A good idea is nothing without a strong team. But how do you, as a startup, actually build a strong team? To answer that question, Founded, TAEMio, and NOM are joining forces. With a matchmaking tool for founders, a talent pool from the Northern Netherlands, and “Founding and Growing Team” sessions, they aim to build the strongest possible team that grows alongside the company. “It’s kind of an experiment that got a little out of hand, but together we’ve now set up something that’s quite unique in the Netherlands,” says Niels Palmers, business developer at NOM.
Through the NOM Startup Program’s new Founding Team sessions, approximately 80 startups per year gain insight and support in building a strong team. “We then connect these startups to Founded’s matchmaking pilot program,” says Palmers. “To do this, we aim to gather about 400 to 500 talent profiles each year through educational institutions in the northern Netherlands or from people who are already involved in entrepreneurship. And after that, we can help them further with our new Growing Team sessions.”
From Intuition to Insight
According to Palmers, a good team is more than just the sum of its talents: “I’ve worked on many different teams, with incredibly talented and sometimes truly brilliant people. Sometimes you manage to create something truly wonderful together, but other times it just doesn’t work out. And exactly why that is has been a question that has fascinated me for years.”
“When I started working at NOM, I had many conversations with investment managers about what ultimately tips the scales for an investment,” Palmers continues. “In all those conversations, the entrepreneur and the team always came out on top. Aside from a good business idea, it’s also about chemistry, a gut feeling, and ultimately intuition. And that’s often true, but can we make something like that measurable?”
“That intuition is based on years of experience, but it does have its limitations,” says Geertje Dam, co-founder of TAEMio. “After all, it remains implicit, personal, and very difficult to transfer to others. That’s exactly where we want to make a difference. We want to translate that feeling, that intuition, into measurable and reliable data and a scalable decision-making system. We do this by looking at Founder Personalities in combination with the OCEAN model, the gold standard in personality psychology and team science. Niels and I have worked together to translate this as concretely as possible into the practice of building teams and scaling up startups. And as far as we know, we’re among the first to combine these approaches in this way.”
Personality as a predictor of success
“International research involving more than 21,000 startups shows that Founder Personality is one of the three strongest predictors of scale-up success,” Dam continues. “It determines whether a team can actually grow to an IPO, acquisition, or trade sale. And the team you start with is rarely the team you scale with. After all, the scale-up phase is intense and demanding, and not everyone is cut out for it. You also won’t find all the necessary qualities in a single person. That’s where data comes in.”
“Our goal is to help startups and scale-ups build strong teams so they can successfully take the next step in their growth,” says Palmers. “In addition to personality traits, we also look at founder-market fit and co-founder fit during the Founding Team sessions, for example. And during the Growing Team sessions, we give you the tools to bring structure, focus, and rhythm to a chaotic period of rapid growth. Think, for example, of methods like scaling up and Rockefeller Habits. And with these, we want to ensure that the team grows in step with the phase the company is in.”
Co-founder and talent matchmaker
To find co-founders and the first employees, Founded is partnering with NOM and TAEMio to set up a talent pool. “Of course, we want to retain entrepreneurial talent in the region as much as possible,” says Wouter van Dijk, Lead Talent & Tech Transfer at Founded. “These aren’t just the people who start their own companies; with their entrepreneurial spirit, they’re actually the perfect employees, too. By setting up a talent pool, we can better support and guide this talent within our ecosystem, making our startup scene even more attractive and enabling it to grow even further.”
“It’s really great that we’ve managed to pull this off in just over a year,” says Palmers. “The sessions are also being very well received by both startups and scale-ups, and we’re seeing a lot of interest from other ROMs; regions are also working on adopting this model from us. It’s an experiment that’s gotten a bit out of hand, but together we’ve now created something that’s quite unique in the Netherlands. And I say that as a down-to-earth guy from Drenthe.”