How are millennials succeeding?

‘When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.’

TO MAXIMISE your chances of building a successful start-up, you should wait until your 42nd birthday to become an entrepreneur, advises a recent MIT study. Unsurprisingly, younger founders are often less experienced and consequently have a lower chance of success. Multiple factors play a role, including industry knowledge, human capital, and access to financial resources. We spoke to 10 millennial founders after their first major funding round in order to understand the critical factor that only comes with experience.

The ability to recognise the need to pick up new skills as a business evolves is at the core of the transition from founder to CEO. An unforgiving, highstakes, high-pressure environment during the early stage of the scaling process tends to push less-experienced founders to rely on skills that have proven successful in the past. A blind adherence to existing strengths is dangerous and often jeopardises the future of a nascent, promising start-up.

A critical transition for the newly minted CEO is moving from product skills to people skills. A high-growth start-up leader needs to make themselves redundant in day-to-day operations and shift their focus to learning how to assemble a strong team, align their motivations and incentives, and build a thriving organisational culture.

Entrepreneurial capabilities largely stem from experience, and from learning that occurs in a stretch zone, beyond our comfort zone and before our panic zone. Reducing a vague and uncertain process to phased mechanic motions can help build an individual’s database of achievement and learnings. The following steps draw an analogy from Singer’s Five Steps Motor Learning Strategy.

1. READYING

The first step in building new skills is recognising the need for those skills. People tend to be invested in their present way of working, especially if it has been successful to that point. Most founders can build these new skills, as long as they are willing to take a step back and admit that their old habits have outlived their usefulness.

Sly Lee, co-founder and CEO of Emerge, shares the point at which he understood what new skills he needed to acquire to continue growing his start-up: “Because we have such a high