Builders' Studio: a Founder School by Slush

Every company has a board, yet it is not all that clear how to efficiently leverage one at different stages of a company’s lifecycle. An ideal board of a young startup may look very different from a well functioning board of a more mature company. Are there some key heuristics that founders should follow when setting up their board?Matt Miller, Partner at Sequoia, sits on the boards of multiple scaleups such as Graphcore and Tessian. In this talk, among other insights, he’ll share his take on the ideal size for a board, what happens in a board meeting and what should be the board’s main focus points throughout the way.

International expansion is a difficult phase most ambitious scaling companies will ultimately face. How then should you go from selecting your target markets to all the way establishing an operational team in place? Joining us to walk through how startups should approach this delicate process is Sofia Dolfe, Principal at Index Ventures.There are a handful of key factors you should consider when thinking about expansion - market size, localisation, competition, familiarity, regulation and capital. In this talk Sofia explains how to analyze each of these as a scaling startup and outlines the common challenges companies face, while giving concrete advice on how to combat them.

While establishing a team focused solely on growth is not a worry in the early days, it is an eventuality for a startup that wishes to scale aggressively. While an eventuality, many still don’t have a clear image on what a growth team truly does. Joining us for an inside look into the mechanics of a growth team is Caroline Hjelm, VP of Growth at Voi. Using learnings from Voi, Caroline goes through the when, why and how founders should start thinking of establishing a growth team for their company. As a key starting point, you need to recognise which functions for growth, remove silos and establish a growth function internally. What next? Tune in to hear more.

As it is rare that customers organically find you, building an efficient sales organization is a crucial part of the success of most startups. While at the face of it, sales might sound straightforward, building an efficient sales process is complex. Joining us to show just how startups should approach their enterprise sales is Geraldine MacCarthy, Chief Revenue Officer at Personio.In this talk Geraldine outlines how the nature of sales changes as the company scales - from founder centrality in the beginning, to setting up a growth team sales function and beyond. What remains central throughout, however, is the importance of the sales/product feedback loop and utilization of metrics that allow for iteration and efficiency.

Ever since Andy Rachleff coined the term ‘Product-Market Fit’, it has reached a near mythical status among founders. Many might have an idea about what Product-Market Fit means, but how should one define it? Joining us to open up the concept is Georgie Smallwood, Chief Product Officer at Tier. In this episode Georgie helps founders identify the concrete actions needed to reach product/market fit, to understand what it feels like to have it, and how to ensure you don’t lose it.

Olivia Nottebohm, CRO of Notion, discusses community-led growth and its significance in building a successful product. She shares insights on leveraging community at different funnel stages, building and scaling through community, harnessing user-generated content for growth, and driving upgrade and expansion strategies.

Paul Graham has famously advocated for doing things that ‘don’t scale’ in order to kickstart your client acquisition. What does this mean in practice and what strategies can founders utilize in the very beginning to convince customers to hop on board? Joining us to uncover what goes into early customer acquisition is James Hind, Co-founder and CEO of carwow.The very beginning of a startup’s user acquisition journey can be grueling. In this talk James outlines how carwow benefited from keeping processes manual in the beginning, the way they found the perfect clients to pitch to and much more to kickstart their growth.

Unicorn startups are cool but they are not all sunshine and rainbows. To get there you need to be a cockroach - a founder that nothing can kill. Jussi Laakkonen, Co-founder and CEO of Noice, will be sharing the story of how Applifier changed its course successfully. It took two hard pivots before Noice was acquired by Unity Technologies. In this episode Jussi shares his hard earned lessons on pivots, founder mindset and grit so that you can be unkillable and survive the hardest times.

Product design is what defines the look and feel of digital products and platforms, making it a crucial cornerstone of product development. However, as a relatively new field of expertise that combines design, engineering and marketing, not many truly understand the value of fantastic product design. Joining us to uncover this secret recipe is Karri Saarinen, Co-founder and CEO of Linear. Having led design at Airbnb and Coinbase, Karri builds on his experience to deliver a product design masterclass in this episode. Through this talk you’ll learn how to consider design as an advantage, why product-design fit matters, what to look for when hiring your first designer and much more.

Pricing is a crucial but often misunderstood topic, which receives disproportionately low attention compared to the potential value it can drive. While pricing is a complex equation, joining us to understand its inner mechanics is Jevgeni Kabanov, Chief Product Officer and Head of New Verticals at Bolt.Building on his twenty years of experience in pricing B2B and consumer-facing products, in this episode Jevgeni will be delivering a deep masterclass into the nuances of pricing to help startups unlock their revenue potential. Through this talk you’ll learn how to think about the different components of pricing, from unit economics, switching costs to moats.