“The idea isn’t the thing”... An interview with IndyKite’s Lasse Andresen

What have been the most important lessons you’ve learned?

I've probably made all the mistakes that are possible to make. In terms of advice: a few things. First, talk to your customers from day one and test your ideas—even if you don't even have a product! Inventing some technology and hoping somebody will figure out a way to use it, will never fly. If your technology doesn’t solve a problem, or creates new services and grows businesses' top line, the technology is going to die.

How do you go about building a team to scale?

You need to always remember every piece of the company, be it finance or commercial or engineering or marketing, are fields in which you need experts. High skills in developing code are equally important to high skills in how to make a finance model. It's like a football team: the goalie probably doesn't score a lot but if you don't stop the other team from scoring, you won’t win the game.

The sooner you can bring in people that know their field, the faster  you will be able to get to market and the fewer failures you will have. This starts with a good core team, either in the form of co-founders or early senior hires who can bring in other people and educate them.

Make sure you have good advisors around you. By ‘good’ I don’t mean people that are famous for being an expert in how things used to be—the market technology is changing too fast. Even if you find someone  that was a superstar seven years ago, if they haven´t been in the game  since then, they're not right for a startup.

What’s your number one golden rule for building a successful company?

Never have a ‘Plan B’, I always have only one thing and that's a ‘Plan A’. I may change that ‘Plan A’ a little bit every day, every week, every month, but that's based on learning. As soon as you start having a Plan B, you don't believe in what you're doing. That's when stuff really, really goes downhill.

When you look at young businesses, do you find a consistent marker of success?

Every entrepreneur should ask themselves: is my business producing and delivering safe, fantastic services for the good of everybody? That's what's always been driving me. Some people are totally fixated on timing: if they’re not reaching IPO within three years, they’re failing. I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. If you focus on creating technology that improves something and has an impact on people's lives, you get a lot of options from a commercial perspective.

What advice do you find yourself giving your fellow entrepreneurs?

It depends on what stage they are in. For very early companies, I would remind them that you can't be half pregnant. There's no safe way to build a company.  If you're building a startup, you have to just build it. Too many people are talking about companies and talking about ideas, very few are actually doing it.

I’d also advise against the fetishizing of ideas. The idea isn’t the thing. Entrepreneurs can become obsessed with their idea: specifically their idea being unique. Firstly, if you're the only person on the planet that has this idea, either you're too early or it's stupid.

The power is in the execution. Even if I gave you all the information or ideas that I might have, you still need to execute it on it. And the idea will change over time as you learn what is possible, profitable and more useful to the market you want to serve.

Any final thoughts?

The world is connected, everything is international. The model where first I'm going to sell to my family and my grandparents and then into the city and maybe expand to a bigger city later - is a very old-fashioned way of building a business. Go out there, sell internationally. Don't limit yourself to your own neighbourhood. Be ambitious, be curious and be able to take in learnings and adapt.