I hear this from founders all the time. They’ve got revenue, a growing team, maybe even some funding behind them, but when you ask about their advisory board, the answer is almost always the same: “That’s something for later.”
It’s one of the most expensive mistakes I see in the scale-up world. And it’s completely avoidable.
The “later” trap
Here’s what typically happens. A founder gets past product-market fit, revenue starts growing, and they’re suddenly making decisions in areas where they have no deep expertise. International expansion. Fundraising strategy. Building a sales organisation. Navigating regulation. They figure it out as they go, because that’s what founders do. But “figuring it out” at this stage is slow, expensive, and often means learning by making mistakes that someone else has already made.
The irony is that the help is out there. Experienced operators, investors, industry experts, people who have been through exactly these challenges before. But many founders don’t reach out for it until they’re in trouble.
A ten-year study by the Business Development Bank of Canada (link here) found that companies with advisory boards had annual sales 24% higher than those without. And 80% of the business leaders who had advisory boards said they’d set one up again. That’s not a marginal benefit anymore.
What an advisory board actually is (and isn’t)
Part of the problem is confusion. Founders hear “board” and think board of directors, with legal obligations, governance requirements, and loss of control. An advisory board is a completely different thing. No legal authority. No votes on company decisions. Just a group of experienced people who meet regularly to challenge your thinking, open doors, and help you avoid the mistakes they’ve already made.
Think of it as your personal support team. In a previous article I talked about building your the A-team: complementary skills, each member filling a gap you can’t fill yourself yet. The three things an advisory board brings:
Skills you can’t afford yet. Advisory board members are typically the profiles you want in your company, but can’t hire at this stage. A CFO-type who helps you think about fundraising. A commercial leader who’s scaled into markets you’re entering. They bridge the gap until you can bring those roles in-house.
Access to money and customers. Good advisors are well-connected. They can make introductions to investors and potential clients that would take you months to get on your own. This alone can justify the effort of setting up an advisory board.
The truth. This is the big one. Advisors are not your friends, family, fools and fans (the infamous 4Fs). They’ve aligned their reputation with your company. If you’re heading in the wrong direction, they’ll tell you. Directly. Before the market does.
When is the right time?
If you’re past product-market fit and starting to face decisions outside your core expertise, you’re already at the right time. You don’t need to wait until you have 50 employees or a Series B. Some of the most impactful advisory boards were set up at the 5-10 person stage.
The founders who get external perspective early don’t just grow faster. They make fewer expensive mistakes along the way. And in a market where capital is harder to come by and competition is fierce, that matters more than ever.
If you’re a founder or CEO thinking about this, start by asking yourself: what are the three biggest decisions I’ll face in the next 12 months, and do I have anyone outside my company who’s been through them before? If the answer is no, you might want to start building that team around you.
Have you worked with an advisory board? Or considered setting one up? Curious to hear what held you back or what made the difference.
What is an advisory board for a startup?
An advisory board is an informal group of experienced people who meet regularly to challenge the founder’s thinking, open doors, and provide expertise the company can’t yet hire for. Unlike a board of directors, advisory boards have no legal authority or governance obligations.
When should a scale-up set up an advisory board?
As soon as you’re past product-market fit and facing decisions outside your core expertise, typically at the 5-10 person stage. You don’t need to wait for a Series B.
What's the difference between an advisory board and a board of directors?
A board of directors has legal authority and governance responsibilities. An advisory board has neither. It exists purely to provide strategic input, connections, and honest feedback.
So you got your startup past the first valley of death. You found product-market fit, got some real revenue coming in, maybe even raised a round. Congratulations. But here’s a question that keeps coming back in almost every conversation I have with growth-stage founders: why does everything still run through me?
If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. And it’s not a capacity problem, it’s an architecture problem.
The founder bottleneck
There’s a concept in systems thinking called a “single point of failure“, a component that, if it fails, takes the whole system down. In most startups between 1 and 5 million in revenue, that single point of failure is the founder. Every deal, every hire decision, every product call, it all funnels through one person. The team is waiting for approvals instead of executing. The VP of Sales keeps asking how you close deals “the way you do it.” Your inbox is a warzone.
Sound familiar? The instinct here is to work harder. More hours, more calls, more “let me just jump in because it’s faster.” But that instinct is exactly the problem. In self-defense (yes, I also run a Krav Maga school, bear with me), one of the first things we teach is that under pressure, your body wants to tense up and fight harder. And that’s precisely what gets you hit. The first skill is learning to relax under threat so you can actually move and respond effectively. Scaling a company works the same way.
What the ones who break through actually do
After working with dozens of startups at EY, IMEC, Intel Capital, and now as a fractional CXO, I’ve noticed that the founders who successfully scale past the bottleneck tend to do three uncomfortable things:
1. They document the ugly version first. Not a polished SOP manual that nobody reads. They literally record themselves doing the thing, whether it’s selling, onboarding or making a key decision, and have someone else turn that into a repeatable process. Imperfect, but suddenly transferable. (If you want a framework for this, have a look at the “E-Myth Revisited” by Michael Gerber, still one of the best books on building systems in a business.)
2. They hire for the system, not the gap. Instead of hiring people to “help out,” they first define what the function should look like at 3x their current size, and then hire the person who can build and run that. The question shifts from “who can take stuff off my plate?” to “what does this machine need to look like without me in it?” 3. They let things break on purpose. They deliberately step out of a process and let it stumble. Not to prove a point, but to find out where the real dependency is. Usually, what they thought required a founder turned out to need a checklist.
The real question
If your company can’t function for a week without you answering questions, you don’t have a scalable business yet, you have a job with employees. The fix isn’t more hours. It’s building something that runs when you’re not in the room.
As I like to say: you are free to choose how you run your company, but you are not free of the consequences of that choice. The founders who grow aren’t the ones who grip harder. They’re the ones who learn to let go of the thing that made them successful in the first place.
What was the hardest thing you had to let go of as your company grew? Curious to hear your experiences. And if you’re stuck at this stage right now, just reach out.
“Ideas are just a multiplier of execution” is what Derek Sivers wrote in his book “anything you want”: You can see how this plays out in the visual scoring table of idea versus execution below. To see the true value, you need to multiply the idea with the execution.
Investor logic supports this approach: investors usually prefer investing in an A-team with a B-idea instead of the other way around. This is because ideas are easy, turning them into a profitable business isn’t. Once you have your brilliant idea, you need to see if it sticks, check with real potential customers if it is a viable solution to a real need that they have. You will need to get out of your bubble and gather hard feedback. You will need to create a product, scrape money together, build a first version (MVP) of that product, and IF you get traction, scale the business. It sounds easy enough, but as the startup curve shows, it’s a tough process, and most don’t make it past this stage.
The Startup Curve
Once you do get to a real solution/market fit, you’re ready to start scaling. But be warned: scaling at a rapid pace comes with its own unique set of challenges. What has worked for your startup in the past may not work going forward with your scale-up. You’ll likely experience additional stress and chaos that comes with exponentially growing your company. You will need to navigate additional pitfalls like shifting focus and alignment, hiring prematurely or too late, establishing long term goals, focusing too much or too little on marketing, postponing the next funding round, and lacking of a scalable infrastructure, to name but a few.
Implementation is everything
Everything needs to fit together in order to get to a successful implementation of your growth plans. Ignace Van Doorselaere, current CEO of Neuhaus, explains thus as follows:“If you line up five dominoes, and you push the first … so that the second, third and fourth fall – but the fifth remains standing – then the score is not 4 out of 5, but 0 out of 5. Because everything that is not implemented does not exist.”
The good news is that companies have been scaling for ages, and that there are some strategies you can build upon. One needs real implementation of the strategy and ideas, because if something isn’t implemented, it’s all wasted effort. You’ll need to take a hard look at your current capabilities and how they fit with your future aspirations, clarify your strategic priorities/opportunities/challenges, and then build an action plan to take your company to the next level.
I can’t help it, I’m seventies kid and grew up with the A-team. So if you have a problem no one can help you with, it’s time to put together your own startup A-team.
One of the things that is important to grow your startup and scale-up is the team composition. Investors tend to look at the team behind the startup, and prefer well-balanced teams. Especially the core team needs to have what we call “complementary skills” – you can’t all be the CEO or the head of tech or the finance wizard. Put all finance wizards together, and most likely you get skewed views on the market, and the chances of success diminish significantly. The same goes for all the other functions. After all, not having the right team is the third reason startups fail:
Source: CB Insight
Complementary skills
Hence the reference to the A-team. Those who remember the series or the movie know that all team members had wildly different personalities and skills. And for those who don’t remember the movie/series, let’s look at two other sectors where the right diverse team matters: gaming and the military. One of the more popular game formats these days revolve around different teams competing either team on team or in large battle royale games (if you’re not familiar with the latter: in a battle royale game your team and about 60 to 100 other people get dropped without anything in an ever closing circle of doom until one team is left standing… much like startups trying to conquer markets). in Overwatch, a typical team on team game, you are in a 6 vs 6 team fight, where the only chance of winning is if you have a team of complementary members that can fill in the gaps in the other’s weaknesses.
Another adaptation that is in vogue now is the link with SEAL teams. After all, if they can kick the behinds of people in jungles and deserts far off, something useful has to be in there, right? Well, other than a lot of training, SEAL teams focus ongroup flowand what they call “dynamic subordination“, which basically means that the person who knows what to do next is the leader, a form of fluid leadership.
” We expect to lead and be led. In the absence of orders I will take charge, lead my teammates and accomplish the mission. I lead by example in all situations.” Excerpt from the Seal Code
Why the link? Just like combat situations can be very chaotic, so can be the life of a startups. Pivots, anyone? To get into this group flow, teams need to really work on getting their culture right, in order to work together as one well oiled machine.
Successful teams work like a Formula 1 tire switch
Team performance is a whole other topic for another post: how to make the team work together? How to get different working styles perform as a team? For this, startups can learn a lot also from sports teams and sports coaches, as they really work on how to make teams of alfa players work together where each know their place.
“A basketball team is like the five fingers on your hand. If you can get them all together, you have a fist. That’s how I want you to play.”— Mike Krzyzewski
What’s the right team composition then?
Well, that’s highly dependent on the mission. For one, in a startup you need FSO’s or “Figure Shit Out people“. More on that in this article on startup hiring. In a nutshell, you need people you can throw a problem at and that will then run with it and solve it without you needing to micromanage them to do that. Lateral thinkers. T-shaped people. Think The Hipster, Hacker, Hustler team – also know as the 3H. More on that here and here. In this composition, the hipster is the creative lead, the hustler the sales lead and the Hacker – of course- the tech lead.
But that’s not quite enough…
Investors would rather invest in a great team with a mediocre product than vice versa, because they know the team makes all the difference. Management is the most important factor that smart investors take into consideration. VCs invest in a management team and its ability to execute on the business plan, first and foremost. Ideally they invest in executives who have successfully built businesses that have generated high returns for the investors. If you don’t have experience, create an advisory board of experienced, qualified people who will play central roles in your company’s development. Or join an incubator or accelerator, they can usually help you find the right people in their network. If you’re still an early startup, you can find a match with a business angel that has experience in your field, and that can either help you him/herself or look for someone in his/her network.
If you’re convinced now of the importance of a good, well rounded team, go ahead and start putting it together.
And in the mean time, enjoy putting your A-team together.
What do spies, soldiers and venture capital have to do with each other, you might ask? Well, even spies need innovative new ways of working and spying. Not to mention that the whole security and protection market is also moving online. Servers and sensitive data need to be protected … or hacked. New wearable technologies need to be developed to support agents and soldiers in the field.
No Matter Who You Are, Most Of The Smartest People Work For Someone Else (Bill Joy).
Nobody has the monopoly on knowledge
After all, not all the brightest people in the world work for your company, so why not invest in those companies that employ a number of these bright people?
Even though their investments are (mostly) public – after all these are VC investments in startups – not many people know that the secret service departments of various countries tend to also invest in startups.
Starting with -of course- the United States. The most well-known secret service in the world- the CIA – invests in startups and scale-ups through its own investment arm in-q-tel (apparently a a cheek-in-tongue reference to the original Q character from the James Bond movies). Business Insider tracked down a number of their investments in their article on companies funded by the CIA (link here). Some of these investments may surprise you, but there’s always some link, like the Atlas Wearables fitness tracker, which is something that can be used to manage the status of operators and agents in the field. For the full list of the on-q-tel portfolio, check out the IQT site here.
But they are not the only US agency investing in innovative startups. Meet AVCI, short for “Army Venture Capital initiative”, managed by Onpoint, and the DIU (Defense Innovation unit. AVCI is or was (it’s unclear whether they are still investing) the venture capital agency of the U.S. Army and Department of Defense. From their website, they were to strategically invest in cutting- edge technologies, and support venture-funded companies developing innovative technologies in areas such as mobile power and energy enabling technologies, autonomy, cyber, health information systems, and advanced materials. There are no investments listed on the website, but Crunchbase does list a number of investments of Onpoint. It’s unclear whether the fund is still doing new investments at this stage (2016 was the last one tracked on crunchbase). The DIU on the other hand is still active, but takes a different approach, going the other way and accelerating the adoption of leading commercial technology into the military.
The US is of course not the only country seeing the value of startups. Libertad Ventures is the Technological Innovation Fund of Israel Security and Intelligence Service (the Mossad as most people know them), and tends to be a bit more secretive, so they haven’t posted any startup on their website – you can however find the the challenges that they put out to startups: robotics, energy, encryption, web intelligence and big data and text analysis. This doesn’t sound too far off of what regular VCs also invest in. And if you are wondering where all that startup talent in Israel comes from, have a look at Unit 8200, its crack cybersecurity and intelligence team, whose alumni, FORBES estimates, have founded more than 1,000 companies including Waze, CheckPoint and Mirabilis.
But even closer to home, we have the Cyber Innovation Hub of the Bundeswehr, which is the digital innovation accelerator of the German Armed Forces, linking the military with the start-up scene and driving digital innovation in the Armed Forces. They look at technologies in the international start-up scene and then adapt these for use in the military. In the UK, they are doing it by means of DASA , their Defence And Security Accelerator.
NATO is also looking at the space, with their NATO Innovation Hub which looks at the future capability challenges of NATO, and design solutions for them through their innovation challenges.
Self-driving cars and the military
Even though we now see a big push towards self-driving cars and big strides being made by Google and others, it was actually DARPA that initiated the autonomous vehicle challenge, spurring innovations from different actors in the ecosystem, as early as 2004. DARPA stands for “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency” and is a US Department of Defense agency that drives the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
If you are curious what the current challenges (and associated prize money) are, check out the current DARPA challenges. Two interesting active challenges are the subterranian challenge (tunnels and boring companies anyone?), and the launch challenge (launching stuff into orbit on extremely short notice – think Space Force). AI research is another ongoing program. – giving you an idea of where the future challenges for the military are taking us. Quoting: ” DARPA envisions a future in which machines are more than just tools that execute human-programmed rules or generalize from human-curated data sets. Rather, the machines DARPA envisions will function more as colleagues than as tools. Towards this end, DARPA research and development in human-machine symbiosis sets a goal to partner with machines.”
But what does this mean for us
It is worthwhile to note that a lot of what comes out of secret service and military research and investments can and will also be used to enhance people’s everyday lives.
Take your iphone for starters. Mariana Mazzucato made a whole study on how almost al of the technology in your iphone come out of the US army research programmes.
Source: Mazzucato
The below 2 video’s also give you a good idea of how US future soldier research programmes can have an impact on commercial exoskeleton development. A quick look at the below video of US research on enhanced soldiers gives you an idea that what comes out of this also has applications for our daily lives. Exoskeletons, personal drones, better motorcycle helmets, thermal management for people working in in extreme envorinments etc.
US Research on the future of tech-enhanced soldiers
Ford’s take on using exoskeleton vests to prevent worker injuries
For more on this topic, have a look at this keynote of Mariana Mazzucato :
The Secret history of Silicon Valley
In light of what was written above, it is also very interesting to see the story of the actual origin of Silicon Valley, as told by Steve Blank, silicon valley investor and author of the startup owner’s manual.
Take for example your microwave oven. That technology was actually invented by Dr. Percy Spencer as part during a radar-related research project around 1945, and subsequently patented by his employer, defense contractor Raytheon, into a device to cook food. I kid you not, you can see the original patent here.
The one thing is that innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Fundamental research is still required, and then people that can build successful technologies and companies, and whether they are funded by the government or private investors shouldn’t matter. As long as these companies get to develop tech and product that get to better our lives.
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