Lessons from an Early-Stage Startup Over 4 Years | Handprint.tech

Intro

00:00I think that's a really difficult thing to do like there is no degree that you need to be an entrepreneur can you do it without sure I teach business model Innovation at University so add all this theoretical knowledge but once you actually have to do it yourself it's a very different thing meet Simon Simon is the assistant professor at Singapore manman University and co-founder at hand print.

00:26Tech handprint Tech is a nature Tech platform that connects companies to the most impactful organizations on Earth our general goal is to help companies capture real business value from the creation of positive impact in the world maybe the most confrontational thing about building a company and building a team is that you're constantly realizing you can only do a very small part you're completely reliant on everyone else to pull their weights hempit is a small company of 10 people but it's already making an impact having restored 3.5 million square met of involvment across 35 countries let's

01:13dive into his story [Music]

Chapter 1. CSR Can't Make Money

01:36Simon was born in Belgium from a young age he wanted to do something meaningful I mean I went to study commercial Engineering in in Belgium after writing my dissertation I chose to do another degree in corporate social responsibility so I moved from Belgium to the UK to pursue a second master's degree however he was told that if he pursu are he wouldn't make any money because nobody in business really cares about it but I was like I was driven to do this and so yeah so for me that's been the beginning of my pathway on in the sustainability space but he still

02:13wanted to continue after working a small boutique firm he eventually enrolled in a PhD program at Imperial College London when I went into Academia to do my PhD I was very convinced that this was going to be my pathway sitting in my office is just thinking and writing that was I really enjoyed doing this but suddenly his supervisor told him is leaving the college I was about 2 years and 11 months into my PhD when my supervisor called me into his office and said you have to finish your PhD in 3 months because I'm moving to Singapore and I said no I still have at least a year and

02:53he said yeah not anymore I'm leaving so you have to finish in 3 months but if you manage to finish I'll take you with me I was reflecting on the fact that 6 hours before that meeting I had been dumped by the girl I was seeing and thought sure all right let's move to Singapore so I moved to Singapore at the beginning of 2015 initially as a postdoc and then as from July 2016 as a

Chapter 2. Challenges and Lessons over 4 years

03:21professor when we look at why companies engage in F action we find two reasons either there are for by regulation or their leadership set up some type of voluntary action pure Goodwill basis but this is not enough the fundamental problem that handprint is trying to solve is making it valuable for companies to do something good in the world convincing a company to give money to an NGO is very hard why on Earth would they do this but if you can show that by doing so they're going to have more loyal customers or their cost of customer acquisition is going to go down

03:59down then it makes sense Maas and I met in Singapore pretty much immediately after I landed so we became friends it wasn't until many years later that we started thinking about working together in December 2019 we founded handprint so initially the name of the company was the green company and then we ended up going for hand print.

04:22Tech and the reason we picked handprint as a name handprint is a scientific concept that is the opposite of a footprint and the footprint is all of the bad things that you do simply by virtue of living or by virtue of being in company whereas handprint is this idea and a construct that measures your positive impact I think having a tag domain if you're in the teag business makes a lot of sense having a tech domain sets the balance right we are a tech company most people who visit the website will see us as a tech company there is no degree that you need to be an entrepreneur can you do it

04:59without out sure I think the main reason why a degree can be quite helpful is you've developed some kind of grit you've developed a level of persistence to do something for a prolonged period of time I teach business model Innovation at University so a lot of what I do with my students is to work with startups or to work with larger companies so add all this theoretical knowledge of how to do this or what should be done but once you actually have to do it yourself it's a very different thing I think there is a reason why there are very few academics that become successful entrepreneurs

05:37Academia is about slow in-depth search for truth when you're an entrepreneur every day has 10 deadlines collaboration in Academia tends to be quite simple because you work with people who are very similar who have been trained to think and write in the same way as you have if you hire those kind of people in your company you're screwed you need different people you need a lot more trust based on a lack of understanding and that is a very big shift as well because it's hard to do as academics we typically do everything ourselves or we work with a very small group of

06:12co-authors that again are very similar to us so I think these are really big challenges that um yeah I'm still grappling with every

Chapter 3. What I wouldn't repeat in 4 years

06:22day we've been around for four and a half years I mean I think in a company of any size there will always be many struggles there's been important disagreements among Founders about strategic Direction but you have to deal with them like you can't just let them Fester you have to bring them out into the open discuss accept when you get your way or when you don't get your way and then move on there was a moment that we grew too fast we over hired we were overly optimistic as entrepreneurs tend to be about our potential to rapidly turn one of our pieces of Technology

06:58into a product that would really make revenue and we basically overstretched and then that meant that at some point we had to let go of 16 people or something and then doing this and having the discussions with the leadership and like okay who are these people going to be and then like the evaluations the emotional toll that has taken on many of us is quite painful and then I think in terms of the process one of the things that we've really struggled with and continued to struggle with is that none of the founders really come out of a sales background developing a practice

07:32for how you sell complex technology to companies really isn't easy and this is typically a very long-term process we've had sales cycles of over 2 years and as a small startup having sales cycles that take that take over two years that's not super appealing so you need to figure out how we can accelerate this so that's been a continuous learning what for me has been a big struggle is as a non-product or non- Tech person what would be great if if we could do this and then this would happen then I talked to the product team and they said yeah sure give me $150,000 and I'll make it

08:04happen it's like no it's just a simple thing so for me that has been a massive learning that developing high quality software is costly and it takes a long time I've learned a lot about the things that I can't do maybe the most confrontational thing about building a company and building a team is that you're constantly realizing that you can only do a very small part you're a small part of the puzzle you're completely reliant on everyone else to pull their weight my job is to maybe motivate them but this collaborative effort is what makes or breaks the company and the

08:44other thing that I have learned we started building our first product too soon we didn't do enough user research we didn't get Lois letters of intent signed by customers and if I would go back to the beginning with this knowledge in mind this would be the one thing we are not building anything until we have 10 Lois if you build this and it can do a b c and d I will buy it for this much money until you have that I wouldn't start building a new

Chapter 4. Where you stand depends on where you sit

09:20company it's impossible to convince someone with rational arguments that they should care about something caring for something or about something is an thing the reality I think is that we're never going to convince 100% of the people you need to have a very small vocal minority probably less than 10% that really make decisions that can change the world when I look at southeast Asia where I've been living for the last decade it's understandable people have very different concerns than people in Europe where I'm from right the level of economic development is not

09:55there there's a lot of corruption so one of the things that we're seeing in some of our forestation work we're doing we do a lot of Mangrove restoration most of them are in Southeast Asia Indonesia incredibly important ecosystems and they're being cut down and even if you give them money there will still be people cutting them down and it's not because these people are horrible people that have as a goal we want to destroy the planet no they have as a goal and if I cut 10 trees down now and I can sell the wood then I can eat for a couple of days and so if your primary concern in

10:29life are will I have food tomorrow then having these higher level goals of we need to protect the planet and all life on the planet sound very kind of distant this is not what people have in have in mind the mission of Educators and and client scientists is to close that Gap demonstrate to people that even within their lives they can make meaningful changes they can do small things that actually will benefit themselves will benefit their communities and will uh benefit the World At Large companies if you if if they want to be successful they need to be sustainable you can't be

11:07sustainable in the long run the world that we know right now which already has changed substantially just won't be around for the next couple of centuries we are in a phase where all of the scientists the climate scientists are telling us that we are facing extinction level events if we're not changing the economy towards a more environmentally sustainable system the future for our children and our children's children is going to be substantially more difficult we've kind of stated as an unofficial goal we want to win the Nobel Prize for Peace which is pretty unusual as a

11:43company won't be easy but if we succeed as a company it could happen that's a goal that's a stretch goal for for handprint [Music]