Charles Delingpole is the Founder, Executive Chairman and former CEO of ComplyAdvantage. His previous entrepreneurial ventures also include The Student Room and MarketFinance, and he has impressively been an angel investor to over 150 companies.

Charlie shares what he thinks should be the number one motivator for founders, how to build an A-class team (which he calls out as the most difficult part of being an entrepreneur), executing an idea it in a way that will be hard to replicate or copy, the thrill of becoming the chairman of your own company and invest in others people ideas… and much more!

At The Finterview, we love to talk to successful entrepreneurs, investors and partners. Charles is all three! 

What to expect:

• Having an idea is not the number one criteria for success

People have good ideas all the time. What makes an idea into a successful business is the way people execute it in order to provide value to their clients. 

When striving to transform an idea into a company, Charles strives to identify how to both provide value as of day one to his clients, whilst making the business model hard to replicate. 

The product marketing pitch is rather straightforward, it is delivering the service with premium quality that is challenging. 

Why? Because you need to hire and nurture the right team for it. 

• Building a team is the most complicated (and important) part of an entrepreneur’s life

Even after having founded 3 companies, Charles still considers hiring and nurturing an A-class team as the biggest challenge of a founder. 

The reason is simple: you need the right people, with the right skills, at the right time, with the right mindset, at the right place. Lacking any of those will lead to failure as a startup, especially in the world of Fintech which is such a fast paced environment. 

But there is some good news, you can try, fail, and iterate. Hiring the wrong person doesn’t have to mean the downfall of your company. But you need to exit the person with grace in a timely manner, and keep the superstars. 

A good hack is to benchmark between people within the same role, and identify the ones which will 10x your development. 

• Passion is key

As a business owner, or a pillar member of a startup, you are very likely to spend 95% of your time doing relentless, mind-numbing hard work, with occasional novelty and success. 

You better be enjoying what you do, or other people that do enjoy it will do it better than you. 

This is one of the easy pitfalls to run into. Founding a company requires you to focus on that one thing, for a (very) long time. 

If you are able to intrinsically enjoy the day to day - whether that is customers, investors or employees driven - then you are on the right track. 

Once successful and wealthy, you will have all the time in the world to invest in others’ ideas, and that will allow you to keep your interests sporadic. Until you start investing, as a founder you need to be single minded in your focus. 

• Investors bet on you, not your business

At least at the beginning. 

When you don’t have financial statements, nor growth to demonstrate, but you need investors’ money, the only metric they can base themselves on is you, and your team. 

Hence the importance of your CV, your drive, your passion, and the same of the people that are doing it with you. 

What is your vision? How well do you convince others of our company’s mission? Are the individuals in your team up to the task?

Your ability to thrive in the niche you have chosen, may it be boring in the eyes of the investor’s eye, is what will make them invest in your company. 

_______________________________________

Links toward the topics we discussed during this interview:

Charles Delingpole's LinkedIn Profile

The Fintech Foundation

Reach out to us at Integrated Finance! Integrated Finance Contact form