How do we build a stellar team at the speed of scale?

Founder Vision is a one-on-one podcast that digs into deep conversations with business leaders from emerging markets as they get vulnerable about their experience in the early- to median-stage moments of their founding journey.

Aaron Enten is the founder and CEO of Insight Optics, a company that’s dedicated to preventing preventable diseases. They serve that mission by means of a mobile-enabled smart platform that allows unskilled, unspecialized, or untrained individuals to record videos of diseases that they normally wouldn’t have the confidence to provide a diagnostic on through their smartphone. The platform advises them in real time that they have captured the right content, and that it is of a diagnosable quality, prior to the transition to a specialist for diagnostic support and follow-up care.

By de-skilling that process and making it accessible through smartphones, Insight Optics is increasing access for the primary care providers who are currently seeing patients who are normally non-adherent to that specialty. It allows these providers to capture patients where they are — which reduces the non-capture rate at the point of primary care. Next, Insight Optics plan to scale — in order to covers the largest group of the population that normally would not have access to this type of exam.

Catch the full episode in the player below, or on Spotify, Audible, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts… pretty much wherever you like to listen.

Key Takeaways

Stay Vulnerable

According to Aaron, “being willing to ask for introductions to people, being willing to talk to everyone, anyone and being open about what your shortcomings are…that is what is essential to building a core team.”

Aaron focuses on staying open — open in talking about the problems of the company, open to asking for help and open to asking for introductions to further mentors and advisors.

“Are there questions I haven’t asked?,” Aaron muses. “Is there someone out there that will know more? Maybe they might not be the person that we need on the team right now, but they will know someone who does, or they will be important down the road?”

Kill Your Ego

Aaron’s flex is that he’s a “really good in-the-trenches CEO,” willing to roll up his sleeves and dive in to pull all-nighters in the initial traction phase.

“When it comes to scaling the company to hundreds of thousands or millions,” he muses, “I recognize that I have limited experience. That’s the reason we brought an advisory board in — to help us to cover our blind spots.”

“I fully anticipate, by the time we go to raise our Series A, fielding the possibility of completely stepping out of the CEO role and moving in someone who has that capacity for scaling the company,” he adds. The challenge: to “match the vision, match the directive and recognize [your] own shortcomings so that [you] can step out of the way and let someone else step in, to really ensure the success of the company.”

Focus, Mindfully

Aaron recounts a time when he rabbit-holed on a new revenue stream and had to ask the team to decide on the viability of continuing to pursue it.

“I had been pulling in our technical co-founder’s time and I had been distracting them from other components and project pathways they had been investigating,” Aaron recalls. “I ended up bringing it up to the entire team in our weekly all-hands. I said, ‘This is something we have been investigating. It has been eating a fair bit of our time and resources. Is this something that we feel we can adequately serve our potential customers?’ and they said, “Well, we don’t necessarily have the financial capacity to advance this from our finance side, or the bandwidth from the technical team if we want to complete all these projects within the next two months, but we really should not be pulling from the core value that we are providing to our current customer base.’”

The choice was a tough one.

“We can be highly focused today and provide that world-class experience in our product for the technical offerings that are coming down the pipeline,” he says, “and then commit that same value to a future operational component, or we can try and parse it, split it, divide up the bandwidth and pursue both at a good enough level as opposed to a let’s excel and blow the socks off of our customers today.”

“Even after that meeting,” he adds, “there was still discussion within the founding team. We took that discussion back to the advisory team. We weighed out some of the pros and cons.

We’re creating an environment of: ‘We have these problems, I want your input as a team and we want to be able to incorporate decision points and direction of the company, not just from a top-down perspective but from a bottom-up.’ This is essential to the success of any operation, and it is how I try to build the culture of our company.”