Founding team impact ambition

Introduction

What is it and how does it align with traditional venture building?

A critical step in getting a venture off the ground is building the founding team and the one or two fundamental early hires. This is about incorporating a desire to create impact as an input into those decisions.

How does it drive impact?

Talent is a key determinant of what a startup will achieve, the same is true for impact outcomes. Building a founding team with people who have impact-related values (empathy, integrity, etc.); are passionate about the targeted impact and bring important technical skills to solving the problem, will enhance the company’s impact.

How does it drive commercial value?

As more talent seeks purposeful careers, selecting for impact is a way to broaden the talent pool and secure top-tier talent. Being explicit in sourcing for impact also helps to ensure vision alignment, avoiding friction down the line.

In practice

What does good look like?

While we're sure this is a key consideration for founders when putting together the team, we haven't heard anyone discuss the practicalities of how they do this. We're hoping to share more as we learn. For now our intuition tells us that it's about trying to get as good an understanding as possible of:

1. Values of founding members

2. Lived experience with the problem they're trying to solve

3. How deeply they think and care about the problem

Some examples:

Sadly, we don't have many, if you know of any, please do reach out!

See Hundo's Origin Story for an example of lived experience playing out in building an impact driven founding team.