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Formerly SpinOut Advisory
REALWORLD FOUNDER LESSON #4
Make sure everyone knows who is allowed to spend what, when and with whom - or your money will disappear down the tracks like a runaway freight train. In the very early days of a startup, founders tend to make almost every decision themselves. You know the budget. You know what is in the bank.You know what can be delayed and what cannot. Then the business grows. Managers arrive. Teams get budgets. Suppliers multiply. Purchase orders increase. Decisions happen faster. And sudd
Belinda Shaw
Oct 162 min read
REAL WORLD FOUNDER LESSON #1.
1. Never let funding pressure you into scaling ahead of commercial reality. 2. Do not confuse access to capital with evidence of a market. 3. Never let the size of a future funding opportunity hide today’s downside risk. In 2018, we launched our company with seven employees, backed by grant funding and matching investment capital. Then COVID-19 arrived. We quickly developed a plant-expressed SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein for potential use in diagnostic test kits. Through introduct
Belinda Shaw
Sep 82 min read
REALWORLD FOUNDER LESSON #4
Make sure everyone knows who is allowed to spend what, when and with whom - or your money will disappear down the tracks like a runaway freight train. In the very early days of a startup, founders tend to make almost every decision themselves. You know the budget. You know what is in the bank.You know what can be delayed and what cannot. Then the business grows. Managers arrive. Teams get budgets. Suppliers multiply. Purchase orders increase. Decisions happen faster. And sudd
REAL WORLD FOUNDER LESSONS #3
If you tolerate something often enough, it stops being an exception and starts becoming your culture. Nobody really prepares a founder for the moment when a respected colleague — sometimes an early or key member of the team — starts taking advantage of their status. It may begin with small things: Arriving at 09h00 — or later — when the agreed start time is 08h30. Leaving early without checking with their manager or team. Deciding at short notice that today will be a “work fr
REAL WORLD FOUNDER LESSON #2:
Meeting Overload is Not Productivity: A Founder’s Perspective At one stage as a founder, my diary became overwhelming. Meetings piled up, one after another. So many people were involved. Everyone who might need to know what was happening had been invited. For my own sanity, I started questioning this. How much were all these meetings actually costing us? Time is money, right? And what were we getting in return? The Cost of Meetings Try this calculation yourself. It might shoc
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