Leaders adept at fostering unity in traditional work environments may witness higher than usual interpersonal conflict when forming teams in a distributed environment. Here I attempt to explain why and the steps leaders can take to mitigate such risk. The Two Forms of Conflict Conflict is simply disagreement. And of course, not all disagreement is…

In 2001 a group of software engineers signed the Manifesto for Agile Software Development in which they proclaimed a preference for: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan So critical, in their view…

Oil is the World’s most valuable commodity, totalling approx. US$1.2 trillion in annual traded value. Nigeria, which holds the World’s eleventh largest proven oil reserves, is one of its biggest vendors on the international market. This would lead a reasonable person to assume that the country’s own internal economy is…

This blog post outlines what we initially look for in a startup and its founding team and therefore provides advice on how to put those things on display in your first pitch meeting with us. Lesson 1: Be Yourself The other day an entrepreneur came in to pitch me and before I could ask…

It’s well known that climate change is one of the great existential crises of our time. …

Recently I was strolling through Regent’s Park with my colleague Nathan Benaich discussing the recruitment industry and trying to understand why certain recruitment startups — including the current darling of the industry, Hired — succeeded where others fail. For those unfamiliar, Hired is an online marketplace for technical talent, where…

Employment interviews as a selection method are so ubiquitous that it is virtually inconceivable that a company would conduct a hiring process without using them. However, the research clearly shows that interviews are a poor predictor of job performance: (Hunter and Hunter, 1998) There is, however, a clear lack of…

Matt Blumberg once said that if you were to take all of the wisdom of every successful founder in history and distil it into a single sentence, it would probably look something like this: build the best team you possibly can as early as you possibly can. But to build…

I want to talk about building a startup team. But rather than talk about how to build a team, I want to talk about something far more fundamental: the need for founders to accept certain truths about what is required to successfully build a startup team. …