Entrepreneurship and Talent

Entrepreneurial Traits

When I'm talking about entrepreneurship, I don't just mean founders and leaders, though I do include them. Entrepreneurship is a trait to seek out in all your hiring.

As I built my team, I did a lot of interviewing and hiring and had to learn the hard way what to look for. Here are some of the entrepreneurial behaviours that I learned to value.

Resilience

Because of the relentless pace, working in a fast-growth start-up requires a positive mental attitude. This attitude does not require constant naïve positivity; indeed, that would be foolish when things are routinely far from great. Hopeful realism is what is needed. Under pressure, the right person will be hopeful that the future vision can be attained. They may not be optimistic that attainment is coming soon; indeed, the person you want to hire is grounded and realistic that they will need to be patient for that attaintment.

I’ve sometimes reflected on the story of Admiral James Stockdale that I first heard as a student years ago. During the Vietnam War, after being shot down on September 9, 1965, he was held prisoner for over seven years in Hanoi, North Vietnam. He was kept in solitary confinement for four years, held in leg irons for two years, and physically tortured more than fifteen times. He was denied medical care and suffered malnourishment. But while imprisoned, he organized a system of communication with his fellow captives and developed a cohesive set of rules governing prisoner behaviour. Later, he told author James C. Collins that during their long captivity, it was the naïve optimists who died of broken hearts. To survive, he said, “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”[1]

It is partly your job as a leader to instil hope in your team, but it’s also essential that you have people who can keep going with a smile when a ton of work lands on their desk or a demanding customer is making the Earth fall in around your team.

Our chief services officer was just such a person. His expert team members were deployed into customer situations all around the world, helping them succeed. The path of IT projects being what they are, it was not uncommon for software set-up to have the occasional bump. People, deadlines, and expectations usually caused these bump; and yet with customer success being paramount, it was my colleague’s job to step in, create harmony, and ensure safe delivery of the customer’s dream. He did this time and again. He never saw any problem as insurmountable; he was as patient and good humoured as others were pessimistic. He brought hopeful realism.

Our services officer was not the first person I hired into that difficult role, but he was the last. The previous three people in the job had lasted about a year each, having been universally good at managing customer expectations, organising teams, and solving problems, but unable to accept that we’d always face customer project issues. Each wanted to solve the insoluble challenge and remove the risk of future incidents. I watched each of them bring unrealistic expectations and bags of positivity and initiative, only for their positive mindset to slide into disillusionment because there was always another problem to fix.

When a company grows at a high double-digit rate and customers put demands on new products, there will always be consequential issues to overcome. The trick is to approach those problems the right way, and not to expect you can eliminate the growth pains of a business entirely.

During Interviews, Ask…

• About the most difficult time they’ve faced with work, and how they coped with it.

• Ask them about a time they had to be resilient, and how they found resolve.

Look for answers that demonstrate this person has experience in overcoming challenges without being consumed by them. Look for people with self-awareness about the source of their resolve and confidence about facing future challenges.

[1] Collins, Jim (date unknown). The Stockdale Paradox. JimCollins.com. Retrieved on July 2, 2008 from http://www.jimcollins.com/lab/brutalFacts/.

 Growth Mindset

In my experience, growth businesses are unrecognizable from year to year. Things get done in new ways and with evolving structures, teams, and performance. As you hire into leadership roles responsible for delivering change, and as you make change an advantage, it could not be more important to find people who are comfortable with ambiguity, see the bigger picture, and are okay with interruptions and making decisions with incomplete information. People with these behavioural attributes can continue to improve the trajectory of the business through incremental adjustment. People without them stall as they seek certainties that are not there.

By way of illustration, in the fourth year of my start up journey I hired a capable financial controller who had their finger on the pulse of cash flow. They planned for and knew the billing and collection timing for every invoice, built strong relationships with creditors, and phased all our payments to manage cash risks. I was so happy with the work they did that the following year I promoted them to finance director, with responsibility for both control as well as planning and analysis.

But I misread them. Whilst they were brilliant with the certainty of our transaction timings, they found the ambiguity of planning for the future deeply stressful. They couldn’t reconcile themself to the task of forecasting the business with incomplete information or the ambiguities remaining over our future team. Though they committed ever more time and more energy to business planning, I’d find them wrestling day after day with irreconcilable planning decisions and slowly becoming more downhearted. After a couple of months, we were no closer to a finished plan. My board turned the pressure onto me: Why hadn’t I delivered the business plan for the next year the previous month?

I’d created a terrible situation by promoting someone who had an inability to work with ambiguity and incompleteness and was ill-equipped to deliver future change in the business. There were few options open to us, and with a lot of regret we finally agreed to part company. I’d learned the importance of having a leadership team that by using assumption, estimation, and pattern matching across broad sets of incomplete information can continue to create advantage in the middle of ambiguity and incompleteness.

During Interviews, Ask…

Ask candidates to talk about a goal they found particularly challenging in their previous job, what they did to meet that stretch target, and how satisfied they were with what they achieved. Ask them what their boss may have thought they could have done better.

Look for answers where you consider the stretch goal to be a big challenge. Listen carefully to how they answer what their boss may have thought.

Game Changers

Many of the best hires in a fast-moving growth company treat work like a game to be won. They are extremely energetic and results-focused, thrive under pressure, and always eager to outperform the competition. Game changers are looking for the small differences and the improvements that can change bottom line. I look carefully at CVs for the tell-tale interests, which over the years have included chess players, dressage riders, sport team coaches, marathon runners, and many more. Game changers usually thrive in teams because it’s second nature for them to have team- or club-mates.

People who love games are also coachable. It’s natural for people who strive for success in match situations to look at continuous improvement and take advantage of insights and opportunities; and in a growing company facing continuous change and new demands, this way of thinking is needed from the CEO downward.

I was fortunate to work with several elite athletes, including an Olympic champion who ran our sales and customer success businesses. Having been part of an underdog to champion story, a member of a rowing team who achieved an inspiring gold medal position, rowing in a boat where every crew member had missed out on selection for the top British crew, he brought their mantra to work every day. This attitude summed up being a game changer. Every day, every member of the team had had to ask themselves, “What can I do today to make the boat go faster?” No stone was left unturned as they sought to be better at every activity in pursuit of winning. Month after month they posted small gains, and as they added up, they became better and better.

Our sales culture that was driven to outperform competition by focusing on results, coaching for improvement, and learning from mistakes. This was a powerful combination that led to increased conversion rate on our deals and a proactive, striving, and driving attitude to find more deals and constantly get better at changing them.

As another sporting legend, Sir Clive Woodward, put it like this: “Better never stops.”

Game changers know this as they focus their innately high levels of energy, putting pressure on themselves to find small improvements that can add up to amazing achievements.

During Interviews, Ask…

• What they like to do outside of work.

• Tell them that the job they will be doing in a year will be very different from the job they’ll do today and ask them how they can prepare for this.

• Put the interviewee under pressure in the interview using techniques such as funnelling down with question after question into a specific area of detail. Challenging them on the quality of their answers will show you exactly how they perform under pressure and if they revise their behaviour to suit the situation.

Look for signals that they seek out competitive advantage in pressurised situations, because if they do and can bring this straight to your organisation, it will be a big benefit.

Hiring

In a growing business, a good business plan will try to maximise growth as it puts its capital to work. Recruitment can be one of the major growth barriers facing potential market leaders. Once you have Product Market fit, the progress of your business relies on a continuum between resourcing of marketing and sales and resourcing of innovation. If you have insufficient marketing and sales, then you are not going to achieve the growth to invest in your innovation; and if you don’t invest in your innovation, then your marketing won’t turn into sufficient sales and retained customers.

All of this relies on good people joining your business at the right time to deliver the plan. Time and again I saw how this can misfire if it’s not well coordinated. When we didn’t have enough quota bearing salespeople to support our investments in marketing campaigns, our new leads slipped between our fingers. When we had great progress in sales but were unable to hit our road map targets on our product, then we lost deals or ran into customer success challenges. When we failed to hire and upskill expert services consultants in advance of the demand, then we were not able to do the work for which we’d contracted.

Getting the hiring strategy wrong can have big consequences for small businesses as well as larger ones, so it is something to get right as quickly as possible because that will accelerate your growth journey.

Hopefully you will begin to be able to approximate the people you need in different jobs to market, sell, innovate, and control your business. Ideally, you will have worked through the timings of when such people ought to join your business through the year, subject to performing against your plan. I recommend reviewing that plan each quarter and assessing if you are on track so that you can make the call on signing off on the next quarter of hiring, or indeed think about cutbacks if the business is going the wrong way.

With your hiring plan in hand for the year, the hard work begins. Everybody in your business, starting with your senior team, are undoubtedly busy, and hiring is seldom on the list of what’s urgent to do. I encourage all my managers to create a two-by-two grid of everything that they must do. The two axes are “urgent” and “important,” and it’s that top right corner of “urgent/important” activities which clearly need the most resources. The highest risk area is the “non-urgent/non-important” work, and this is where hiring is often placed. However, you won't deliver your business growth or your strategy if you don’t spend the time and focus on this.

Fortunately, because hiring the right talent is a shared responsibility, then a small part of several peoples’ time, rather than a large part of a few peoples’ time, can address this important need. Everyone who’s involved in hiring should have hiring as an objective, as well as a set of key results linked to the business plan through the year. Support from a central coordinator, which in the bigger businesses may be HR, but maybe in a smaller one an office administrator, means that candidate scheduling, room booking, diary coordination for interviewers, and final panels can all be done. CVs can be circulated and evaluation criteria agreed and shared. Don’t underestimate the effort involved in these secondary activities that result in a hire, because if these aren’t done then you won’t find the people you need and grow your business.

Candidate Sourcing

Hiring can be an expensive process. If like many companies, you work with an agent, then you can expect to pay between 15 and 25 per cent of the annual salary for any given hire to an agent who brings you candidates. In a growing business, this can account for a large sum of money. I remember going to my board with a $1 million hiring budget as we entered a particularly high-growth period. I was challenged by the board to look at new ways we could hire without burning so much cash on finding the people that we needed. I took this feedback to my senior team and our founders, and we looked at all sorts of ways that we could solve this problem differently if we thought more about it.

There’s another set of alternative options open to you as you begin your hiring process.

Find academic institutions in your area with which you can build a relationship. Ideally, they will have students who work in the field you will be bringing people into. But even if they don’t, onboarding inexperienced workers when they finish their education and then training them up yourself is the best way to avoid wage inflation in the market and keep a capital-efficient payroll. This approach puts a much heavier emphasis on developing your own people; however, doing so is a competitive advantage. Build relationships with the academic institutions. Go and speak at their career days, sponsor student events, offer part-time work to talented students, and insert placements during the term breaks.

Another innovation around talent sourcing that we developed was training weekends. In these events, we offered free training and advice to inexperienced candidates who wanted to sign up and learn more about our industry and our professional skills. Over the course of two days, they received a taster in a particular skills area, and they were tested out by our course administrators, who were also our key staff members. By the end of two days, it was obvious to us who the best talents were, and we were able to take them into our selection process. If they were still studying, we were able to keep in touch with them until a later point when they were looking for work. The candidates didn’t feel like candidates because they were getting free experience and something to put on their fledgling CVs. It was a win-win for both sides.

Another benefit of bringing in and developing our own talent was that we gradually built a team of people firmly embedded in our culture and our ways of working. These people had a much higher success rate because they experienced what it took to succeed in a fast-growing start-up. They had not experienced big company cultures; they were more accountable and more street-smart than hires we might have got from elsewhere.

It’s easy to make the mistake of trying to hire people from a big brand that you aspire to be like. We made this mistake by hiring salespeople from leading global software companies and hiring expert services people from the world’s top consultancies. These people cost significantly more than candidates without the big-company experiences.

Generally, hires from big business turned out to lack the hand-to-mouth drive that small company staff have because they know they’re keeping the lights on. They tended to lack the sense of individual accountability for results, because understandably their experience in much bigger organisations shielded them from personally finding customers and making customers successful. Collective accountability can lead to apathy. Bigger companies necessarily need more policies and controls than small ones, but the knock-on effect on staff is that big companies do not want staff to think for themselves in the same way as small companies do. They do not so highly value street-smart skills, nor individuals thinking for themselves. They want people to strictly adhere to boundaries rather than recognising boundaries but being flexible with the rule book and keen on treating every customer differently.

Our business reached a point where we invested in an internal recruiter. This person not only made sure the hiring process got done and that our people kept hiring at the top of their “to-do list,” but they also developed a network of talent. The business case for working this way was strong, because the cost of an individual with a bonus plan was considerably less than the per centage of salary paid to recruiters across every hire made.

Our internal recruiter naturally began to use social media as a platform for candidate sourcing. The benefit of social media is that the cost of finding talent was lower than using an agency. We could be very targeted on the geographic, demographic, and psychographic characteristics that we needed, and we were in control of our message in a way that working with external recruiters would not allow for. The social community our marketing and sales team were building, that I have written about elsewhere, was a good springboard for this recruitment work. Social media also allowed us to build a database of contacts, so that by using keep-in-touch emails, we could nurture candidates in the same way as we nurtured prospects; and when the point arose that we wanted to hire, our chances of attracting good talent with a strong cultural fit who were responsive to our nurturing email engagements was higher.

Interviews

I look for the good in people, and there have been interviews where I put aside reservations, listened to what I wanted to hear, and hired the wrong person whose shortcomings I may have known about from the start.

I set a golden rule for myself: Never interview on my own. A decisive second or final stage interview should always be done as a panel interview with two, or preferably three, interviewers with a pre-agreed list of evaluation criteria and a scoring system. At the end, being able to compare notes objectively leads to a much higher success rate in the interview process.

Once the strongest candidate has been established through this process, getting a unanimous approval on the candidates is the final step. Only if everybody thinks the person is a good fit and has the skills should they be admitted to the organisation. Though this is a high bar, it does mean that people who are offered jobs are more likely to succeed.

Internal Promotions

I’ve always taken the view that if a person has made the grade to get into the business and has proven they can do a job and take responsibility, then giving them more exposure, opportunity, and coaching to develop into bigger roles is preferable to hiring new managers. I have promoted many people that way successfully. Promoting from within saves hiring fees, and often the process of external hiring takes longer with more candidates to review, select, and interview. Hiring from within is motivating, engages staff, and increases retention rates. Internal promotions can be more successful because you know what you’re getting. I have found successful leaders across almost all executive and senior management roles that way—people who made their mark and delivered success, and having made their mark, either stayed on or moved on.

However, relying on internal professional growth has its limits. There are times when every business needs fresh expertise so that a function can improve from external inputs. The truth is that when a business is growing quickly, not everyone will experience professional growth at the same speed as company growth. When the relative speed of these two measures of growth begin to diverge, then the business will have a problem. In all companies, certain talented people will grow faster than the opportunities offered to them, and regretfully those talents will eventually leave. The opposite situation is harder; like the analogy of the frog in the pot that fails to notice the gradually heating water destined to cook it, people in positions of responsibility (and importantly, their bosses) may fail to see that the job is becoming too big and too complex for them to do effectively.

A longstanding colleague of mine once gave me feedback that my biggest strength was my loyalty, and at the same time my biggest weakness was… you guessed it, my loyalty. More than once, I have misjudged peoples’ ability to grow professionally at the same rate as company growth. Indeed, a good example in this section is when it happened with my finance director, whom I promoted from financial controller after they had performed so well in that role. This situation can be doubly hard because the member of the team is usually putting everything, they’ve got into succeeding in the new expanded area of responsibility, and there is usually mutual loyalty born of the journey taken thus far with the company.

I recommend the same approach therefore when hiring from within as with external candidates A final interview should be a panel and all panellists would need to agree on the promotion Whilst an unsuccessful candidate is likely to look elsewhere for a role thereafter, under such conditions, everyone can move forward with the certainty that options have been thoroughly explored.

Diversity and Equality

Diversity

The last twenty years of technology, innovation has brought about an explosion of opportunity and new businesses. A government statistic from the UK states that in 2020, there were 2.5 million more businesses than in 2000, an increase of 72 per cent over the period.

At the same time, businesses are finding it ever harder to stay at their peak and avoid falling into decline. Since its inception in 1984, thanks to globalization and competition, three quarters of all the businesses in the FTSE 100, which is the index of leading UK companies, have faded away and fallen out of that select group. In short, today there is more competition and more dynamism.

Why does this matter? It matters because the business environment is becoming more complex to operate in.

The more complex a situation, the more brain power it takes to come up with a solution. Today’s business complexity is fast becoming more than any one person or single point of view can solve. There is a truckload of evidence pointing to the fact that it is collective intelligence, and problem solving from all angles, that allows truly complex problems to be solved.

All businesses today therefore need to embrace diversity. In the workplace, this is defined as the practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds, and of different genders and sexual orientations.

I have learned much about diversity from the stand-out UK journalist and author Matthew Syed, whose research and evidence on the subject is just mind blowing.

Let’s start with what a lack of diversity does for any company. Bringing together a team with the same backgrounds and life experiences means there is significant overlap in frames of reference and in the dominant assumptions used to make decisions. This can be called “collective blindness.” When many people with shared experience work in the same team, they see things the same way. Within that group, a premium is likely placed on the depth of their specific know-how, but in reality it leaves the group inadequately prepared for the subtle and complex marketplace where diverse insight is necessary to succeed.

My company had direct experience of this when we started a subsidiary in Croatia.

When my co-founders and I started our business, we all thought we could gain competitive advantage employing the highly skilled engineering talent available in Croatia, which was the homeland of one co-founder, Dave. In Croatia, a particularly high premium was placed on developing STEM skills throughout the education process, and many well-trained people were available in that market. Furthermore, the cost of that talent was below the rates we’d have to pay in other European markets.

But we faced a problem: Croatia was then still outside of the EU, and the typical business culture was not the modern, meritocratic, flat structure we wanted to have in our business. Instead it was almost entirely based on a dominance hierarchy, where the exalted status given to “the boss” led to subservience and unquestioning obedience from the team. This culture was rooted in the strong socialist traditions that played out there for most of the 20th century.

Our solution wedded diverse views into a new successful combination. My Croatian colleague had spent ten years in London working and experiencing thriving market capitalism, progressive liberalism, and start-up culture, and he was intent that from day one he would champion and export what he’d experienced back to Croatia.

Had Dave not spent all those years in the UK, he’d have been unlikely to have valued meritocracy over bureaucracy, or put healthy challenge from staff ahead of subservience. Thanks to his insight, we were able to build a team that was renowned in Croatia for being a unique and rewarding work culture, and our customers remarked on the exceptional level of skill and engineering talent that we could harness there. Bringing diverse experience to recombine the best of two different work paradigms unleashed a competitive advantage for us.

Thanks to Dave, we were able to build a subsidiary that was both cost efficient and highly productive.

An important dynamic in avoiding collective blindness in a dominance hierarchy is what Matthew Syed calls “constructive dissent.” We called it “challenge and support.” During new starter onboarding, we’d tell every employee that offering healthy, respectful challenge was equally expected as supporting colleagues in the team. Healthy challenge to anyone at any level in a business ensures collective intelligence gets applied to all problems by bringing together diverse views. Though it’s human nature to look for status and observe hierarchies (we all do it every day in our interactions with other people with society and the state), such ingrained subservience can go very wrong, especially when people feel they cannot speak up.

Some individuals are more likely than others to “recombine” ideas to create innovation in business. These people are the outsiders who, without the overlapping frames of reference and dominant assumptions on how businesses run, come up with game changing alternatives. Recently the idea that outsiders can be visionaries and game changers, successful in their fields, has gone mainstream. Everyone has heard how people who’ve been forced to see the world differently because of their makeup—like Richard Branson, the Virgin tycoon, who is dyslexic, or Elon Musk, who admitted to having Asperger’s syndrome—have succeeded. There are people who have felt like outsiders and bullied as children, and have been galvanized to succeed, including Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder; JK Rowling, the best-selling author; and Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the world’s greatest living explorer at the time of writing. Migrant families produce famous business leaders including Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post; Jerry Yang, the founder of Yahoo; and again Elon Musk. As children these people were thrown into an alien environment with different assumptions about the world.

Interestingly, neither Alex, Fawzi, Davor nor I came from the ‘software industry. We hadn’t built or sold software products. We’d only ever bought them, as users and buyers. We were not insiders in that world and we all had very different life experiences, growing up in different environments around the world.

Cognitive diversity is broader than national and cultural diversity, and although it follows that coming from different places can be a great multiplier of perspectives and ideas, the central point I’ve been making is that it’s different ways of thinking, borne of different perspectives of the world, that is the foundation of collective intelligence. Allowing all diversity to surface and thrive by encouraging healthy challenge, welcoming outsiders, and deemphasizing dominance hierarchies, is the only way of solving complex problems in today’s changing world. No single person or world view can comprehend and create as well as the broad collective.

Equality

Equal opportunity applies to all people, and my section on diversity explains how important it is to systematically and culturally include people from very different backgrounds and experiences.

This section focuses on the benefits of thinking through how you promote more different perspectives in your business by giving women an equal platform as men. In the UK, men are five times more likely to be founders of a start-up than women. In the US, women hold just 5 per cent of the Fortune 500 CEO roles.

Meanwhile, more than half of people completing a university degree in the US and UK are female. Something continues to go seriously wrong. Where are all the women?

My own experience in business is that teams with an equal or near equal balance of men and women are happier, more engaged, and yes, produce more output. Furthermore, these more cohesive teams have a better retention rate, so not only do you achieve more, but hiring costs go down. With the best of intentions, without women present, meetings and decisions can get a bit too alpha, and dominance hierarchy kicks in. As I explained in the diversity section, that is not to be unexpected; all male groups will have more overlap in their frames of reference. With the same dominant assumptions and the same collective blindness, it becomes easier to dismiss collective intelligence, and fall into an over-simple, status-based decision- making environment.

The founding team of my business brought together a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences, but it didn’t include any females. We were 100 per cent men. Why? Because less than 10 per cent of the staff, working in the team where we met, were women, so the chances of even 25 per cent of our founding team of four being a woman were improbable.

That is the point and therein lies the issue. Men are in a position of power, and unless they care about this topic too, then the cycle continues of women being insufficiently represented and insufficiently skilled due to lack of experience to take on the most senior roles and the collective blindness of men will continue to lead to working- place norms that do not fit with the needs of women, and worse, that undermine women.

Career breaks to have children are handled differently all over the world, ranging from equal paid time off for men and women over an extended timeframe, to women being offered paid time off and a job to come back to thanks to post- maternity leave, all the way to the other extreme of no pay and no job guarantee.

As business owners, I believe in getting away from the biased fixation that employing women “of a certain age” is poor decision in case they go off and have a baby. Only one in eight companies admit to it, but many more clearly think it, based on low numbers of women in senior roles. The narrative is wrong on this subject. Companies should value the competitive advantage that equality in the workplace brings. Our business employed 35 per cent women, while the average for the tech industry was 19 per cent, so we were nearly 80 per cent better than average. But it didn’t feel good enough to me, even though we were recruiting from a male- dominated candidate pool. The number of female computer science students as a proportion of the whole is 20 per cent, so it tracks closely to the 19 per cent employed in tech.

But there are reasons to be hopeful. This problem is now discussed, measured and challenged and the stats are moving in the right direction. Covid as a catalyst for the shift to hybrid and home working and brought many more women back into the work place in more senior roles too.

Companies and entrepreneurs who embrace this recombination of technology and working practices will harness a multiplier effect both in terms of efficient labour force access that improves quality and reduces cost, as well as the rich dividend of greater diversity and equality, which sets those businesses up to thrive in an ever more complex requiring ever more collective intelligence.

Final Thoughts

In this note, I discuss the significance of identifying and nurturing entrepreneurial traits within your team, emphasizing the value of resilience and hopeful realism in driving a startup's success.

Key Takeaways:

• Seek Entrepreneurial Traits in All Hires: Look beyond founders and leaders; identify and cultivate entrepreneurial behaviors across your entire team to foster innovation and adaptability.

• Value Resilience: Prioritize individuals who demonstrate the ability to maintain a positive yet realistic outlook, especially when facing challenges inherent in a fast-growing startup environment.

• Embrace Hopeful Realism: Encourage a mindset that combines unwavering faith in achieving long-term goals with the discipline to confront and address immediate challenges head-on.

• Learn from Experience: Recognize that previous hires may have possessed strong skills but lacked the necessary resilience; use these insights to refine your hiring criteria.

• Incorporate Behavioral Interview Questions: During interviews, ask candidates about past experiences where they faced significant challenges and how they overcame them to assess their resilience and problem-solving abilities.

By focusing on these entrepreneurial traits, particularly resilience and hopeful realism, you can build a robust team capable of navigating the complexities of startup growth and driving sustained success.