This Much I Know - The Seedcamp Podcast

“Keep it simple. Be brilliant at the basics”. This is the advice that Andrew Bartlow, Founder of Series B Consulting gives to small, high-growth organisations looking to scale rapidly on this week’s This Much I Know episode. Managing Partner Carlos Espinal chats with Andrew about Andrew’s recently published book, “Scaling for Success: People Priorities for High-Growth Organizations.” The two discuss common challenges related to rapid growth, including the brilliant jerk’ phenomenon, along with the merits of when a company should define a proper HR function. Regarding the latter point, in super early stages of a company, HR encapsulates payroll, employee benefits, and recruiting. But when a team starts to have around 20 employees, Andrew suggests that a CEO should hire a dedicated recruitment role. “You want a dedicated internal recruiter once you’re hiring 10-12 people a year,” Andrew says. “The recruiter will easily pay for themselves.” They also discuss how to find the right advice from the right people for founders. It’s important to prioritise context over content and to not go shopping across a bunch of different people for advice - it’s better to find the targeted advice that fits a founder’s own context better. Tune into this week’s episode to hear some of the secrets to scale your high growth startup successfully! Shownotes: Andrew Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/bartlow Series B Consulting: seriesbconsulting.com Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - seedcamp.com Book, Scaling for Success - amazon.co.uk/Scaling-Success-Priorities-High-Growth-Organizations/dp/0231194447](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scaling-Success-Priorities-High-Growth-Organizations/dp/0231194447 Brilliant Jerk Phenomenon - hbswk.hbs.edu/item/can-the-brilliant-jerk-be-managed-effectively

90% of startups fail. For early-stage founders, this can come from both false positives or negatives. Two factors include: bias towards early adopters vs. mainstream customers, that are mostly necessary to scale, or giving up too early on a project that turns out to be a billion-dollar business idea a couple of months later. Tom Eisenmann, Professor at Harvard Business School, discusses this and much more in his recently published book '*The Fail-Safe Startup'*. In this episode of This Much I Know, our hosts Kate McGinn and Carlos Espinal have a chat with Tom to cover topics at the heart of founder journeys. This includes a few key factors to keep in mind for early-stage founders, such as MVP testing or upfront customer discovery work. Tune in to hear more about what Tom observes in academia around patterns both founder and investors tend to follow! Show notes: Tom Eisenmann: twitter.com/teisenmann Tom's book: penguin.co.uk/books/315/315444/the-fail-safe-startup/9780241420171.html Kate McGinn: twitter.com/ktmcgn Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - seedcamp.com

The landscape of working and hiring remotely has drastically changed. Recruiting some of the best global talent as an employer requires a lot of knowledge on highly locally specialized topics because doing the statutory minimum is simply not enough anymore. Dee Coakley, the CEO and co-founder of BoundlessHQ, is on a mission to make it easy to employ anyone, anywhere. In this episode of This Much I Know, our host Carlos Espinal has a chat with Dee to cover topics at the heart of global organisations around multi-country payrolls and HR compliance. Tune in to hear more about the best practices on topics around compensation for internationally remote teams, employee stock options and more! Links Dee Coakley: twitter.com/DeeCoakley Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - seedcamp.com

Restructuring a company can happen on all scales. Whether it’s within a founding team or a huge corporation, there are important common threads that are applicable across all business sizes to ensure value creation. On this episode of This Much I Know, we have a very special guest, Managing Partner Carlos Espinal’s father, Carlos Espinal Sr, Business Transformation & Restructuring Specialist, to discuss restructuring lessons that founders and CEOs can apply to their startups. Carlos Senior shares several past professional experiences that shaped his knowledge and understanding of how to best restructure a company. Carlos and Carlos discuss the importance of honest and transparent communication with stakeholders, identifying the root cause of a company’s problem, assessing the quality of a team on delivery outcome, and the key ingredients within a transformational plan.

The power of community lies in the ability to thrive virtually and scale across borders. Behind these communities, lie powerful and dedicated leaders whose intrinsic motivation to connect and support members creates compounding value. On the final ‘Precious on Community’ episode, Precious speaks with Erika Batista, VP International at On Deck on managing and growing their communities. On Deck is an ecosystem of founders, investors and angels providing programmes and creating communities that strengthen each other one after the other. Erika shares her experience of building community through new geographies and finding the ‘North Star’ that resonates with individuals and unites them as a community. She offers advice on striking the balance between doing things that don’t scale, and managing the influx of information that comes when thinking about community as a growing product. Precious and Erika explore the difference between operational failures and experimental failures, and Erika offers some hot tips on how she manages to get her community members always coming back to events. Tune in, it’s a good one. Show links: Precious Oyelade - www.twitter.com/preciousOlade Erika Batista - www.twitter.com/erikabatista Seedcamp - www.seedcamp.com OnDeck - www.beondeck.com

The power of community lies in the ability to thrive virtually and scale across borders. Behind these communities, lie powerful and dedicated leaders whose intrinsic motivation to connect and support members creates compounding value. On the second-to-last ‘Precious on Community’ episodes, Precious speaks with Hung Lee, Curator at Recruiting Brainfood on managing and growing communities. Recruiting Brainfood is an industry newsletter for talent professionals that Hung Lee started in 2017 and has grown to 38,000 subscribers. Hung shared a lot of important questions to ask yourself when starting, managing and moderating a community: Have you nailed the community values down by being true to your intrinsic motivation? What does the community member get for showing up? How will you ensure the community doesn’t get corrupted? The age-old question of Platform was raised as Hung shared his preference for newsletters over Slack (naturally), and how setting up a community is as customised an experience as setting up a bar, “you need to go and create a reason for being”. Tune in, it's a good one! Show links: Precious Oyelade - www.twitter.com/preciousOlade Hung Lee - www.twitter.com/Hunglee Seedcamp - www.seedcamp.com Recruiting Brainfood - www.recruitingbrainfood.com

"Diversity of the leadership... is the number one thing you should be doing as a founder at the early stages. Because that is going to pull in more diversity over time — that's how networks operate." — Hephzi Pemberton, Founder at Equality Group Diversity and inclusion within startups is essential in innovating and adapting in our fast-paced world. Bringing people with distinctive life experiences into the room to make decisions is key, whether in leadership meetings, the board room, or investment discussions. Even if we might agree with this hypothesis, the reality is that most companies are not doing enough to encourage a diverse workforce. Research from the Silicon Valley Bank finds that only 42% of startups (in the UK, US, and Canada) have at least one C-suite executive who is ethnically or racially diverse. 43% have at least on female C-suite executive. Racial and gender, not to mention socio-economic and political, diversity is sadly by many still not seen as a must-have priority. To discuss why diversity is so important for good decision-making and share key tangible ways startups can work on their diversity and inclusion efforts, today's podcast features Hephzi Pemberton, founder of the Equality Group. Joined by our talent manager Alex Lewis, our host Carlos Espinal discusses Hephzi's most recent book launch of The Diversity Playbook. In it, she showcases latest research and case studies, as well as an applicable exercise in each chapter, to show how leaders and firms who embrace and embed inclusion and diversity into their business will benefit. Show notes: Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Hephzi Pemberton - www.hephzipemberton.com Alex Lewis - twitter.com/AlexLewisTalent] Harvard IAT - implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/education.html Seedcamp - www.seedcamp.com The Diversity Playbook - https://amzn.to/3w08qv8

We've said it before and we'll say it again: the world of managing people and organising teams is brimming with changes. COVID-19 and new societal views on working in the 21st century (90% of Generation Z, for instance, want a human element when it comes to their job role and interactions with their coworkers) are changing workplaces of all types. Founders and investors are picking up on these trends and putting their money and time towards solving these issues. HR, a department which we remember looking like a sole office manager equipped with nothing but an Excel sheet and coupons for free drip coffee, has been booming with innovation. Giovanni Luperti, co-founder and CEO of Humaans, is one such innovator. Backed by Moonfire, Y Combinator, and a handful of operators including the CEOs of Figma, LinkedIn, Qubit and Evervault, Humaans is helping managers better onboard and manage their staff. One of Humaans backers is Mattias Ljungman, the founder and Managing Partner at Moonfire. Previously the co-founder of Atomico and an investor in Klara and Supercell, Ljungman knows a thing or two (or three or four or..) about venture investing. When he met Giovanni, he got excited by his vision and backed Humaans as one of Moonfire's first investments in its recently launched $60M seed fund. In this episode of This Much I Know, our host Carlos Espinal sits down with Giovanni and Mattias to discuss building for and investing in the future of work: everything about growing an organisation to managing teams remotely and keeping team culture at the centre of it all. Show notes: Carlos Espinal - www.twitter.com/cee Mattias Ljungman - www.twitter.com/Ljungman Giovanni Luperti - www.twitter.com/giovanniluperti Seedcamp - www.seedcamp.com/ Humaans - www.humaans.io/ Moonfire - www.moonfire.com Moonfire Fund Launch - www.fortune.com/2021/05/06/new-venture-capital-fund-moonfire-europe-startups/

Being a leader is a lonely journey. COOs, due to their incredibly diverse job descriptions, are particularly at-risk of feeling lonely and unable to confide in people within their teams. This is what seasoned COO-turned-CEO Ben Branson-Gateley from Seedcamp portfolio company CharlieHR and Kelsey Traher from Marvel felt. In search of a community that didn't exist, they teamed up to start their own support group. What started as a small pub meet-up in 2015 has now evolved into COO Stories, a London community of over 200 Ops Leaders. From that one community, there is now a collection of different communities across the London & Berlin tech ecosystems that all share the same set of community values, rooted in friendliness, openness, humility, and integrity. In this episode of Precious on Community, Precious Oyelade sits down with Ben and Kelsey to discuss how they built COO Stories and what they have learned about building a healthy community during their time together. They dive into the drumbeat of their community, the importance of letting leaders emerge from within, and how the conscious decisions they made on membership criteria, the cadence of events, and platform for communication have shaped COO Stories into a space where members are truly engaged and collaborative. Remember to check out the first and second episodes of Precious on Community in the show notes before diving into this one! Show notes Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - www.seedcamp.com Ben Branson-Gateley - twitter.com/gateley Kelsey Traher - twitter.com/kelsddog COO Stories - www.coostories.com CharlieHR - www.charliehr.com Marvel - www.marvelapp.com Precious on Community, Ep 1 - https://seedcamp.com/podcasts/seedcamp-sessions-introducing-precious-on-community-what-does-community-mean/ Precious on Community, Ep 2 - https://seedcamp.com/podcasts/seedcamp-sessions-precious-on-community-the-business-of-community/

"If you try to grow too quickly, you miss a really critical opportunity to create the foundation of community and figure out a model that works really well and is repeatable. Don't try to do too much too quickly." David Spinks, Co-Founder @ CMX A decade ago, the term 'community' didn't strike most as a central component of company-building, even though it was. Fast-forward to today, where the internet has transformed communication in our professional and personal realms, and community managers have become key stakeholders in product, marketing, and business development. David Spinks has been at the forefront of this community revolution. Having launched his first online community at 14 for his favourite video game, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4, David now advises community teams at the likes of Google, Udemy, Waze, and Airbnb. He is the co-founder of CMX (acq. by Bevy), where over 20,000 community professionals gather to learn and support each other, and the host of the CMX Summit, the world's largest community conference. In this episode of Precious on Community, Precious dives into David's background and dissects how founders can use community to grow their businesses. The two community leaders also dig into CMX's SPACES, a model for defining community business value which is further explored in David's recently released book The Business of Belonging. One of David's recommendations for early-stage startups? Don't try to do too much too quickly. Focus on one small group and build on top of their loyalty and commitment to the brand. A few cited examples of community-building in a business-context include: - Airbnb: www.airbnb.co.uk/d/superhos - Reddit: www.review.firstround.com/What-to-Learn-from-the-Man-Who-Managed-Reddits-Community-of-Millions - Skimm-bassador Program: www.theskimm.com/general/skimmbassadors-5er7Uanv5uK6eQYMiOsmaU-post - Notion Community: www.notion.so/Notion-Community-04f306fbf59a413fae15f42e2a1ab029 - Sephora Beauty Insider: www.glamour.com/story/sephora-beauty-insider-program-updates - Tech Ladies: www.hiretechladies.com Links: Precious Oyelade - www.twitter.com/preciousolade David Spinks - www.twitter.com/DavidSpinks Seedcamp - www.seedcamp.com The Business of Belonging - www.davidspinks.com/book CMX SPACES - www.cmxhub.com/the-spaces-model CMX Community - www.cmxhub.com/community Bevy - www.bevy.com