7 Questions with Jamie Cuffe

Princeton E-Club
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read

Meet Jamie Cuffe ’19. Formerly Co-Director of SVTT and IgniteSTEM.

What advice would you give to students interested in joining E-Club?

The first thing I would say is ‘just do it’. Put yourself out there and meet cool people working on some impactful projects. It’s amazing to see the places it will take you! When you’re thinking about what team or what project you want to work on, I think 90% of it is the people. I would focus on working with a team of individuals that you think will be fun to work with and that you’ll learn a lot from. The second part is making sure that the project aligns with your goals and that it’s meaningful to you.

How do you go about incorporating/thinking about team culture?

The way I think about it, there are a couple of components. First, it’s about hiring great people. It is about finding people that are passionate and have bought into the ‘why’ of your mission. There’s an incredible TED Talk by Simon Sinek explaining how people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. For IgniteSTEM, what we wanted to see was people aligning with the vision of why we do what we do. It starts with the hiring, but it doesn’t end there. We also put our team in touch with the end user, the people that were at our conferences, the teachers and the students. We found that it was incredibly motivating for our team to see the end impact they were having. At our conferences, we had each of our team members engage in a conversation with one of the attendees and it was amazing to see the results that came out of that. It was when people on the team started to hear comments like “IgniteSTEM reminded me of why I got into teaching” that we started to build an incredible team culture. Another thing is building traditions. IgniteSTEM focused on building meaningful traditions into our culture. We were the first team to hold an offsite and we enjoyed spending time with each other. We had power sessions, in which music was blasting, people were hanging out but also getting a ton of impactful work done and there was a great culture around that.

What has been the biggest surprise you’ve found looking at startups from the VC side this summer?

It’s kind of like sitting on the other side of the interview table. E-Club was one of my first experiences sitting across the interview table. You learn so much, such as how to ask questions and how to tell your story. To some extent, its been the same with venture. I’ve started to understand what the important components are and what to think about in the future when I hope to start or invest in a company. The biggest thing so far has been market size. You need to be chasing a big problem and a big market. Having an incredible group of founders and a strong first set of hires is of course extremely important. Lastly, the relationship between VCs and their founders is a special one. At Sequoia, I have been fortunate to work with some extraordinary people that strive every day to be the 10x investor that their founders need to build the legendary companies of tomorrow. That’s been the most important takeaway for me as I think about how I can add the most value to entrepreneurs and the world more broadly.

As someone who went to a boarding school in England, can you compare/contrast entrepreneurship in the UK vs US?

The community in the UK for startups has hit hockey stick growth. You are seeing a number of incredible companies coming out of the UK and they have a great investing ecosystem built up there. There are more and more of the Silicon Valley names investing in Europe and beyond. But I think the interesting thing is that the seed stage is still on the local level. There isn’t as large a pool of talent or capital in the UK and I think that makes it a little harder to start companies. But some people are doing great work to change that, such as Matt Clifford at EntrepreneurFirst. He is starting to build something similar to YC for Europe. They are bringing together founders and guiding them through the early stages of their startup journey to create an ecosystem for success and an infrastructure that was not present in the UK before.

Who is your role model in the entrepreneurship space/why?

Keller Rinaudo, founder and CEO of Zipline, which is a medical drone delivery company. It is an unbelievable business that does life saving delivery of blood transfusions in Rwanda. They have only been around for 3 years ago but they’ve saved thousands of lives. He also has an unbelievable team and is a real role model when it comes to building teams and culture.

Do you plan on creating your own startup? If so, what?

I want to work on game changing platforms that can make a real difference in the world. There are so many inefficiencies in our everyday lives that could be solved with the creation of open marketplaces. Companies like Airbnb, Uber, DoorDash, and Stripe have been the trailblazers here but there is so much more to come. For me, the compelling thing about these platforms is they can help market forces work properly in a way that creates opportunities for everyone to work their way up.

If you could travel back in time where would you go?

I would go to Bell Labs right when they were discovering the transistors and all the monumental breakthroughs were coming through. I would have loved to have been a part of that. It feels like they were focused on longer-term scientific innovation that would have a revolutionary effect on not only business outcomes but on their fields as a whole. I think that can sometimes get lost in the flurry as every business rushes to hit the next milestone and will be top of mind for me as I think about building an enduring company.

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