Inside Venture Capital with Laura Wilming on the Teamcraft Podcast
“In startups, ideas are great, but you ultimately win on execution and the pace of it.”
In the latest episode of Teamcraft, we were lucky enough to be joined by the fantastic Laura Wilming. Laura knows a thing or two about execution and pace. As Head of Portfolio Talent at Octopus Ventures, one of Europe’s largest and most successful venture capital firms, she helps founders navigate the considerable challenge of scaling teams in high-pressure, fast-growth environments.
But before Laura was supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs in the Octopus portfolio, she gained real world experience at iconic, disrupting brands like BrewDog and Harry’s, where she learned the art of teamcraft firsthand.
In the Teamcraft episode, Laura sits down with my co-host Andrew and me to discuss her journey from crafting beers to crafting teams, the challenges startups face in scaling their culture, and how venture capital can play a pivotal role in supporting founders. You can hear the full episode wherever you get your pods, or watch on Youtube:
Youtube | Spotify | Amazon | Apple Music
Early Career
Laura’s career in venture backed businesses began with Brewdog — an iconic British brand from northern Scotland that was the catalyst for a reboot of the beer brewing industry in the UK and the resurgence of small, craft breweries. Laura tells us how creating her own podcast while she was still studying at college landed her an internship at the tip of the British Isles.
Laura joined Brewdog at possibly the peak of their attention grabbing shenanigans — one of her intern tasks was to source taxidermied squirrels and stoats for the marketing of the company’s most infamous beer, The End of History. Laura got to experience the punk culture that Brewdog cultivated so strongly, saying:
“That approach existed internally as well … come up with the big ideas and don’t really question if you can do it or not, try to find ways to make it happen, take the big swings and some will work and some won’t. They didn’t really shy away from the controversy [but] actually held it close as part of the brand”
We next hear how Laura returned home to the US, graduating from University of Michigan, before joining and scaling the equally disruptive Harry’s — at that time a start-up of only twelve people that was focusing on direct-to-consumer men’s grooming products. Hot on the heels of the category busting Dollar Shave Club, Harry’s was one of the first and most prominent businesses offering a now near-ubiquitous service — subscription healthcare and grooming products. While it probably seems entirely natural to you to order deodorant and razors on a monthly subscription, in the early 2010s this was category busting innovation. Laura joined Harry’s around the same time that the company acquired the Feintechnik razor factory in Germany for $100m, and she tells us how she was given responsibility to manage the hiring process for the rapidly growing business.
In the episode, Laura reflects on what it took to scale a team from 12 to over 200 while maintaining the core values of Harry’s, that she calls out as being curiosity, humility, and collaboration. And, of course: execution. As Laura says,
“In startups, ideas are great, but you ultimately win on execution and like pace of it.”
We talk about how, at Harry’s, elements of the culture were embedded in the hiring process, and Laura mentions how one piece of advice from a university professor stuck with her while she was creating the hiring process for Harry’s:
“…he had scaled a number of startups and organizations. And he gave me great advice that I still kind of think about and repeat: [the] first 20 or 30 people of the company are going to join because they believe in the founders and the mission of the business. [the] next group, the 30 to 70 or 80. They’re going to join because they want to work with that original team. That is what they’re excited about. They want to be a part of what you’re building. The 80 plus, like they’re going to be interested in the job that you’re hiring for.”
This insight drove Laura to deeply consider who you really need to bring into the founding team; that those people just interested in the job are probably not right for early stages of growth, and the way a job is pitched needs to reflect and adapt with growth. You can see this reflection as we turn to Laura’s time at Octopus
Time at Octopus
We then turned to Laura’s time as she took over portfolio responsibilities at Octopus. I was keen to ask Laura a question about venture backed founders that has stuck with me since reading Secrets of Sand Hill Road by Scott Kupor. Scott was the first employee at the giant venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (or A16z to its friends), and the book offers fantastically usable insights into how venture backed companies operate in a starkly different world than any other business. Scott quite bluntly states in the book that A16z was looking for egomaniacal founders, or in his words:
“When Marc and Ben first started Andreessen Horowitz, they described this founder leadership capability as “egomaniacal.” Their theory — notwithstanding the choice of words — was that to make the decision to be a founder (a job fraught with likely failure), an individual needed to be so confident in her abilities to succeed that she would border on being so self-absorbed as to be truly egomaniacal. As you might imagine, the use of that term in our fund-raising deck for our first fund struck a chord with a number of our potential investors, who worried that we would back insufferable founders. We ultimately chose to abandon our word choice, but the principle remains today: you have to be partly delusional to start a company given the prospects of success and the need to keep pushing forward in the wake of the constant stream of doubters.”
– Kupor, Scott. Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital — and How to Get It (pp. 47–48).
I wanted to put this point to Laura, asking: “[In] this environment with quite challenging personalities [where] psychological safety may not be high up the list, [how] do you, how do you encourage founders to take that kind of thing seriously?”
Laura puts the creation of these proven cultural values as being driven by good management, saying:
“I think actually you can break it down into the behaviors that create that type of environment, which I actually think is just good management. And that is where I think there’s such a gap today across the startup and tech industry of just solid managers. Because the way that companies have grown and scaled, there’s not the formal training that you would get in a big organization and things happen so quickly that you don’t really have time to do the training or get that support yourself”
This resonates — most teams in start-ups are driven by the drive to get stuff done, with minimal time and little resource and the opportunity to build a supportive environment to create great managers slips by, often until it’s way too late.
One thing I would have liked to have dug into more with Laura was the prevalence of narcissism in founding teams, which I find fascinating. A snippet of research which rattles around in my notebooks includes this nugget:
“Research indicates that narcissism, more prevalent in men (7.7% vs. 4.8% in women) NIH, provides resilience and risk tolerance that benefit early-stage entrepreneurship. However, as ventures grow, these traits often lead to counterproductive outcomes like poor collaboration and ego-driven decisions. Despite receiving less funding — female-founded startups average $935K compared to $2.1M for male-led ventures — women-led businesses deliver higher returns, generating $0.78 per dollar invested versus $0.31 for male-led ones (MassChallenge). These findings align with research showing narcissistic traits become liabilities over time (Emerald Insight). Female founders often achieve better long-term outcomes by balancing ambition with adaptability and collaboration.”
Or to break that down, my chain of reasoning is:
- Narcissism is more common in men than women ->
- Narcissism is a beneficial trait in early stages of entrepreneurship (higher resilience, robustness to failure) ->
- There’s a tipping point in scaling where narcissism becomes a hindering trait ->
- Female founders build better returns than male founders if the company continues to scale.
I would have liked to dig into this more, but we moved on, discussing how quickly things happen within a start-up, where she explained:
“When you are a founder, it happens so quickly, right? You go from building, bringing this idea to life a bit, and then you get funding. And all of a sudden you have to go from developing a product to now building a team. And those are two distinct disciplines and skill sets. And that’s a pretty hard right turn to take.”
Andrew then laid out how small, early stage teams (under, say, about 10 people) can share a great deal of common ground, where the team is the company. But at an inflection point, the company becomes a ‘multi-team’ system, and scaling the common ground is hard. He asked Laura how the portfolio copes, saying “I imagine it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that those things that you took for granted at 10 people have to actually be deliberately maintained and managed at 40, 80, 150”
Laura replied,
“the way that you work as that early team might not be the optimal way to work as you get bigger and later stage. […]And that means you do have to change and as cliche as it is, change is a constant, right? If you’re holding on to all the stuff that made you work really well as a very early stage company, then that’s probably going to hold you back from scaling into the future. And I think, like, emotionally for people, that’s a hard hill to take it over and to accept.”
She continued, “because when all the stresses of building a business, like time scale, the pressure, the ambition, the expectations, I think for people who love working in early stage companies, that’s energizing, like that is the exciting stuff and you get to be a part, you feel really a part of something special. And as the stakes or the risks decrease a bit, I think you might feel a little of that energizing push fade.”
How Do VCs Look at Founder Teams and Their Teamcraft?
I wanted to return back to another element of Scott Kupor’s book, and in particular a headline from Chapter 3, which is entitled “How Do Early-Stage VCs Decide Where to Invest”. In this chapter, Scott breaks down the elements of what investors look for in a pitch but starts with number one: “People and Team”. Of specific interest to me was a line where he explains the most important thing that they look for in a team: “what is the unique skill set, background, or experience that led this founding team to pursue this idea?”. You may not be surprised to learn, this being the Teamcraft podcast, that I’m a little shook by this. Not “can this team work together”, but more of a check box exercise that the capabilities and motivation exist in the founders pitching.
I put this to Laura; how do Octopus consider how well a team can work together? She answered,
“What we at Octopus, my team, focus on is the support post investment. So, once we validate this business and vision are exciting and viable, and we think we have got solid people who we believe can go and build that, then we’ll go and work with the founders on understanding what’s the shape of the team today? Where do you see the strengths and gaps?”
Laura went on to explain how her team helps founders look at their goals and team motivation, and can help identify if there is a lack of clarity, or of current or potential conflict. She explained how startups can employ regular, perhaps 6 monthly, planning and mapping exercises to understand what the company needs today, and what it will need in future, in order to create a hiring plan against the gaps.
Laura then coined one of my favourite quotes from the interview, and something I’ll no doubt re-use regularly,
“you’re then able to build a team that will build the company. The ideal state is [that] you’re building the team that will bring the company along. Rather than scaling a company and then building the team to catch up”
I can’t emphasise enough how much I love this quote, and how much managers and people in positions of responsibility would be improved by repeating it to themselves; if you lead a team, your responsibility is to create the team that delivers. It’s not heroic effort that succeeds, it’s this capability of building a winning team that can execute even in your absence.
During the interview, Laura mentioned that all of her team at Octopus were former operators themselves, and this is a crucial thing to look for in an investor. A slightly dated statistic that I recall from Europe focused startup news site, Sifted, claims that 60% of investors have experience working at, or running, a startup while in the UK, it’s just 8% (with the majority of UK investors having a background in consulting, finance or investment banking). It was refreshing to hear how important it was to her that her team had this real experience on the ground.
“So the team that we have at Octopus are all former operators. […] so we’re coming in with the scars and the well known, common mistakes that we can help other folks [avoid]. I’d like to think that all the support we provide varies, depending on the situation, sometimes coaching a founder or a leader who is really struggling with somebody on their team, just even saying like, ‘Hey, it’s okay for you to part ways if this really isn’t working’, giving that permission for somebody who struggles [to make] that decision. […] Just being able to have that coaching discussion and talk that out can be super impactful”
She goes on to talk about the leadership team themselves: “I actually think leadership teams are the most impactful lever you can pull, because if you can build a great leadership team and that will kind of trickle down into the, into the organization.”
The importance of hiring
We returned with Laura to the subject of hiring — having a great process and sweating the details of how well it is designed to find the right people.
“I just think it matters so much. If the difference between a high performing, highly aligned team and one that’s good is massive. And I think it makes a difference. In terms of whether you build a good company or a great company, it’s something that we have control over.
We can be really thoughtful about those decisions. My rule of thumb for founders is you should be spending 20 to 30 percent of your time hiring. And that feels like a lot, truly, but if you’re building a business, and you plan to scale, you will never stop hiring. You’ve got to get used to it, but it’s something that matters that much that it deserves that kind of time”
How Do You Deal with a Team That Is ‘Just OK’?
Here’s the bit where Laura turned the table on us. Andrew asked a question following on from the point on good and great teams:
“Here’s my imaginary case study, when you get handed over a startup that’s just given investment by Octopus, And you go, ‘hmm, they’re in the okay category’. What do you do? What are the conversations you have? Are there any, are there any magic tricks you play? Or is there a playbook you have for that when you diagnose a suboptimally performing founding team?”
Laura was quick to clarify some of the approach that Octopus takes with its portfolio, saying:
“The approach that we try to take [with] our team at Octopus is [that] we have experience and we have perspectives, but ultimately as a founding team, it’s your company and you get to build. You have the right to build a culture and the team that you want, what we try to do is share what we’ve seen work in terms of performance and success, but one of the great things about founders and leaders is they have ideas and they challenge a lot of things.”
We continued to discuss what the proportion of ‘good’ and ‘great’ people a company needed, before Laura took over the interviewer role and faced Andrew and me with a question:
“I would love to know if you have a view [on the] population in a company. How many people do you need that have that high performance mentality in order for the entire culture to start to shift? Is it like a third of the employee population? Half? 75%?”
My position on this comes from a slightly different perspective, perhaps having spent my entire working life inside teams. I’d often be delighted with ‘just’ good team members. Good seems aspirational. So often, I feel that good people are let down by process, a lack of clarity and administrative bureaucracy, and those barriers erode their capacity to deliver great things. I answered the question from that perspective — don’t worry about getting great people, get good people and let them do their best work:
“I find that quite often there is a lack of good strategy, but even more, damningly for the performance of the business, the strategy isn’t being communicated down to the people that need to do the work. And so it’s actually not that people don’t want to work, it’s that they don’t know what to work on […] Even with ‘just’ good performers that are strongly aligned towards a clear outcome, they can execute far better than a group of really, really high performers that don’t have that clarity in objective.”
Andrew took a slightly different tone with his response, picking up a mention of ‘social loafing’, or the tendency for some people to not pull their weight in a group setting, saying:
“In that fast moving startup culture, there is an idea of people evaluating each other on the basis of just how much of a shift are you putting in? How much of an extra mile are you going to, to deliver this vision? Because this vision is going to change the world.”
He continued,
“One of the things we know from social loafing [research] is that we all perceive our own inputs to be disproportionately greater than those of the people around us. And one of the things that happens in that social loafing phenomenon, where people perceive others not to be pulling their weight, is that individual inputs are [proportionately] lower than if people are working on their own and we don’t have the sensitivity to perceive accurately the inputs of others compared to our own. Which means [both that] they’re proportionately less and that we perceive our own to be greater.
That’s quite a useful thing to know in the context of thinking about any kind of performance change, that if a team doesn’t understand that then [they] can end up in a bit of a standoff where everyone’s [saying] , ‘well, I’m working harder than you’. And that’s a problem, that’s bringing the overall output of the team down. Is it possible that those high performers are in fact disempowering some of the people around them through the way that they approach their work?”
Finally, Andrew turned this question back to the team-level view:
“Sitting behind all of this is considering individual inputs and outputs. There is also a question to be put, ‘are you really assessing the team?’. You’re trying to think about overall team level output, you’re framing the question to yourself as a team level view, but you’re trying to articulate the answer through [observing] individual inputs and outputs.”
With time closing in on us, we didn’t have a time to explore this further, although just before we got to the quick fire round, Laura did observe:
“If nobody’s opened a coworking space / bakery called Social Loafing yet, I think it’s a great idea.”
Quickfires
What are your team red flags?
“Complaining and gossip. It’s the most toxic thing and not productive.”
What’s your best team memory?
Laura: “Best team memory? Harry’s, we did an annual chili cook off, where we would send teams to make like chilies the night before, and there were always like themes and then everyone brought it in the next day, it was a great, like silly team building exercise where you have food, but we always had a lot of fun with it.”
Andrew: “that’s entirely supported by excellent research that teams that cook together are higher performing teams.”
Pass-it-On Resources
Laura recommends two standout books for leaders and managers:
- When They Win, You Win by Russ Larraway — A practical guide to clear communication, performance management, and career development.
- The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership — A concise framework for emotional management and team alignment.
And Mark mentioned:
Listen to the Episode
For more of Laura’s insights and advice, listen to the full episode here: Spotify | Amazon | Apple Music or watch it on Youtube