UNDERSTANDING SCALE-UPs.

Right now I feel like I’m in over my head – and I love it. For the first time in a while I’m outside my comfort zone; excited by the opportunity to learn from a whole industry of interesting generous people.

For those not playing along at home via LinkedIn, I’ve been diving further and further into the start-up world or more specifically the scale-up world.

Becoming consciously incompetent.

First described as the “four levels of teaching” by Martin Broadwell in 1969, the four stages of competence are the psychological states involved in the process of progressing incompetence to competence in learning a new skill.

Image Source: Zainab Zaki on Medium

As most of you know, the majority of my work since leaving the corporate world has been with digital unicorns. However, I’m on a quest to meet and understand the challenges of founders and investors in the next generation of unicorns – the scale-ups. I’ve already had some fascinating conversations and I am amazed at how generous people have been with their time and experience. But here’s the thing – whilst I’ve been able to test and validate a bunch of hypothesis about what lessons from the unicorns can be applied to scale-ups I have been doing so by drinking from the proverbial fire-hose. Suddenly realising how much you don’t know outside your bubble of expertise is a sobering situation. It’s exciting and nerve-wracking.

1. How do you satisfy the desire to learn more whilst juggling personal and client delivery commitments?

2. With so much new information how do you distinguish the signal from the noise? 

Then our friend the imposter kicks in. That phenomenon that stops you in your tracks – a voice in your head that tells you you’re not good enough. What is interesting about this phenomenon is that it’s so irrational. Firstly, my clients get a lot of value from my platform strategy work – they tell me so. Similarly, the conversations I’ve had recently have validated that there’s a need for this work in the scale-ups; and yet that little voice (I call him Bruno) is still in my ear. I drew this picture whilst attempting to unpack where I feel I’m at. It’s not my best work but for those visual learners amongst us, it might be useful. Essentially, as I become more aware of the number of things I don’t know, the louder the impostor gets – albeit these new things aren’t within my area of expertise.

Silencing Bruno

“Learning is not attained by chance; it must be sought for with ardour and attended to with diligence.” ― Abigail Adams

I think the best way for me to silence Bruno is to seek to learn more about my market and close the knowledge gap. So, I am doubling down on my mission to meet as many founders and investors as possible this quarter. To that end I’m attending the Emergence 2022 investor conference in Sydney on the week of March 7-11. So far almost everyone I’ve approached is open to meeting and sharing experiences – this is clearly a community of connection and sharing. If you’re around Sydney next week please let me know and we’ll have a yarn.

If you’re interested in learning more about the impostor complex, one of my favourite Platform Diaries episodes was with the divine Jen Brown who dives into it in detail.

Can I enlist your help?

If you had 15 minutes with an investor looking to put Series B+ funding into a business, what would you ask them? Would you focus on what they look for when making their investment decisions? Would you be more interested in how they go about sourcing funding? Would you be curious what they put in place to protect their investments? Perhaps it’s something entirely different?

I’d really appreciate some thought-provoking questions and I’m happy to share with you what I learn. Just hit reply, please.