Curious Business: The B2B Growth Podcast

Predicting Startup Success | Measuring Team Dynamics with Soma Pirityi

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We Invest In People is the oldest principle in venture capital. It's also, Soma Pirityi argues, the industry's longest-running paradox. 65% of startups fail due to team-related issues, not because they can't sell or find product market fit. So why can't we better measure, predict and guide startup teams to success? 

Soma is the founder of ETA Technologies, the Cambridge-based company that's on a mission to measure, model and inform team dynamics. They've analysed over 10,000 startup teams and built mathematical models to spot the patterns of success - and failure - and realised that the team is the soul of the company.

In this episode, we get into the data behind startup failure, the sometimes counterintuitive dimensions of what makes a great founding team, and why the single most predictive factor in startup survival is something most founders have never heard of.

Listen to find out:

  • Why VCs are beaten by a stock-picking algorithm when it comes to early-stage investing
  • What the team slide in a pitch deck actually tells investors
  • Why too much resilience can kill a company as surely as too little
  • What is the single most predictive factor in founding team survival
  • The one story that proves why ignoring a data model can cost you everything

    • Chapters:

    • 0:00:54 — The founding paradox: investing in people you cannot measure
    • 0:04:07 — From VC to founder: what crossing the table teaches you
    • 0:05:59 — The negotiation nobody teaches founders
    • 0:09:17 — Building ETA and why Cambridge beat Silicon Valley
    • 0:12:35 — 65%: the startup killer nobody talks about
    • 0:16:00 — The lone genius myth and the teams behind the icons
    • 0:19:45 — Survivorship bias: why ETA studies failure, not success
    • 0:26:29 — The Big 20: what ETA actually measures
    • 0:32:37 — Synergistic support: the most predictive factor nobody has heard of
    • 0:35:50 — Jim Simons: the mathematician who changed finance
    • 0:41:12 — The death of the pitch deck
    • 0:44:50 — The Frankenstein moment: testing their own team

      • Links:

      • ETA Technologies: https://eta-technologies.com/
      • Connect with Soma on LinkedIn:
        • https://www.linkedin.com/in/soma-benedek-pirityi/

        Book recommendations:

        • Peter Thiel with Blake Masters 'Zero to One' 
          • https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15792/9780753555200 (affiliate links)
        • Gregory Zuckerman 'The Man Who Solved the Market' (Biography of Jim Simons and Renaissance Technologies)
          • https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15792/9780241309735
        • Ashlee Vance 'Elon Musk'
          • https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15792/9780753555644

           

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          Curious Business: The B2B Growth PodcastBy Stephen Morris | B2B Growth Podcast Host