Supercharging the search for your ideal co-founder
It is no secret that at Zinc we think Human Capital is the most important form of capital there is. We have written before about the fact that we know that the story of our impact starts with our people. How we find talent, how we develop it and how we support it is central to the change in our mission areas that we are here to create.
But it is not just in the individuals we back, it is in the magic that goes into the forming and performing of founding teams.
The Harvard Business Review reports that 65% of start-ups fail due to the breakdown of founder relationships, not due to market forces. Looking in the rear-view mirror across the individuals and ventures we have backed, that seems like a conservative number.
That’s why we put time into supporting our Founders on their Co-Founder search from within and beyond our cohorts.
The ability to attract and really understand the potential of candidates to found at Zinc is a core part of our offer. Having seen hundreds of Founders over eight years means a certain element of “pattern spotting” of a strong, enduring co-founding team looks like. Not only do we scout for the best ideas and investment opportunities in the health of people and the health of planet, but we look for people that can:
- Pull teams around them, with charisma and leadership gravitas
- Look across the landscape and see where the commercial and innovation opportunities are, or have a credible strategy and clarity of direction
- Be the engine for the business, igniting momentum and ensuring execution
- Articulate their own direction and have full commitment to leading and founding in this space they have identified
- Can leverage networks and social capital to move from idea to venture quickly and resourcefully
Yet more than these qualities, we dig deep on the motivation and the rocket fuel – we need to know the mission matters. We ask why now, building conviction that this is the right life moment for this endeavour. We are clear about the excellence and the credibility of the skills our Founders bring the table. We have faith in the grit and the resourcefulness, knowing that one of the only thing that start-up life guarantees is challenge. And we look for coachability, that openness and humility which can hold both a strong point of view and have the ability and agility to flex.
We support each of our Founders in the practicalities and approach of their co-founder search, whether that’s from within their cohort, the wider Zinc ecosystem, or beyond.
“Zinc de-risks and super-charges the co-founder search process with their: 1) Rigorous hiring process; 2) Emotionally intelligent and flexible approach to understanding the value of human capital and how each company’s needs are different; and 3) Vast network of people who want to help!”
— Sujitha Selvarajah, Founder Umbi Health
You can learn more about the co-founding opportunities currently available in the Zinc community here on LinkedIn, and by signing up for our monthly newsletters here.
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Featured Resources
Zinc Impact Report 2024
Zinc’s mission is to make the UK the best place to successfully start a venture which can have a massive impact on the health of people and the planet.
Increasingly, we are building deeper science ventures that serve global, industrial customers in environment and health, giving access to impact at a global scale.
Our 2024 Impact Report explores the challenges that need to be tackled to empower and enable talented founders from around the world to solve critical health and environmental challenges at scale, from here in the UK.
This report showcases success stories from the Zinc portfolio, and highlights how Zinc – and our growing community of hundreds of Founders, Fellows, Coaches, Partners and Funders – are working together to build a world-leading “Science-for-Impact” ecosystem for inception stage ventures in health and environment.
Impact Report 2023
We started Zinc with the hypothesis that missions are an effective way to attract highly ambitious, talented and experienced groups of innovators, who might not recognise themselves as “classic entrepreneurs” but are ready and able to start a new commercial and successful venture to tackle some of our most pressing societal issues.
The world has overcome the sorts of challenges we face today when it has adopted a mission-based approach to the biggest problems and brought together world-class talent to invent and innovate, e.g: NASA and landing a man on the moon, the LSE blueprinting the British welfare state, or the Gates Foundation aiming to eradicate diseases.
On this basis and assumption, we designed Zinc as a new mission-based Venture Builder — a place where global talent, ‘impact makers’, can join to experiment and develop new solutions to our most pressing societal issues.
