Work / Spirit of Enterprise
Spirit of Enterprise
- Client
- Spirit of Enterprise
- Year
- 2022
- Role
- Co-founder — programme development, website and tooling
- Question
- Entrepreneurs with an idea but no co-founder get stuck, and whether a team works isn't about chemistry — you only find out under pressure.
- Approach
- A six-month incubation programme in which participants set up a start-up several times in changing team compositions, until the right dynamic was there.
- Result
- From sixty participants to twenty start-ups; four of them are still running and have raised substantial investment.
The situation
Spirit of Enterprise was an incubation programme we set up with three founders, for people who start out alone and are looking for a co-founder. So everyone came in on their own.
That’s a harder problem than it looks. You don’t find a co-founder at a networking drink. Whether a team works, you don’t notice in a good conversation — you notice when something goes wrong and a decision has to be made.
What I did
I was responsible for developing the programme and for the technology: the website and all the tooling we used.
The set-up was that participants set up a start-up several times during the programme, each time in a different team composition. Not to practise, but to experience who they work well with. Only after that did they start on their real start-up.
We ran everything with the three of us: six months of coaching, training sessions and building programme components, with speakers we brought in.
What came of it
One six-month edition. Sixty people went in, twenty start-ups came out, and four of those are still running — having raised substantial investment.
That funnel is the honest story. Sixteen of the twenty stopped, and that’s part of it: the programme existed precisely to let people discover that early, together with a team, rather than on their own after two years.
What it taught me stands apart from the numbers: team dynamics is behaviour, and you only see behaviour by having people do something. It’s the same reason I don’t give AI trainings where you watch a demo.