Top 5 Learnings After Assessing 300+ Startup Founders

During my time as an engineer and Head of Engineering at BlueChilli I had the privilege of meeting hundreds upon hundreds of prospective founders. I read business plans, collaborated in facilitating sessions on business risks, sat in on dozens upon dozens of pitch sessions, advised dozens of founders and wrote code on dozens more.

To date this was one of the most fulfilling roles of my career and I am fortunate enough that many of the people I worked with a life-long friends. Since BlueChilli ceased their operations in Australia I've had a team-member officiate my wedding, and I've freelanced alongside several others.

After 5 years of working with those startups here are my top 5 takeaways.

Highly intelligent, low ego, high EQ, motivated and passionate female identifying founders frequently came through the doors at BlueChilli. We embraced them warmly both in regular cohorts, but also in our female-only program SheStarts.

Seeing these incredible founders take to our education offering and startup program like naturals leaves little wonder that many of the startups that lived on since BlueChilli are female led. Many of these founders are still hustling and creating incredible value.

We also had an incredible and diverse team internally, many of whom shaped me in incredible ways during my time at BlueChilli.

Our core business was in building MVP stage startups. We would work with founders to take ideas from napkins to market. And as much fun as I had building startups, I had so much respect for CEO and salespeople who hustled and got first customers in the door.

As someone who doesn't enjoy the sales process, this is a fundamental skill massively lacking with many businesses. If you only build it; they will not come. All of the best founders who went through these programs were also terrific networkers and salespeople.

We were a tiny team punching far, far above our weight. And we did this because the people we had were incredibly passionate about showing up each day and delivering for our founders.

Of course the team had incredibly intelligent people, but their passion and determination to build great things was the actual thing that kept made the team so incredibly effective. We had a culture of saying yes, solving customer problems, and generously sharing knowledge.

It's quite an attractive thing to invest in the latest and greatest technologies, but a stable and reliable monolithic code base often outperforms many of these.

Our team worked in .Net and React, most of our day-to-day stack was re-used again and again across projects, and we used zero microservices. And if I did it all over again I wouldn't change a thing.

Our "boring" back-end of .Net modules still serves many of the startups today, they're yet to outscale the codebases they were delivered, and it makes a terrific case for always starting with a monolith.

Before joining the team I was actually hired and fired in the same day. The then CTO hired me as a remote front-end developer, and the company just wasn't set up for that, and my offer was rescinded. I was gutted, plead my case, and the decision was reversed.

I joined the team as the first remote team member, then went on to take 3 promotions all the way to Head of Engineering. We were innovating not just in the startup space, but in our ways of working.

Over the time I worked at BlueChilli we went on to make several remote hires and grow satellite offices in other cities. We developed mature, inclusive, flexible, and responsible ways of working. And most importantly team members were managed by the outcomes they produced for BlueChilli and the startups.