Perfectly Imperfect: Core Skills and Acceptable Gaps for Venture Studio Founders
This may be taboo to say out loud to the startup ecosystem, but it is also undeniable: the very best founders don’t join venture studios. A venture studio partners with founders and provides a mix of founding capital and deep operating expertise to launch and scale startups through product-market fit (more here). But if you are a deeply experienced and successful founder, you are very likely unwilling to make the equity tradeoff required to partner with a venture studio — typically 10–50%+ of your company. Given that equity tradeoff, a venture studio and a potential startup founder should never join forces unless the founder has obvious skill and domain expertise gaps that the studio can support.
That’s not a critique of venture studios or founders. It’s a reflection on the fact that there are very few established exceptional founders. A venture studio exists in part to help newer founders become exceptional.
To thrive as the founder and leader of any startup, it takes an incredible amount of ambition, resilience and luck. In my experience supporting 100+ companies in the Samsung Next portfolio, co-founding 10+ companies at Superlayer (web3 venture studio), and as an angel investor and/or advisor in many more, I have observed that there are six skills above all others that separate the very best founders from the rest. However, for founders considering joining a venture studio or a studio evaluating a founder, not all of those are skills are mission critical from that start. Figuring out where a studio can supplement the founders’ weakness — and where it may just be getting in the way — is critical.
The Six Core Skills of Successful Founders
To lay the groundwork, here are the six skills that I’ve observed the best founders master independent from industry expertise, market selection, etc (we’ll dig in more on each later on):
- Develop an Inspiring Mission
- Build and Communicate a GTM Strategy
- Attract and Empower Incredible Talent
- Act Decisively Amid Uncertainty
- Set the Pace
- Capitalize the Company
In my experience, most founders are weak in at least a few of these skills. That’s to be expected. There are also many great founders that are weak in most of these skills but elite in a few. Only the most mythical founders like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk are able to claim mastery or near mastery on all six. For example, Elon is a master of the inspiring mission (SpaceX: “make life multiplanetary”, Tesla: “accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy”), the strategy, acting decisively and capitalizing his companies. He is arguably either a psychopath and/or best in the world at setting the pace — check out his biography by Walter Isaacson for his “hardcore” philosophy. But for all his strengths, Elon maintains a vicegrip on control, which, possibly with the exception of Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX, ultimately burns out or alienates his top talent. Even then, the results suggest that this hasn’t slowed down Elon’s many successes.
Knowing that many founders have the potential to be great but are lacking in at least a few of the core six skills, the key for both venture studio and founder is figuring out which of those six skills can be best supplemented by venture studios to give a studio startup the best odds of success.
Assessing the Criticality of Each Skill Within The Lens of a Venture Studio Startup Founder
1. Develop an Inspiring Mission
An inspiring mission magnetizes people, clarifies direction and inspires best efforts. “Organize the world’s information” was an easy to understand and motivating rallying cry for Google culture in the early 2000s. In a venture studio, the mission can originate from the studio or the founder, but more often than not the original concept starts with the studio. From my experience at Superlayer, when founders actively contribute to shaping the product to be solved, mission, and product vision, their commitment and effectiveness significantly increase. At Superlayer, we saw that founders brought in to support an already established mission and product vision were less bought-in and less able to catalyze the team around the mission, as they acted more like product managers taking the need for the product as a given rather than constantly questioning the best path to achieve the mission.
2. Build and Communicate a GTM Strategy
Developing a unique strategy or go-to-market approach is challenging and often under-appreciated with respect to its role in driving a startup to success. A strong GTM strategy is critical to ensure that the product is able to gain enough traction/distribution to achieve critical exit velocity. In a venture studio, founders should ideally benefit immensely from the domain and functional expertise of the studio, especially in the initial stages. This partnership should help in crafting a robust strategy, ensuring the venture is well-positioned to bring product to market effectively. For example at Superlayer, the gaming and web3 token launching expertise our founding team collectively wields has enabled us to support studio startup founders that are skilled in launching a product but unfamiliar how to launch a product and token in web3. While a venture studio can supplement this founder skill in the short term, the studio startup founder will need to be the long-term driver of strategy as the studio steps back over time.
3. Attract and Empower Amazing Talent
The success of any venture, studio startup or not, hinges on its people. Bringing on great people requires a founder who can attract, close and empower top talent. Therefore, in a venture studio, the startup founder must be clearly seen as the leader, not an employee of the studio startup. The founder should ideally be able to leverage the studio resources to help with sourcing, interviewing and onboarding, but the startup founder needs to play a decisive role in final selection and overall team composition. Over-reliance on the studio for talent can undermine the founder’s leadership once the studio eventually steps back, especially if the majority of the talent felt more loyalty to the studio vs. the founder. Engaging deeply in the recruitment process establishes the founder as the central figure capable of steering and inspiring the company independently.
4. Be Decisive and Adapt Quickly
Swift and decisive action is absolutely critical for great founders, especially in the earliest stages. One of the biggest risks in a venture studio setup is the potential for uncertainty regarding decision-making authority. Striving for consensus can lead to delays, undermining agility. For venture studios, there is only one option — attract founders that can act decisively and empower them to make those decisions. The main advantage a startup has versus a large incumbent is speed and the ability to adapt quickly to changing market conditions —in this case a venture studio needs to ensure it preserves that advantage for its startups. For founders, if you are not decisive by nature, joining a venture studio is more likely to slow you down by adding more cooks in the kitchen than speed you up.
At Superlayer and also previously in my COO role at Samsung Accelerator, the startups that struggled the most were those where the outside co-founder acted more like a product manager or GM than a true founder. You can’t be decisive on behalf of the company if you don’t feel like you are the ultimate decision maker. This is also a reminder to venture studios that product managers don’t always make the best pioneering founders.
5. Set the Pace
Setting the pace for the startup may seem like an easy/obvious role for a founder, but in the era of remote work and entitled employees who have never seen a real recession in the last decade-plus, a startup that is consistently cranking at a high level is the exception rather than the norm. A venture studio can support the founder in pushing the pace by providing resources that accelerate progress and reducing some of the administrative friction that slows down startups. However, while the studio can provide the caffeine, the founder must be the heartbeat that drives the urgency of the company.
The stories of Elon at SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, etc. calling for “surges” and spending all night at the offices are legend. It’s not just about hours worked, but the intensity of focus and obsession with shipping product. At Superlayer, the startups with the best outcomes have almost exclusive been the ones that consistently ran the fastest and smartest, which starts with the founder. Ultimately, a founder can’t outsource hustle.
6. Capitalize the Company
Securing funding is a super power of many world-class founders (think Sam Altman and OpenAI), but it’s also the easiest of the six skills for a venture studio to support. With established relationships with early-stage VCs, deep expertise in the fundraising process, the studio can guide the founder through the fundraising process. As COO of Superlayer, I’ve shepharded multiple companies through a robust seed stage fundraise, sometimes as an advisor teaching the process and making the intros and other times as a participant in every pitch. This support is particularly beneficial for technically inclined founders who may not be as comfortable with the external demands of a fundraise. By leveraging a studio’s network and expertise, founders can develop this skill over time so they are well versed to raise capital once it exits the venture studio around Series A or Series B.
Summing it All Up
Looking at the core six skills of the most successful startup founders, venture studio founders need to at the very least be able to co-create and own the mission, be decisive and set the pace for the company. However, a venture studio founder should be able to lean on the studio in the early days for support in developing GTM strategy skills, providing resources for recruiting and guiding the first few rounds of fundraising. In conclusion, the perfect venture studio founder is imperfect in the ways that a venture studio can most readily support.
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Originally posted: May 2024
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Other Venture Studio Content by Gary Coover
- Venture Studios Beware: Don’t Expect PMs to be Pioneers — What to look for and look out for when bringing in founders to run venture studio startups.
- All-In: The Only Choice For a Winning Founder / Venture Studio Partnership — Why depth of commitment is critical for a founder / venture studio relationship to work, and how to ensure you get it.
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Gary Coover is the COO at Superlayer, a web3 venture studio launching the next frontier of tokenized consumer products, in addition to running ops at the portfolio company Taki Games. Previously, he spent the better part of a decade architecting, launching and scaling startup incubation and investment programs for Samsung Next (the software and services innovation arm of Samsung Electronics), including developing a first-of-its-kind incubation model (Samsung Accelerator) and launching a global $150M venture fund. As the Operating MD, Gary directed the selection and launch of Samsung NEXT’s Israel and Europe offices, built and led the platform team supporting venture investments, and ran a pre-seed incubation program. Prior to Samsung, Gary started his career in consulting and co-founded a venture-backed startup in the ecommerce space that resulted in a small exit in 2017.
