Building the Team Behind the Entrepreneur

At the annual Social Capital Markets Annual Conference #SOCAP18 I had the privilege of leading a speaking panel titled Building the Team Behind the Entrepreneur. Presenting with me were the impressive Kate Cochran (Upaya Social Ventures), Krishna Murthy (Sattva Consulting) and Maria Dayton (Singularity University). Together, we explored a simple question that has a remarkably challenging answer:

How do you help startups build more effective, healthy employees that can help your organization scale?

To answer this question, we broke the conversation into 3 main pillars:

1. Building a culture of growth with shared values
2. Finding, hiring, and compensating the best talent
3. Building an inclusive environment that enables personal learning and growth

The key lesson from our session was this: building human capital has never been more important, and it requires a holistic talent strategy that entrepreneurs, their boards, AND their investors must screen for and help develop.

This is not an easy, one-off “best practice”, but rather a call for startup leaders to embrace the importance of building effective teams as well as inclusive cultures of learning and growth.

Embedded in our presentation slides here are the key takeaways from our session, as well some valuable resources (slide #24) to help entrepreneurs, impact investors, and institutional funds to do more to help build the skills of startup employees so that the organization can truly scale and make an impact.

If you want to continue the conversation and learning, here a few suggested next steps:

1. Follow SOCAP and its SOCAP365 content platform
2. Find skills and know-how to build the capacity of your team with MovingWorlds.
3. Follow the talent-building best practices of Upaya Social Ventures
4. Learn how Sattva Consulting helps startups effectively scale their growth AND Impact