Learnings From Building My First Startups

Over the past year I was helping to build Launchpad, BP’s scale-up factory focused on building 5 billion-dollar businesses by 2025, tackling the dual-energy challenge. You can read more about them here:

https://www.ft.com/content/bd8e838e-2324-11ea-92da-f0c92e957a96

Had I helped build a start-up from scratch before? No. Had I helped build a corporate venture fund from scratch before? No. It turned out to be one of the biggest challenges and most exciting experiences of my career to date. I learned an enormous amount, not only about building startups but myself too.

Now whilst this may seem like the obvious to some, I thought I would share a handful of learnings from along the way, as it may help some of you now, or in the future.

1. You wouldn’t try to build a ten thousand user product with the infrastructure to only support ten users, your people processes should be the same. This would have saved me countless headaches further down the line if I’d pushed back more in the initial stages around the necessity to create structure, rather than focusing primarily on hiring demands, especially in an environment that moves as fast as Launchpad and the residents we were building do.
2. Don’t try and change everything on day one, gather data, and use it as leverage to implement efficiency and best practice.
3. Failure is a blessing when used constructively to drive improvement.
4. The people around you are not necessarily talent or people professionals and consequently, may not understand the hiring process and its intricacies; cement your position as the SME as a coach, not a commander.
5. The right leadership hires are critical but allow time for relationships and structure to develop. A storming phase is natural when the majority of business leadership is brought in externally and haven’t worked together previously. Having a good leadership coach in your team or network is very handy long term.
6. Diversity breeds success.
7. Most importantly, embrace the chaos and have fun.

This journey made me realise why people fall in love with start-up life; the pace, constant change, and ability to get stuck into such a range of different areas outside of what your role would typically entail. Anyone fancy building a venture fund?