Are there many events?
There are a few that I’ve attended and am going to attend. There aren’t as many as there would be in Manchester, London or Birmingham, but that’s what you expect. And you have to work harder to keep your reputation high in areas like this – word will spread fast if something goes wrong.

What are some of the other challenges for startups in rural areas?
Talent is an issue, in terms of finding people who have a big enough mindset to want to make the sacrifices required to be successful in a startup. I think people who understand tech — especially in terms of online startups – people in places like London, that’s what they expect. Around here people expect you to have a “proper job”, doing something that doesn’t require as much time, or money or sacrifice. In London they’ll happily take on a role at a startup, and might worry less about finance straightaway because they’re around successful startups.

It’s a culture that breeds itself. That’s why the UK government wants to create the Silicon Roundabout, or whatever they call it, in East London – they want to replicate Silicon Valley.

What is it like to be a risk-taker in a rural area?
It doesn’t take much to be seen as “unusual” in a rural area. One of the biggest issues for me setting up my own company and creating a job for myself, was that so many people were against it. People would ask me weekly if I “had a proper job yet”. And I’m thinking, why have we as a society got to a point where we just want to work for someone else? There’s such a lack of vision and drive to be our own people.

What about events like Jelly?
I think the issue is that one event won’t change a whole mindset of an area. And when you go, if there are fewer than ten people, you have a vicious circle that people will turn up to try it out and see there aren’t many people, then never turn up again.

What can be done to help form the kind of community startups need to succeed?
People try to use a device that’s been successful in other areas, and think it will be successful for their problem. But they’re not thinking about how to develop a tool for the situation they’re in. You can’t use the same ideas you do for general business, when you’re trying to create a way for startups to thrive. Or even for people in rural areas to network and create a community more easily.

You have to change people’s mindsets. As British people we tend to be quite negative about new things, even as business people who’ve gone through hardships and difficulties to make a successful business.

Is there a design solution?
I think Inventorium are in a good position to achieve this. Jelly is one thing, but other events are needed, not just getting out of the office for the day. People have a perception of value for time, and you have to show them their time will be spent wisely if they attend. Getting business people together would hopefully push that forward.

I think perhaps in places that are more built up, you can have a bad day at the office, and you can go to the pub, and you’d be fired up again because there are people talking about exciting new ideas and ventures. Where if you went to the pub here, you’d become even more depressed about your business.

I think someone should look into what makes those built-up areas successful and see how that can be replicated for a rural area. Obviously some things won’t replicate as easily as others. You could also get more people who are big in their fields to come along and show people that big things can happen in small places. A few inspirational speakers every few months would boost a lot of morale with people who run businesses in small areas.

What advice do you have for people who want to set up a startup in a small area?
Find people that have at least a similar desire to you and are “yes” people. They won’t give you all the disadvantages, and if they do, they’ll also give you solutions. Somebody who is positive is far more helpful than somebody who is negative – even if the positive person lacks realism.

According to Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh it’s either 30-40% (if your investors lose and you liquidate), 70-80% (if you don’t see the projected return on investment) or 90-95% (if you declare and fail to meet a projection). And that’s for businesses that even get to the product stage.

According to behavioral psychologist and startup adviser Matt Wallaert , “There’s a difference between naturalistic failures that should fail because it’s not the right time or it’s a bad idea, and things that fail for other reasons.”

Why do startups fail?

Dr Johnny Ryan is a tech thinker and Chief Innovation Officer at the Irish Times. He describes working with a promising startup whose technology was revolutionary. “The technology functioned, and despite poor design, it was clear to me that this could revolutionise an important aspect of the Internet users’ experience.”

But it was the sort of product that needed a large company as a partner. They spent too long trying to find one who was willing to pay for it to be a great user experience for their customers.

You need passion to get you through inevitable challenges, but this company also struggled because they cared a little too much. “The founder’s passion for technological innovation drove him to dive down successive rabbit holes of new feature development, leaving no time to get the fundamentals correct,” he says.

It’s never from just one cause, and it happens to so many startups, thanks to timing, funding, poorly defined offerings, under-developed technology, inability to pivot, and sometimes (we hope rarely) founder hubris.

Even though everyone acknowledges that startups fail for multiple reasons, it was tough to find people willing to talk to us for this post. We don’t like to talk about failure except in the abstract. But why?

Why we won’t talk about why startups fail

Before you think it’s an Irish approach to an Irish problem, it’s not. True, there’s a real aversion in Ireland, and it’s certainly not celebrated like it is in Silicon Valley, or light-heartedly addressed like at New York’s Startup Funeral events  (although Startup Funeral has a serious core). Avoiding the F-word is part of startup culture wherever you go.

New York-based Wallaert says it’s everywhere. “It’s the most relentlessly positive community you will ever meet, which is a great thing. You have to be overconfident as hell, but what results is a community that doesn’t talk about failure.”

When you don’t talk about failure, he says, it means that people don’t ask for help when they need it. “I’ve seen the inside of startups where things were on fire, and going terribly, and I see them go out for beers and they’ll say they’re doing great.”

He calls this ‘founders’ disease’. “It’s the complete inability to express authentically the challenges a startup is facing, and the individual is facing.”

It’s not because they’re deliberate liars, or unaware of it. “Startups are partially about appearance – no one is going to sign a deal with someone whose startup is a week away from failure.”

Using the F-word might be the only way to succeed

But if you don’t ask for help, nobody knows there’s room to give it.

“What’s ironic is that’s how things happen,” Wallaert says. “Business deals get made because you say to some friend that things aren’t going well, and that friend says, ‘Hey, I know someone.’ You don’t even have to ask for help, you just have to not lie about your status. People are nice – they want to be nice!”

That’s a feature of startupland: most of its relentlessly positive people don’t want to see anyone fail. They actually like to help.

“Most problems are only solved by someone helping,” he says. “If you could solve them yourself, you would have done it already.”

We know we’ve failed because we’ve usually run out of money, but there’s no one reason for it, just like there’s no standard metric for success — and nobody does it on their own.

In the tech world, startup founders are often quick to credit their teams for success, and blame themselves for failure. They’re right about success not being a solo effort, but the only time a failure is yours alone is when you fail to admit you need a hand.

Apply for NDRC’s accelerator programme LaunchPad here 

How much does personality have to do with it?

You need different personalities involved. If they’re all outgoing hunters, it will be difficult. But by the same token, if they’re all introverts, it will be difficult as well. You need a balance.

I love an extrovert on a team, who is a good presenter, and knows how to work assets like body language, knows how to make people feel comfortable, and is extremely responsive. Somebody who is a good emailer, good at following up, and doesn’t let things slide. They may not add a lot of content, but you need someone who is a very good communicator.

Can you talk a little more about what and how teams need to communicate?

It’s how you communicate transparently, how you convey a sense of urgency, get people to respond even when they’re busy, and how you leverage your relationships – that’s what makes a company get funded or work.

You’ve got to be out there. Of course, I’ve seen founders who are way too much out there — at every event and every conference — so you need results. If you have the team with the extrovert, the only way to empower that person is if there’s a team delivering while they are communicating.

And a good team will be brutally honest with each other. They don’t have to be that way with people outside the company, but within the company, that’s the only way they’re going to get better. If you have a situation where one member is dominating all the others and the feedback is only one way, that’s a recipe for disaster. You need open communication within the team.

What advice would you have for someone looking to build a team? How would you engage people to see if they fit?

I would start by asking what gets them excited. What do they enjoy doing the most? Why are they here? Focus on personal preferences: what makes them excited? That’s the only way you’ll be able to sustain what’s required of a startup – high alignment between with whom you spend your day, and who you are, and what your preferences are as a person.

That’s the big luxury in startupland, that we can decide from the start who we want to work with.

Should you ask people about how they handle challenges?

It’s a very difficult thing to do in a Q&A session. You only get to know people under stress and see how they react to stress. They will only give you the best-case scenario, how they’d like to be seen. And I don’t think that’s going to be how they actually are.

So I would focus on the positive stuff, and on what their interests are. The big ideas, what they think is going to change the world, and how they like to spend their day. Are they a day person or a night person? All of this can make a difference. And then spend a lot of time with them.

See how they react in social media, how responsive they are over emails. Articulate your idea in an email and send it out to see what they think, and see who gets back to you – if they don’t respond it’s probably that they’re not all that interested.

What else should you look for?

You’re also testing around the edges, not just of skills. They might be a great python developer, but you have to pick people who are multitalented and can do several jobs at once. You might have 16 different jobs and three people.

So you might have an introverted developer, but given a couple of hours in the evening, he can actually formulate why his product is better than the competitors’. These are the people I’d be looking for, the ones who can really bring something to the party.

What else do you need to think about when you’re building a team?

Which of the team can actually devote time, and in what quantity. Be realistic about your time. Certain things can be done contractually – things like foundervesting, and what that means for people who want to put together a startup. Figuring out what you do with the fallout when you know it’s not going to work.

Teams that are too big are also not going to work. One of the key metrics for success is whether the team can grow. Can it attract people? If you start with a nucleus of six and then it’s down to two after three months, something is not working. It should go in the other direction. You should start a trio and build it up to an orchestra.

How do you determine ownership on a team?

You have to decide who is a founder and who is an employee. And like I said, chief anything is disastrous – it pigeonholes people and limits ability to move around. You have to have people who are willing to grow, for their job to be 100% different in a year’s time.

On the title issue, conferring the status of founder or cofounder on people is really important. It should be everybody that was doing this full-time at the start for at least six months. You can earn a cofounder title – you can tell someone, “If you start and it works out, I’ll make you a cofounder.” For the lifetime of the startup it’s important because it’s the DNA. You infuse the startup with who you are, with that DNA.

If you’ve got a great idea for a business but need a team, or if you’d like to join a team, but don’t have an idea of your own, find out if our Swequity Exchange might be for you.

Are startups a young man’s game?
Yes, and for a number of reasons. The first thing is that a lot of startups at the moment are tech-focused. Government policies are about rapid growth and export.

If you look at the statistics on female entrepreneurship in Ireland, the vast majority are in services or business support, and they don’t get as much funding as businesses that focus on export. Government policy ensures that this is a young man’s game.

The second policy is parental leave. The only people who get paid leave are women, so who is going to stay at home and mind the kids by default? Discrimination is built in by the lack of parental leave for men.

People in their 20s who can take a risk can be part of it all, but these are two government policies that work against women.

It’s a sweeping generalisation, but women aren’t always risk takers. I thrive on it, but I was very lucky that I had a husband who always supported me, so I could go for it.

When does all of this start?
Keep in mind that the educational system still separates the sexes, and girls are taught home economics while boys are taught engineering.

The fact that we split genders from a young age and we teach them different things means they don’t go into STEM. The vast majority of startups are STEM, export-based, and high-growth, so girls are disadvantaged from the beginning. Female entrepreneurship statistics haven’t changed in the last ten years.

What about outside of Ireland?
If you want to look globally, look at the parental legislation in those countries. Look at the cultural and educational situation. Who gets the education in those high-growth areas? Who can afford to take risks? Who is the main carer where there are children — is it both parents, or is it the mother?

We know that a more diverse team is better, but what are some of the benefits of a gender and age spread in a business?
We can definitely see that businesses improve. Studies of larger businesses show that companies dominated by a male board do more mergers and acquisitions, and are less profitable. Women on boards are more conservative, and the companies end up more profitable.

I believe there needs to be balance in all things. I don’t think it’s good to have an all-female or all-male business. You need a balance of gender and age groups because there’s something to be offered from everybody.

What about in startup-land?
A lot of these businesses, if they are all-male and mostly in their 20s, that business is at an immediate disadvantage. First of all, they won’t have a female perspective if they are selling to a female market. And they don’t have mature business heads. We rush into things when we’re younger. Older people will think our way through the possible moves and permutations, take their time over decisions, and make decisions in a strategic way.

Women are more risk-averse, likely to look at a number of solutions. It can add a bit of calm and reflection to a team. Women are also good at working in a group and getting buy-in from a team. I think women are more concerned about the good of the group.

What advice would you give to a team looking to expand their gender and age spread?
Be a good listener when you diversify your team. Even if you don’t agree, listen and reflect on it, then decide. Don’t bother bringing in new people if you aren’t going to listen to them.

I think it’s really healthy to have divergent views in a company because it makes you stronger. If you can overcome those objections early, you can have a better product, service, or methodology. If you have a group of people around a table who all say “yes”, then that’s completely the wrong team. Strong leaders surround themselves with people who are smarter than them.

Speakers will include:

Mark Weber, Director of Digital Engagement, Save the Children Fund

Sangeet Bhullar, Director, Wise Kids

Rebecca Crane, Centre for Research and Practice in Mindfulness

Nia Griffiths, School of Psychology, Bangor University (TBC)

We’re inviting educators, parents, representatives from social services, police, agencies and charities. And as always, we need designers, coders, business experts, and people with great digital imagination to come and begin to shape some of the ideas into early stage concepts.

For more information, see our Events page, or contact jenny@inventorium.org