Prioritize Core vs. Non‑Core

• Core team = the handful of people whose long‑term impact defines your product and culture.
• Non‑core work = projects, one‑off features, niche expertise.
• Rule of thumb: Keep burn and complexity inside your core small. Everything else belongs to consultancies or contractors.

Attitude > Aptitude

When screening your core hires, look for people who:

• Give you energy. You’ll be spending all day with them – make it a +1.
• Are endlessly curious. They’ll outlearn problems you haven’t even foreseen.
• Are ambitious but humble. They’ll push the bar without breaking the team’s spirit.
• Settle for nothing less. As one founder put it, “your fucking life depends on it.”

Skip the Recruiters (…for now)

• You don’t need external headhunters until you’re hiring dozens of people.
• Use your network. Personal intros yield faster, higher‑fit candidates.
• If you must scale fast, engage a top‑tier agency – but be prepared to win their attention (they’re busy) and to vet their backlog carefully.

Structured Trade‑Offs

Balancing speed vs. quality:

• Long‑term core: Invest time to hire slowly, deliberately, and at full alignment with your mission.
• Short‑term specialists: Spin up consultancies for sprinty needs – design, dev ops, analytics – so your core doesn’t get distracted.

“Hire people like character.studio first; let them unearth the designer you’ll make a co‑founder one day.”

Cultivate Relationships With Talent Like You Do With Sales

• Top agencies and freelance stars have waitlists.
• Nurture those relationships early – reach out, share progress, schedule regular check‑ins.
• When you need them, they’ll remember you first.

The CEO’s Job

• Runway & Resources: Make sure you can pay your people and raise more when needed.
• Hit Targets: Sales, metrics, milestones.
• Compound Up: Every hire should be better than the last.

Culture Is You, 24/7

Culture is the way you behave. It’s not a job; it’s just you.

• Model the behaviors you want – transparency, ownership, grit.
• Consistency matters – your team will imitate how you show up, especially when you’re not in the room.
• Codify early: a short manifesto or handbook is fine, but actions speak louder.

Closing your round is a green light to hire – but if you blast the accelerator without focus, you’ll burn both cash and morale. Instead:

Assemble a tight‑knit core of attitude‑first lifers.

1. Outsource non‑core to specialist partners.
2. Live your culture so it scales long after you’ve left the building.
3. Execute these fundamentals, and you’ll turn your new capital into a team that lasts.

After you close the round, hiring isn’t about headcount was originally published in Journey of the curious mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The theory goes: capital is here, talent is here, quality of life is good.

But there’s a hard truth people avoid:

Europe doesn’t have a founder problem. It has a context problem.

Entrepreneurs are shaped by friction, density, and velocity.

They grow fast in chaotic ecosystems – places where 10 people around you are building something insane, and one just raised a Series A while eating noodles in your coworking kitchen.

That’s not Europe. Not yet.

Europe has deep technical knowledge – some of the best engineers, researchers, and product minds in the world. But building companies isn’t about knowledge. It’s about relevance. It’s about friction. It’s about growth. It’s about network.

You learn what problems matter by working at the bleeding edge.

You learn how to solve them by doing – inside OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, Stripe, Figma.

But if those companies don’t exist here…

Where do you go to sharpen yourself?

How do you build an AI startup that solves real billion-dollar problems if:

• You’re not near the customers who have them

• You’re not near the people who are solving them

• You’ve never worked inside the engine room

It’s like trying to build a Formula 1 team from scratch without ever driving on a track.

That’s the structural gap.

Europe has the raw material. But without proximity to the frontier, it’s just potential.

A Simple (But Not Easy) Fix for Europe’s Startup Problem

Everyone’s trying to “fix” the European ecosystem. More capital. More accelerators. More events.

But most of it misses the point.

The core issue isn’t talent. Europe has that.

It’s relevance.

You don’t become a world-class founder by staying in your city.

You become one by being exposed to the right problems at the right time.

The solution is simple:

• Send Europe’s best talent to companies at the frontier – OpenAI, DeepMind, Stripe, Anthropic.

• And bring them back once they’ve seen the real thing.

That’s it.

Let them absorb the bar. Let them live in the pressure. Let them see the problems that actually matter – in context, not theory.

Then bring them home.

Give them space. Give them support. Let them build.

That’s how ecosystems grow.

Not from panels.

From proximity to heat.

Why Europe Struggles to Build Great Startups was originally published in Journey of the curious mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• Create: This is about the freedom to think differently, to push ideas into the world without getting boxed in by what’s “realistic.” It’s the difference between playing by someone else’s rules and deciding you’re not bound by them. Imagination is powerful — it’s what makes us infinite.
• Score: Performance needs a stage. You have to get into places where you can actually land some wins, even if that means starting smaller or picking your moments. Winning matters because no one keeps a strong mindset if they’re losing all the time.
• Step Up: This is resilience, and it’s different from just being stubborn. It’s about showing up, starting over, and staying with it, knowing when to pivot and when to push harder.

When you’re in a good, open mindset, creativity flows. You’re finding spaces where your work is seen, valued, and able to hit its mark. And when setbacks inevitably hit, resilience kicks in, helping you stick with it because your approach is rooted in something real, something that actually matters to you.

Top performers operate from love for what they do. They’re driven by collaboration, and they’re always searching — not for rigid answers, but for ways to build, to connect with others who see what they see.

But when you’re in a negative space, the world closes in on you.

Look at Decipad. Giants like Microsoft and Google dominate the territory, and it’s tough to find spaces that aren’t flooded by them. Competing there without regular wins can wear you down; it can close you off, forcing you to keep going purely on resilience.

But as Steve Jobs put it, if you’re waking up too many mornings in a row dreading the day ahead, it’s time to change. Stubbornness can keep you going, but it can also blind you. If you’re not creating, if you’re not finding the people who get excited about what you’re building, what’s the point?

The higher you set the bar, the harder it gets to stay open, curious, in that beginner mindset. It’s too easy to fall into rigid thinking because every strength has its dark side — like how resilience can slide into stubbornness.

At the end of the day, you succeed by staying in a positive mindset. Kahneman noted that positive reinforcement is the only thing that truly works; it creates self-fulfilling momentum. And honestly, I’m humbled by how the team carries me sometimes. We all have ups and downs, and watching them execute reminds me that you really do need a village.

The Three Principles was originally published in Journey of the curious mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In my life, I’ve found a peculiar comfort in adversarial times. Like a weirdly placed puzzle piece, I fit best when everything else seems to fall apart. It’s in these moments, these fragments of life’s chaos, that I’ve felt most alive, most focused.

There’s a certain romanticism in being the underdog, the black sheep, the one who defies odds. It’s a narrative I’ve clung to, a source of strength that’s propelled me forward. But let’s face it, it’s also draining. It’s a focus on proving others wrong, rather than doing what truly brings joy.

Look at the greats in any field. They’re not just flashes of brilliance; they’re beacons of consistency. My own experiences, from sports, running companies, to the virtual battlefields of video games, taught me a vital lesson: it’s not about winning the race, but about improving your lap. If your lap resonates with your core, if it’s something that drives change within you, then you’re on the path to success.

Yet, there’s a catch.

In our pursuit of recognition — be it funding, awards, or just a pat on the back — we often surrender our power. We let this adversarial source of encouragement define us. And when we finally step out of the underdog shadow, we falter, we sulk. We’re no longer fighting against something; we’re just… there.

Today, I learned that while adversarial motivation can lead to spectacular feats, it’s not the recipe for sustainable performance. The key lies in being positive with oneself and focusing relentlessly on the change we wish to enact for others. It’s about taking that next step, learning, and adapting.

What truly makes us great are the things that make us smile.

So, let’s begin again and never give up. Because it’s about improving your lap, not winning the race.

Thank you Sherali for the conversation today, and helping me learn something new.

The Paradox of Adversarial Growth: Sustaining Top Performance was originally published in Journey of the curious mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is the idea that brought our small team together.

Decipad is a new way to create, collaborate and build anything you want using numbers. Whether managing cashflows, analyzing vaccination rates or exploring crypto, we’re making it easy and more accessible for anyone to be a data analyst, every day.

Today, we’re excited to announce our raise and invite the curious minded to join our private beta.

A sneak peek,

Data is everywhere. Why isn’t data analysis more mainstream?

Today, people and businesses have access to more data and information than ever before. By 2025, there will be 175 zettabytes of data. Yet, most of us struggle to derive insights from data and use numbers to drive decisions.

The tools available today are limiting. And, our culture around collaborating with numbers is nowhere near as inclusive as it should be.

Data Programming tools are powerful, but the barrier to entry is high. They require knowledge of complex programming languages like python. It is estimated that only ~0.5% of the world’s population knows how to code. And, inclusivity in data science continues to be a challenge.

Spreadsheets are more accessible with ~20% global adoption, but they come with inherent problems. Have you ever used spreadsheets? Or, tried to read one? If you have, you know they are error-prone, quickly become too complex and were never designed for collaboration or knowledge sharing.

Today, making sense of data and information remains a privilege of the very few.

It’s 2022 — why is the gap between tools for programmers and everyone else so damn high!?

I’m an open-source developer. Data is something I have been working with most of my life. I love using powerful data programming tools like Jupyter Notebooks. Collaborating with data has always been a passion.

When I was building YLD, an engineering and design consultancy, that is where the idea for Decipad started. Working with a range of business clients, the gap between tools for programmers and everyone else was massive. It was just so complicated for non-developers to collaborate and meaningfully contribute to a modern company in a data-driven way. They either got stuck in excel, or needed a developer/analyst to achieve their goal. I was surprised how in open-source we could create so much knowledge from working together. Outside that, we are still emailing excel files crossing our fingers they work and then answering several questions to explain what it means, “can you explain this excel sheet to me” shouldn’t be common practice. Most non-developer users know the problems they want to solve with data, this is the important part, but just lack the tools to achieve it and a collaborative culture to learn together.

These tools lacked the fundamentals that made me love being an open source developer: community, extensibility and a shared language for connected thought and learning.

The idea for Decipad started with a few simple questions:

1. Why do some of the best data and analytics tools require complex programming languages?
2. Why are spreadsheets so error-prone and non-collaborative?
3. Why do the ‘technical’ and ‘non-technical’ operate in different tools?
4. Why isn’t data-driven thinking more mainstream and community driven?

Meet Decipad. Helping more people take part in a data-rich world.

With today’s access to data, the rise of low-code and a shifting culture toward creating in the open, there is an opportunity for a new, more modern approach to data analysis and knowledge collaboration. Over the past year, we’ve been building tools to make it easier for anyone to gather information, build models quickly and publish data-driven ideas. We’ve been designing around three principles.

• Access: Give more people the power to analyze and understand data in meaningful ways. We believe this starts with numbers.
• Community: Connect people across interests and skillsets to explore data together. This isn’t just another analytics tool for finance teams (although, we think they will love it too!).
• Ownership and reuse: Create a culture where data-driven knowledge and ideas can be income driving.

Where we are today. A notebook for numbers.

It’s still early days. We’ve built an early version of the product, and we’re excited to begin testing with select members from our community on Discord.

Today, when you enter Decipad, you can create a notebook and just start writing with text, data, and numbers together. It’s a more human way to build models with greater readability for collaboration and shared learning. The experience is powered by a new, more human language for writing with numbers and interactive no-code elements. You can build something as simple as an interactive 5k running model or something more complex like a dynamic VC term sheet.

What’s possible

1. A notebook for numbers: You can quickly create data-driven documents with greater readability and understanding. Just start writing.
2. Powered by a new language: A simple, yet powerful way to analyze data and information. No A1 + B1 or complex programming languages.
3. Achieve more with low code: Enhance your abilities and build faster with low/no code elements (coming next).
4. Connect to data effortlessly (coming soon)
5. Share your work with the world

“I am most excited about the role Decipad is playing in the future of work,” says Avi Eyal, Managing Partner at Entrée Capital. “It is crucial that more people and teams become data active to accelerate better decisions.”

This is just the beginning. We’ll be sharing more of our journey with our community along the way.

We hope to see you on Discord 👋

Nuno & The Decipad Team

Meet Decipad. We want to change the world’s relationship with numbers. was originally published in Journey of the curious mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Parents reinforce it: Do well in school, get rewarded. Do poorly, get grounded.

This is flawed.

Recognition is a measure of performance but it is not a measure of improvement.

Validating performance by external evaluation has lots of downfalls:

• It’s not designed for high performance
• It doesn’t offer actionable feedback
• It doesn’t evaluate consistently
• It is almost always flawed

Let me ask a question. What is the most frequent month when NBA players are born?

The answer is January. In basketball, being stronger gives you an advantage. Age groups have a cut-off in December, so people from January are the strongest.

But is it the cut-off that makes the player? No, it’s a reflection of a cut-off point only.

Our external validation bias is so strong we end up with more January born players. But that is coincidental. If you are born in December, you can still be one of the best NBA players of all time.

People believe that better scores mean better outcomes. But there are plenty of ways that it is not true.

In adulthood, many can’t reconcile why they are top performers but never get top outcomes.

You can game the game. But you cannot game life.
 — Probably Darwin. No, not really…

In life, performance is a measure of improvement. The faster you improve, and the more outcomes you achieve, the better you are off.

When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as “rootless and stemless.” We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.
 — W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance

We are all seeds, we all become roses. But the external world judges us as a rose. We compare ourselves to our brothers or sisters. To our friends.

The only way to lose is to compete. To achieve your full potential the only thing that matters is the rate of improvement.

Lucky for me I was taught differently.

Whenever I got a test result my parents would ask if “I felt happy with what I had learned”. If I said yes, they were happy. If I said no they would chastise me for wasting my time. Why would I waste time trying to get a high score on a test instead of learning?

They didn’t care about the score, growing up is all about improvement.

The analogy of racing the clock vs. winning a 100m race always comes to mind.

The only consistent competitive mindset is to beat the clock. Improve your lap time. Again. Improve your lap time. Again.

If you focus on winning the race, you might get recognition. But in the long term, it doesn’t work. You may win the game because you played lesser opponents.

Winning all the time is not a sustainable way to be competitive. You will always find circumstance or luck in the way. And winning against the whole world feels like taking a boulder up the hill.

Being competitive is the opposite. It’s demanding the most of yourself. It’s to have an improvement mindset. Is to surround yourself with the very best and learn from them.

You don’t have to push anyone down to make your way up.

But we do compete. So when should we look over our shoulder to see our competitors?

Our competitors matter so we can copy from them. They have a cool technique. They innovate in the way they run. They use better sports data. They eat better. They might develop better running shoes.

We need to keep track of our competitors in order not to allow them to have an unfair advantage. But that’s it.

The rest is on you: Keep improving, increase cadence, and lead on.

Begin again, never give up.

Winners don’t compete was originally published in Journey of the curious mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2013 I was about to be a father for the first time. I was in a different city and country. I did not have a job. The job options I had, I did not like them.

So, on the 5th of November, I started YLD. The idea, simple: work two days a week so I could focus on my family. Paula was six months pregnant. We had a plan.

On the 22nd of November, we went for a routine scan to see how the baby was doing. I remember Dr Ge Zhang excused herself to “double-check some calculations”.

This baby needs to be born in the next 24 hours — said Dr Zhang upon her return.

I spent the next 24 hours in fight-or-flight mode. I booked flights for Paula’s family. I made lodging arrangements. I researched. I went to get the baby bag from home. I took care of the cats. It was tunnel vision for 24 hours.

Alice was born the next day, healthy and weighing 1kg (under 3lbs) at St. Mary’s Hospital.

Are you staying with mom or going to NICU with the baby? — the nurse asked.

Should I go with the baby and leave my Paula by herself? Am I prepared to bond with this baby? Is the baby going to live? Is Paula going to live? I was trying to speak, but the words would not come out.

Looking back, none of these questions seems sensible. But when you are in fight-or-flight, everything is out of proportion. You overreact.

You should go with the baby. — Paula said.

And so I did. And I cried.

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

I thrive on chaos and stress. I seek big challenges and am not afraid of conflict. Like most of you, I am an entrepreneur and know what it means to walk that path.

But when the nurse asked me that question, I froze.

The fact that my job is to make difficult decisions all the time made no difference.

People and teams need leadership when under extreme circumstances. Yet even those that thrive in stressful situations can freeze at a moment’s notice.

Leaders need a method to manage these critical situations for their team. We can achieve that by following two simple steps:

1. Understand what motivates each person.
2. Build a comprehensive plan for your journey.

We should start by understating what motivates each person:

• What they observe
• How that makes them feel
• What they need
• What they request of you

For instance, I understood how Paula felt but never asked what she needed from me.

Hospitals deal with premature babies all the time, so we were ok. The doctors know we are afraid. They know what we need and can predict the requests we will make of them. They have developed processes and infrastructure to cater to our crisis-related needs.

Chances are your business is not as prepared for the stormy waters ahead. But before you get to the right answer, you need to contextualise the journey for your team. Without their buy-in, even the perfect plan can fail. You can ask them what they see, feel, need, and request.

Two years later and Paula was pregnant again. This time I decided to take six months of extended parental leave, a benefit YLD offers all staff.

Can a founder do this?

• We had enough bookings for a whole year.
• We hired an experienced team that had done it before.
• We had enough money on the bank.
• We were growing 100% year on year for the second year in a row.

So we felt pretty positive about me taking parental leave.

In January 2016, Ben was born. I was happy and at home.

Things did not go to plan. Paternity leave was great for the family, not so good on YLD. I was taking an executive course at Stanford when I learned that:

• Revenues were lower than bookings.
• Costs skyrocketed.
• We had no new clients.
• Upon my return from the course, more than half a million pounds of our cash reserves were already spent.

Up until this point, YLD had known nothing but tremendous growth and success. But that was no longer the case. We were in crisis mode. I had to come back to work.

So we called an emergency meeting to discuss. I listened to everyone, both in the meeting and in private.

We made a plan.

In these situations, I always visualise what is happening as if it was a theatre play:

• What actors should take part in?
• What is being communicated?
• How does the location affect the scene?
• Where are we shining the spotlight?

The focus was on getting YLD back to the troupe our audience had come to love. There was no time to waste. We needed to make changes.

Some of our cast didn’t agree with the needed for change. They needed to agree or leave. Some, like myself, will be too shocked to respond. We planned for their absence.

We decided to promote new managers from within the company. We couldn’t afford to bring in new people that didn’t already understand the play.

The cast, our cast, needed to understand the urgency of this change. We were transparent and direct with the financial challenges we were facing. This increased the pressure but allowed the team to regain trust and focus.

We committed to a clear, shared goal: 2017 would be a non-loss-making year. In 2018 we would double our revenues and be profitable again.

This piece of teamwork helped our people feel reassured about our financial outlook.

Then, we started acting again.

We shifted the spotlight from the storm to the discovery.

And as the play unfolded, we considered the same questions for each scene. Always remaining transparent with the team. Always focusing on our newfound shared trust.

With our people feeling safe, and the spotlight back on the future, we enabled our cast to move on from the past.

Over time more of the team embraced the new plan. And YLD went on to double our revenues. For two years in a row.

When we fail to deal with difficult situations we lose out of what matters the most: The people. Our people.

We remember how things affect us, but we never learn how we affected others.

So, start by listening to people. Get their buy-in.

Then don’t freeze, be the doctors.

Have a plan.

Be bold. Be transparent. Be clear on what we are achieving together. Ensure people understand why and what they need to do. Then, be true to your word.

It will get your team back to winning. And you will experience the most important moments in your careers.

The moments that you never forget.

Making decisions when life got you #$@&%*! was originally published in Journey of the curious mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

But

winning is better than losing.

This was the first thing that caught my eye when reading Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.

I was born surrounded by books.

In my house there were more books than space on the shelves. You would find books pilling all the way to the ceiling in every division of the house. Yes, even the bathroom (that’s where all the Saramago books were, not because they were bad but because everyone loved reading them I guess?)

My dad always thought there was no better company than a book. When I asked my grandmother how he was when he was young she would always paint a picture of him reading a book on the couch. When I asked him how to entertain myself in parties that were boring, his response: a book.

Whenever my parents weren’t home I would sneak around and find a new book to read. But not because they were super strict with their children reading books. I knew it would make my dad proud to see me reading and, as a contrarian, I didn’t want to give him the privilege.

One of those books was The Death of a Beekeeper.

It’s a book about a teacher that finds he has cancer. However, he decides not to read the diagnosis that was posted to him. He continues living his life: reminiscing of what could have been, enduring the pain, the rejection of his own dog, shopping lists, and all sorts of other things you do on your day to day.

It’s a plain book, even boring. But I liked it. So much so that this book had a far bigger influence in my life than any other that I came to read ever since.

Throughout the book the author kept remembering the reader to

Begin again. Never give up.

That sentence stuck with me.

As a teenager, I often felt lost and wondering what to do with my life. It’s a feeling many of us have in our teen years, I suppose.

The only verdict I could find, the only thing that was sure, was death itself. Everything else seemed meaningless.

Begin again. Never give up.

It was this sentence that shifted my attention from the end to the adventure.

It allowed me to accept my mistakes. To move on.

And so I changed my attitude towards life. And the adventures I lived are a result of this change.

This is why the quote from Good Strategy, Bad Strategy stuck with me. When the entrepreneur says “strategy is never quitting until you win” it was more than a quote to me.

This had been my survival strategy in life: the way I got to adulthood happy and motivated to pursue my interests.

Later on, in business, it became a mantra. A secret weapon if you will — I couldn’t be the best at everything, and I couldn’t always be right. But I’d be damned if I didn’t keep trying.

This mantra allowed me to remain focused, happy, and grateful for the opportunities that I got. When it didn’t work out I would

Begin again. Never give up.

While working I reinforced this mantra in the teams I was part of. I used it as a way to motivate people that I was nurturing.

You see, you can only improve when operating outside your comfort zone. But when you are outside the comfort zone, you fail more often. But that’s ok, you can pick yourself right up and try, try again.

Begin again. Never give up.

Richard Rumelt (the author of the Good Strategy, Bad Strategy) replied to the entrepreneur “but winning is better than losing”.

And that’s the key to understand the role of strategy in business.

You set your own goal. You can even imagine what you will be doing in five, ten years. What’s important to you? How does it feel like? How does it smell?

You can plan for the goal that you want to achieve.

When you are clear on what that goal is, a strategy is the set of (coherent) actions you need to take, under a guiding policy that plays to your strengths, based on the situational diagnosis you made.

And as good as resilience is, it is not a strategy.

It’s a survival technique.

But winning is better than losing was originally published in Journey of the curious mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the things I appreciate about sports is the notion of academy.

Unlike sports not all business run an academy. So, when is a good time for you to invest in creating an academy?

Having someone grow through the ranks in a club to become a professional is a magical moment. Academies have been the foundation of some of the best football teams of all time. Cruyff identifies the Ajax Academy has the enabler for creation of total football, a new philosophy of playing that changed the power dynamics in football forever.

Further, academies show a social commitment to local communities and grass roots development of the sport.

In some clubs however, there’s no time to waste and short term planning takes priority. The same happens in businesses and so we rarely see good software engineering and digital product academies.

But hiring a top team for your starting eleven is not a bad idea at all: transformational projects are riddled with problems and you should do all you can to show a results quickly. At YLD we often help our clients augment their teams exactly to this effect. No results, and it quickly turns to a blame game and ballooning costs.

However, considering the long term your business must create incredible technology capabilities to survive in a digital economy. The pace of change is relentless in the age of wonderfully dissatisfied customers. Miss a beat and you might find yourself out.

Building your own team is the only sustainable way to ensure the rate of change you need in your organisation.

Having an internal academy gives you the ability to do so, by adding new team members as they become ready to work in a professional manner.

However, to set up an effective academy there’s a degree of planning and strategy that you must respond to before starting:

• An academy requires an incredible aptitude from the students. Just like in football this makes it very competitive to even have enough capability to make it to the first team. Your recruitment needs to be very good at identifying skills, culture match and personality (desire to improve) at a very granular level. Just like in football, the definitions of roles in technology is fluid. What it meant to be a number 10 in the 90s has nothing to do with a modern number 10. You need to have the ability to foster the development of players in a way that they can succeed in modern day business.
• You need coaches for an academy and that has a costs. In football it’s retired players and sports managers but in business this is more difficult as often technical positions don’t want to graduate into management positions. External coaches in business are costly and their quality varies wildly, hence not very suited to an academy. So you ask yourself, can I pay (in velocity or just buy specifying a budget line) for an academy?
• You need mentors. Learning by doing is the best thing you can do early on in your career and pairing with an experienced member of the team is one of the best ways to learn. Once again in high risk delivery projects it’s hard to justify not having a senior member of a team helping to deliver the project, both from a risk and a financial perspective
• You need a learning and development function since you need to give people guidance on how they can improve. You need to invest in their training, as well as integrating them into your team with summits and events. This also is a cost to the organisation
• You need to engage with communities to give them opportunities to increase their understanding of practices outside your organisation and develop critical professional skills. Open source is a great example of this. If the community sees your company as a “force for good” and sees that your alumni are successful, further generations will have a bigger talent pool. Fail to do this and you will have less talent available.
• You need a career framework, hiring principles, people process, incentives, clear guidelines for graduation. This should by now be standard practices, but in my experience the understanding of software engineering and digital products inside big organisations is wildly different and few have defined these artefacts, let alone agree on best practices.
• The average tenure of an executive is two years (made up statistic that is likely true) and there’s no incentives to build capabilities. Hence executives will often optimise for delivery and then shift to a outsourcing model that makes the structure more capital efficient. Boards are often oblivious to these challenges and fail to set appropriate expectations. The stock market sells a continuous and forever increase in capital for those who participate but in reality we know quarterly profits and short term thinking normally take priorities. Executive incentives are normally tied to those.
• Sometimes something as simple as the funding of a company changes incentives in a way that makes it difficult to justify the investment: public company, private, venture backed, etc
• There’s a possibility for abuse of power dynamics of young vulnerable people

One way for companies to get started in developing staff is to use an external, ready made academy which can provide several advantages.

First of all, teaching is hard. Unless you have done it before, it can challenging figuring out what material should be included in your lessons and in what order. Similarly, it can be a challenge knowing when your teaching is working and when it’s not, and more importantly what to do in such a situation. By using an external academy, you do not need to worry about any of those problems. All you need to do is build a good relationship and be ready to pick out the best graduates at demo day.

Using an external requires no upfront investment and the hard work has already been done for you. Teaching is done by passionate, experienced instructors who know to shape and mould passionate students into ready-made developers who will provide your company with the next generation of talent.

This approach may not be so easy in practice. To begin with good academies are rare and finding one whose syllabus is aligned with your requirements could be hard. One of the reasons for that is that running an academy is expensive, therefore one way they can lighten the load is focussing on technologies which are more beginner friendly but may not have the greatest usage in industry such as Ruby on Rails.

In addition, an external academy has different incentives one in-house. Typically, they make money by charging admission to students who want to become software developers. The more students pass through their door, the more money they make. Therefore they are incentivised to keep the standards just high enough for graduates to be able to get work, but no higher as that would eat into their profits.

Perhaps the biggest disadvantage of using an external academy is that you miss out on helping your own staff grow by training and mentoring. Teaching is often thought of a one way street, passing knowledge from teacher to student. However, anyone who has taught a subject before will tell you that teaching forces you to deeply evaluate own knowledge, address any gaps and constantly re-evaluate one’s understanding of a topic. By providing your in-house developers with eager students, you give them the opportunity to grow an improve in one of the most powerful ways possible.

There’s one thing I learned by all the attempts I’ve seen to create an organised academy: you can only do it if you plan to answer all of the above before even starting. You need an operating model, answer to all those questions, you need people to manage, and you need to understand the money and time commitment it will take. You need executive sponsorship of the project.

The worse thing you can do is to try to do it as a side project. There is nothing worse than working alongside incredible people and failing their development. And when the pressure to deliver is there and you didn’t have the clarity up ahead you will find yourself with limited choices.

However don’t let any of this discourage you. Knowledge is key. By tackling the problem before starting and understanding the setup you need you increase your chances of success.

Companies are made of people, and investing in them is the best possible use of your time. By setting up an academy you are making sure you develop the very best talent, in a way that fits your culture. More, you create grassroots connections to your community, and in business as in life you only get what you give.

Building a technology academy inside a business was originally published in Journey of the curious mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I had been invited by GP Bullhound to attend the investment firm’s annual summit in Marbella earlier this year. And although I was present at several amazing lectures while I was there, it was Toni’s talk in particular that stuck with me. And it took place on a tennis court…

Toni started by saying that tennis was simple. Hit the ball as hard as you can, try to hit it inside the lines, and, if possible, hit it away from your adversary. All the skill, strength, speed, tactical awareness and the study of your opponent should be built around these simple principles. At their core, these three glaringly simple steps foster improvement in a young player and helps them win more points.

The tennis coach got me thinking. You can put in a lot of effort when cycling, but if you’re in the wrong gear there’s a significant loss of energy. In business it’s the equivalent of a burnt-out team member trying to work long hours on a job that demands critical thinking. Its output will be suboptimal.

Only by being in the right gear and having the best technique you can make sure that your great effort turns into great work. It requires discipline, critical thinking, planning, learning how to say no and, above all, improving in the very basics of our profession. In tennis, according to Toni, that can be summarised in those three steps. But, how would you summarise these for, let’s say, a CMO?

Hard work is by no means a guarantee of exceptional output. How many times have you seen teams create incredible work that never saw the light of day? In tennis, according to Toni’s experience, this can be translated into just how many times you hit the ball with near perfect technique.

If you use perfect technique to return all shots, you score more points. And if you score more points, you win more games.

I obviously enjoyed Toni’s talk, but up to this point, parallels aside, I had learned little in terms of practical management. It was at that point that I was taken by surprise, as Toni told the most contrarian, unusual story.

A really eye-rolling, this-guy-is-past-his-prime moment for much of the audience. Which was, of course, when I knew I was about to learn something new; something truly special always comes with a truly different perspective.

Toni told us a story about his young players. Apparently a lot of parents come to him and say, “My child loses a lot of games, how can I make them win more games?” He stopped and said, “Well. Have them play lesser players.” Basically, if you suck and want to win, play someone that sucks more than you.

The status quo says that the perfect way to learn is to be surrounded by people better than us, so why the bizarre advice?

He proceeded to explain; if Rafa loses a bunch of games with a specific player, maybe he should be playing a different tournament. You learn a lot in your losses, but you can’t develop a winning mentality by losing all the time. This is the very notion of outcome management.

If you want to become the next Rafa Nadal, you can’t expect to start by competing in Wimbledon; you need to work your way up. If you continually play out of your league you’re ignoring your mental capacity for coping. You will build resilience, but even the most strong-willed of us will at some point give up. You need wins, and sometimes that means playing “lesser players”.

Toni taught us there’s no guarantee you’ll be the best tennis player in the world, but you’ll definitely be the best tennis player you can be.

That’s the difference between output and outcome, you simply cannot guarantee an outcome.

The lessons are very attuned to Nassim Taleb’s concept of ‘antifragile’; rather than building resilience, we create in a way that improves on each problematic encounter.

In business this is about setting people up to win at the edge of their continually advancing abilities, throughout their career.

Illustrations by James Hevey. With contributions from Finn D’Albert. Thank you to the team of GP Bullhound.

Further reading: High Output Management by Andrew Grove, My Turn: A Life of Total Football by Johan Cruyff, and Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Play Lesser Players: correlating your teams’ input with exceptional outcomes was originally published in Journey of the curious mind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.