Announcing the Playfair Founders’ Studio @ Warner Yard
“Leadership is the capacity and will to rally men and women to a common purpose and the character which inspires confidence.” — Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery
It’s Lonely at the Top
It’s lonely at the top, as they say, and in our world, no one knows this better than startup founders. Studies consistently show that most startup CEOs experience feelings of isolation and stress that directly hinder their performance.
The main cause is a lack of relatability amongst the founder’s social groups, both at work and at home. No matter the effort a founder makes to be accessible to, to relate to, and to ask for honest feedback from their staff, most of their subordinates will not feel comfortable opening up to the boss, typically out of fear of judgment or retaliation. (It’s worth noting that this in no way reflects on the founder themself, so much as it reflects the reality of human nature and workplace dynamics).
Being at the helm of a cash flow negative company, where you can literally point to the specific date in a calendar on which the company will no longer be able to make payroll unless you see an uptick in sales or manage to raise more money from investors, must be a pretty stressful state of existence. Solo founders are of course particularly susceptible to this stress and isolation.
Thus, founders owe it to themselves — and, more importantly, to their teams — to make sure this stress and isolation doesn’t impact their effectiveness as a leader. At Playfair, one of our guiding principles is that we owe it to our founders to “have their backs” and ensure that they’re set up to be the most successful version of themselves possible.
In our view, this responsibility is not limited to ensuring that they’re pursuing the correct business strategy, or being sufficiently conservative with their cash spend. We also view our roles as ensuring the welfare of our founders, including their mental and emotional wellbeing.
We’re professional investors and not founders, so it’s hard for us to relate to the specific challenges of a startup leader. We recognise that the best way to support our founders is to enable them to support each other, which is why one of our key imperatives in 2021 is “founder initiatives”, and our flagship rollout is our new Founders’ Studio.
Ideation
Upon joining Playfair just over a year ago, one of the first concepts I brought to the team was offering our founders a physical space exclusively for them to work from. Luckily, we are fortunate to own an office building in Central London, and with the pandemic came an exodus of our tenants. While on the hunt for new tenants one day, we had the idea of keeping one of the floors to ourselves and to develop it into a multi-functional workspace for the exclusive use of our founders.
We were immediately obsessed with the idea and knew that, if the Playfair team was this excited about the prospect of a founders’ studio, our founders surely would be as well!
A shared space can do wonders for business leaders, facilitating increased relationship building, collaboration and problem solving. Our vision was also to be able to provide professional development opportunities to our founders via in-person talks, seminars and workshops.
Planning
We began our planning process by identifying the ideal setup for the studio. We discussed the idea of hot desking, where founders could book a desk/meeting room and share the space with each other. But despite this being a great way for different founders to meet and engage, we recognised that we’re still in the midst of the pandemic and having founders from multiple companies mixing was not the most prudent decision.
So instead, we’ve decided to start by offering each startup a “team day”, where founders can book the entire studio for one day per week and bring as many of their teammates as the office can fit.
The pandemic naturally had a huge impact on the role of the office, with many companies switching to home working and adapting well to the remote environment. We were hopeful that there would be interest in the space, but obviously could not guarantee it. We reached out to our founders about our idea, and the feedback was uniform: Where do we book because my team needs this NOW?!
It was encouraging to still see a huge value in people being together - so the physical office space is still arguably just as important for building collaboration and maintaining a positive culture as ever before.
Execution
Our second floor then underwent its transformation.
It was important that the space was versatile enough to accommodate various styles of working. After a well needed lick of paint, we fashioned a large board room, with a 75 inch TV, that can seat up to 10 people, making it an ideal set-up for meetings or strategy workshops.
The space also contains a breakout area, where founders can brainstorm/relax, an eight-person desk station, another smaller meeting room and of course a fully equipped kitchen and island.
We also offer seamless entry into the studio. Founders can download an app and enjoy a contactless journey into the building and to their floor, making access straightforward, hassle-free and covid secure.
As we are all aware, the course of the pandemic has been continuously unpredictable, especially in regards to where we should be working from. The studio was ready to launch towards the end of 2020, but inevitably winter lockdown measures put it on hold. From April this year, the studio soft launched and we are delighted to say it’s been fully booked ever since.
Iteration
Going forward we’ll use the space to continue our team days and focus on our community initiatives, but also to host regular events with industry experts and thought leaders on the topics that are most important to our founders. The Playfair community strategy will always be adaptive but beyond that, it’s important to listen to our founders at all times.
From our founding nearly a decade ago, we’ve consistently over-indexed on our founder community and support initiatives. With this physical space in the heart of London, we’re continuing to push the boundaries of what it means to be a value-add fund that puts our founders’ interests and wellbeing above all else.
