Startup Origins: Solo Kombani COO of Aiculus

Solo Kombani is the Chief Operating Officer and third team member to join Aiculus. Aiculus is a Melbourne startup that specialises in using artificial intelligence to secure APIs against abuse and fraud. Aiculus’ customers are able to leverage the benefits of API’s (flexibility, scalability, improved customer experience to name a few) while maintaining the integrity of data and the privacy needs of their clients and partners. The story behind Aiculus and Solo’s own personal journey from Botswana to Australia and from corporate to startup are some of the key themes we focused on when we met with Solo. Solo has an infectious enthusiasm for life and business and he generously shared with us many of the ups and downs, he and the business have faced to date.

Solo, when you look back on your life now, what were some of the things that led you to the startup world? 

To start with, I always think of my life in terms of chapters and inflection points. So, imagine you are travelling in a certain direction and then things happen to you and they cause you to either awaken to something or to learn something new. 

So, thinking back, when I was growing up in Botswana… I remember one day my Dad asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said “a business man” and he asked “why?” and I answered “because you get to carry a brief case”. 

You must have seen some great briefcases

Well, the next time he asked me, I said I wanted to be Batman, so go figure!

But definitely coming to Australia was really important to me and my journey. I came here to go to university and my focus was to graduate and start working. I studied a commerce/finance degree on a scholarship at Melbourne University and felt very fortunate.  After university I was very fortunate to get a job with a big American corporate in finance, and I did that for a bit, before moving to another company. 

However, in these roles in big companies, there was only a defined set of skills I could learn and use.  Now part of that is by design, clearly defined responsibilities allow for better accountability, but I found that it meant a lot of things were left on the table. Career wise I was only ever stretched in a set of well-defined directions. 

As I grew in my career and became more confident, and this was nothing to do with the place where I was working, but I felt a continual dissatisfaction rising from within. I wanted to do more, to be closer to clients, and to actively contribute to decision making. I like the idea of living off your strongest skills, positioning yourself such that the continual exercise and refinement of your strongest skills turns you into a dynamo and maximises on your ability to make positive changes in our shared reality. 

What traits or personality characteristics do you feel have driven you to where you are today? 

I grew up in Botswana and I was the middle child, so I was always caught up in my own little schemes. We were fortunate to have a computer in the home, and, not that I got into coding, but I remember, my parents would leave for work and I would mess around with the computer and it would be broken by 12noon! And then I would try and get it fixed before my parents got home from work. Now, I am not saying that this led me into coding, but I always liked breaking things down and putting them back together. That became my thing. I was always inquisitive when left to my own devices.

It was in these “destructive” teen years that I learned I had the capacity to deconstruct and understand things enough to put them back together, and despite the terror of getting into trouble, I also learned just how much we can all achieve with a bit of focus, repetition and persistence. That’s what I believe gave me the self confidence that I could grasp most things if I applied myself.

Is there a story or anecdote from your early life that might have suggested you were going to be an entrepreneur?

Growing up in Botswana, there was a school camp in South Africa that I wanted to attend with my friends. It was an optional trip, so I said to my Dad “I’d love to have some money for this camp” and he sort of scoffed at me. My Dad grew up with very little, and he told me if I really wanted to go on the trip, and if it was so important to me, I should do something about it and earn some money towards it. So, I worked for my uncle’s catering business and while it was really hard, eight weeks later, I was on that trip, and Dad had matched my earnings dollar for dollar. 

That instilled in me at a young age, that I have to always be ready to take steps beyond my feelings to get closer to the things I want. We all have dreams and aspirations and things we want to achieve in life, and when I look at how I am spending my time I always question if it is lined up with my life aspirations.

And for me it got to a point where I really had to move past the fear of failure and to really focus on falling in love with the process. Fall in love with doing something I am passionate about, and I certainly hope it goes well and I will do everything in my power to help it to go well. But there is whole lot you can’t control in life and that’s just fate or the Universe. But I fundamentally believe, whether you are working in a company or for yourself, you are always working for yourself. When you ask for a promotion you are asking for people to believe in you, when you ask for funding or clients, it’s the same, you are asking for people to believe in you. It’s the same exact process. 

I’d like to move to your startup now. Tell us about your business.  Where did the idea come from? Has it changed or evolved in terms of service or product offering from when you first started?

Aiculus was founded by Dr Omaru Maruatona, who had previously worked for one of the Big 4 consulting firms in cybersecurity. And he saw that there was a lot of innovation in how APIs were being used at the time but not a lot of innovation in how to secure them. Furthermore, as API’s continue to become key infrastructure, the solutions in place were not robust enough for what could easily go wrong if critical API’s were compromised. And so Aiculus was born. Eleven months after it was founded, I was asked to join Aiculus as Chief Operating Officer. For a long time, it was just Omaru and I, and this is why today I am quietly proud of the influence I’ve brought into Aiculus. 

Perhaps an example is the best way to show just how crucial this is. In the simplest way it’s good to think of APIs as a pipeline of data between an organisation and another.  So back in the day if I went to the bank, I’d fill in a form and give it to a teller. And that teller would put it into the bank’s system through an API. So APIs were very internally facing, within a firewall.

Over time, people started to recognize how to cut out a lot of this work. So if I use an app to fill in a lot of this information, then I don’t need to queue up at the teller and the bank also needs less tellers. Instead I go straight into the bank’s system, provided the bank can verify who I say I am. The problem with this is that the only way APIs are secured, loosely speaking, is with a username and a password. So let’s say you fell asleep on the train and I pressed your finger to the phone then I could clean out your account. So beyond the username and password what are the other things that you can do to secure an API?  

Omaru found a lot of innovation in this space, a lot of data going through APIs. So when we started off, globally I think it was 65% of internet traffic was APIs and that’s moved away from html. So if you think about yourself and how many APIs you’ve used just before lunchtime. For example have you gone on Instagram? Have you called an Uber? Uber doesn’t have to create a payments platform, they don’t have to map out Melbourne, they just have to connect through APIs to a mapping or navigation provider. This is both the strength and weakness of APIs.

Were you and Omaru friends before starting Aiculus?

Yes, Omaru and I first bonded as friends and neighbours, as the friendship grew, it grew into taking this on together. Are we still friends? Ha-ha yes, but our professional relationship has come to the forefront to allow us to achieve what we have set out to do. 

Tell us more about getting started

What struck me when Omaru started out on this venture was that he was married with a kid, planning for another, so he had a lot of responsibility. I thought “wow to be in that situation, and still quit your job!”. 

When he asked me to join I felt a bit of imposter syndrome. Cyber was not my space. Usually someone would go back to uni to study and learn this. But there I was pivoting from finance to cyber. Prior to joining, I asked Omaru to tell me what he saw and valued in me because I didn’t want to join and then, a year on, feel that I wasn’t pulling my weight.

It turns out he wasn’t interested in my coding abilities, thank goodness! He wanted me to provide a business lens and help with structuring and optimizing things as we moved forward and draw off my product experience.

I’d like to talk about your relationship with Omaru in the context of him as CEO and you as COO.

I think you have to be really clear about what value everyone is bringing to the table. Omaru designed the product, he has a PHD in machine learning and AI – so he is a genius like that. So I had to be clear on what he saw in me. If you’re not clear on the value you bring, it will get testing. It’s important to have a mutual appreciation of each other’s strengths, weaknesses and also what happens when you combine the two.

Aside from having a common purpose, you must have respect and confidence to realize that other people have a lot of value to offer you, and vice versa, and you have a duty to speak up. You also need humility, recognizing that I have something to contribute, but so do other people. The key is to put those things together to work out what is best for us as a team, as Aiculus.

When I think about Aiculus, we are a team but we don’t gloat, there are no politics, no “I told you so”, no ego. It’s just him and me, and a small but very capable team. If someone suggests something and they’re willing to say it, and back it, we will give it a try. 

There must have been some tough times, tell us a little about how you manage conflict? 

There is no place for ego in a startup. If you want to keep the great chemistry you have, you have to be able to argue without your ego getting in the way. We have had some really robust discussions on some of our biggest decisions, but one thing I’ve really respected, is that when we agree, we move forward as a team. Once we reach that consensus, we move as a team.

Our very own thinking process involves conflict to arrive at a decision. I’d be prone to think we stopped thinking if it disappeared. So welcome conflict, and understand that through those discussions, we uncover the truth. 

Tell us about the stage your startup is at right now? (early 2020)

We are early stage, we have been running for just over two years in Melbourne and we were lucky to get into Australian Landing Pads, one of four cyber security startups selected from Australia to go to Singapore. Within 18 months we had our first foray into the international market. We actually found a little bit more traction in Singapore. And I think this was more just a timing thing.

Omaru and I thought about the major reason startups fail.  And the first reason is timing, either being too early or being too late to a market, and the second thing is funding. For us in Australia, we were a little bit too early.  We were timing this with open banking that forces the banks onto APIs, but in Singapore, we found that APIs were already being heavily used and the folks there were well aware of their risks. So there was a lot less selling and we got a bit more traction there. And then we were fortunate enough to get into an accelerator program in Singapore, and we got funded.

Can I ask what accelerator?

ICE71, it’s a partnership with Singtel and the National University of Singapore. They gave us some office space and introduced us to a whole bunch of clients. We have just finished a trial with a telco in Singapore, with some really good results.

We are not billing yet.  But our product has been validated by the market and we are now looking to have discussions about our results and what that means, and partnering. This will take a while, that’s one thing you learn in startups - everything takes 2 – 3 times longer than you think it will.

Tell us about your experience with approaching investors and with trying to raise money. What kind of reception did you get from potential investors? How did you prepare for these meetings? Any tips?

A lot of folks in Australia have VC funding. But with startups you need a warm introduction. You can’t just cold call and expect funding. You really rely on that warm introduction. One thing we thought was credibility is so important.  We were walking around with our briefcases and a solution in a little black box – how could we prove we had a solution that worked? 

Not many people really knew us before. Neither of us had a family in Australia or Singapore per se to help open networks and so forth. However we were never really alone, and enjoyed great supports from Cyrise - the accelerator we went through in Melbourne. And Austrade and ICE71 in Singapore, really helped us build our credibility.

Funding has been a challenge to date, we’ve bootstrapped it, and put in the hard yards and gone without salary for a long while.

Was there a little bit of injection there through the accelerator?

Yes, we got a little bit of funding in the accelerator, and even though we are pre-revenue we now have a more solid case. 

In our case specifically, we have found that there is a lot more interest in funding us from Singapore.

We don’t have a high burn rate in terms of capital, we don’t need a lot and have found that we fall below the threshold of what VCs can do. Some won’t pull a team together unless you have more than $2m. That’s what we’ve experienced in terms of funding, it’s a little bit challenging in Australia but it is improving as more and more startups succeed.

Are you pitching? Have you got a deck?

We have been, but when we got into the accelerator in Singapore, we shifted a little to getting these pilots done, to get more traction and more results to make a more compelling case for investors.

It’s really on the startup to convince VCs that you mean business, and while I said it’s been a little slow, it’s also because, to demonstrate that value to them, you have to be pretty solid.

How have you prepared for pitches and investor conversations?

What we have realized is, for a company our size, people are really looking at us - the people in the startup.  Especially before we had our pilot results, we were untested. They were looking at us saying “you are early stage, and while it might be a great idea, execution is everything”. They asked questions such as “What is the relationship between you two? Are you qualified? Can you handle complexity?” and they asked these sort of questions to ruffle our feathers and see what we were like on the spot.

Like what?

They might flip your numbers up and say that they had some independent numbers. They also want to know how you are going to use that money, you have to be accountable for that money. If you over-fund, you end up giving away more equity than you need to and, if you underfund, you end up having to go back to your investors for more, too quickly. It takes a lot of energy to pull together a funding round. So that’s why we went to an accelerator, to pause from that for a bit.  But now we have good results and a few other potential clients wanting to pilot, we are now thinking we just need a runway for the next year to get this off the ground. (Ed - as an update to this, in May 2020 Aiculus was successful in raising a USD 670k seed round led by Cocoon Capital).

How have you and your CEO found the Melbourne ecosystem?

We have been great beneficiaries of it. We went through Cyrise with the cohorts there and we are still invited to alumni events to get involved and hear how everyone is doing. I think the beautiful thing is practicing pitching in a safe environment. 

StartupVic also does a really great job running programs. Usually you get people swapping contacts – if you talk to a VC who isn’t in cyber, but they may be interested in HR tech, and you know someone in HR tech, you can connect them. Everything comes from those networks and keeping up to date on what everyone is working on. 

There is a lot of support in Australia, but Singapore is just turbo charged. There are rebates for working with startups and innovation challenges. There are also a lot of funds, backed by the government, so the Singaporean government really sees tech as a good space. Google and Facebook have offices there, so Singapore has a lot going for it, there were a lot of conferences when I was there for 3 months.  I’d be at a conference every other week and that’s where it all happens, that’s where people meet.

We quickly learned that there are a lot of intelligent people doing great things and we needed to position ourselves.  And for us, when it comes to cybersecurity, we felt that collaboration was more important than competition.  In that, if we are in the business of securing assets, the pie is big enough, there is enough cyber-crime going around so that if you can get your solution to work well with other peoples’ solutions, it is a much more robust and stickier solution for your client. So the ecosystem has been great.

Ever since coming back to Australia, with a bit more experience, it put us in a position to give back. People like to say “going out on your own”, but you don’t need to go out on your own. So now I can share my experience with other startups such as with you now, or with Austrade or StartupVic. And once again you’re meeting people.

What kind of advice do you offer?

I would say just connect and engage. That way you’re always meeting new people and sometimes you can collaborate or help each other out. There are some things you stumble on serendipitously by just doing this.

For example we didn’t know that Victoria had global offices in SE Asia to promote businesses. It’s when I was there with Austrade, one of the Directors reached out and said, “hey are you from Victoria?” and I just happened to be the only startup from Victoria there, and it turned out there was all this additional support available to us. This led to us going to another conference where we met the telco folks I mentioned earlier who we are partnering with, as well as lots of other potential clients from all over.

You’re not going to know everything and it’s really important to approach people with humility. Everyone you meet knows something you don’t. And you have the opportunity to interact with people going through a similar journey. They’re having good days and bad days and they can tell you where they have succeeded or where they haven’t and offer advice on how to approach this or that. So I think it’s really important.

There’s a saying in Africa – “if you want to go further, go with others. If you want to go faster, go alone”, and I think this is a marathon, if you really want to go further you have to be plugged in to your ecosystem.

That’s a great message.

Do you have a mentor or advisor you rely on? Or maybe an Advisory Board?

We pulled together a team of advisors. We looked for seasoned people in their fields. It’s not a board that we pay, it’s just some folks we have known over time and they believe in what we’re doing. We made sure we had good representation and diversity across gender and roles and experience. We currently have eight advisors. We don’t go to them for everything but, when we do, it’s because we have strategic decisions to make and so we seek their advice.  These people that support us are happy to share their time and would like to see us succeed. They have introduced us to folks and they’ve pointed us to opportunities.

 So what makes a good advisor?

For me, it’s people I have worked with in the past who were able to rise above certain challenges and I admired how they were able to do that. I think that says a lot about their character. I also look for folks with depth in all the areas that we are trying to get into. Our cyber security product puts a great emphasis on privacy. We don’t believe that we need to know what’s in your house in order to protect your house, so we have a privacy lawyer as one of our advisors.

One of the other things we struggled with was selling a tech product and getting people to relate to it. So one of our advisors used to run a BMW Dealership. And one of the things he said to us was “I don’t go and pop the hood and sell people the specs of the engine, I sell a feeling and that feeling is prestige and importance. So how do you put that into your product?”. So he was able to challenge us on that. So it is quite an eclectic mix. We don’t pull them together every month, but we do bounce things off them as we need to. So I’d say it’s really looking at what we were lacking as a team and trying to complement that as much as possible.

What are some of the hardest decisions you’ve had to make to get your startup to where it is today?

I think probably the hardest decision was quitting full-time work. Omaru and I were both quite fortunate, we came to Australia on scholarships. That’s an investment into your education and you look to get the ROI on that. So moving away from that, the thing that brought us here, was not easy. I was also on a career track and earning good money. When you join a start-up without salary, your “pay” becomes actualization. It’s your feeling of satisfaction. It’s a leap you have to make. That’s hard.

Did your decision weigh up?

There are days when I realise, “oh man I used to go out there and do this or that”.

But then I think that getting up every day and doing something I believe in, is great. Don’t get me wrong, it’s work, but it’s enjoyable and every little bit of progress is feedback that makes me realise, “hey we’re doing this and there’s momentum and people are recognizing it”. 

I think the biggest thing for me was joining. Once I was in, I was in. I was offered a sabbatical from the place where I had been working so I had that as a safety net. My one year came up in July so I could have gone back to my previous employment. That was the hardest thing, figuring out if I had saved enough to be able to somewhat maintain my lifestyle. Especially as a single person. What would dating look like for me? I’d go on dates with people and they’d ask, “what do you do?” and I’d say “I am in a startup”. Trust me, some people didn’t respond well to that.

It’s one of the realities of startup life and you know its gonna change your lifestyle.  If you can’t be comfortable with that, it’s gonna be really hard and there’s no one to blame for that. When things aren’t going well, you can’t catch up with other employees at the local watering hole and complain about the situation. It’s all on you. I ultimately accepted that and drew a clear line in the sand and after that, for me, there was no return.

Who was your first recruit? And what sort of selection process did you go through?

Well, I was technically employee number 3, and when it boiled down to just Omaru and I, it unified us more. The next person we needed, was a developer and we were very lucky to get one. We couldn’t afford to pay him as a fulltime employee, so we had him on a contract.

And then we were doing projects with RMIT and that’s where we met our second developer. He worked on a project with us while he was doing his Masters and, when he finished, everyone else was getting grad programs and jobs and he said “hey can I join you guys?”. We had to explain that we didn’t have a salary package for him but he seemed very keen to join because he liked what we were doing. I’d say he joined us out of pure passion. 

We are aware as a startup we can’t offer a competitive salary, so what we tried to do is make up for it in terms of experience. So we took him to Singapore. It would be rare for someone to have an opportunity like that, after just six months in a corporate role.

You’ll find with younger folks they just want to join things they believe in. I’m not saying you should underpay anyone. We were very clear about where we were at and that, once the business could afford salaries then everyone would get salaries, but he was more interested in the experience he could get and what he could learn and for us it has meant that we have an obligation to keep that in mind and put him at the forefront of things we are doing. Where else, in your first job, would you be meeting CIOs and CEOs and attending conferences? For him, we think he may or may not stay with us for a long time, but when he does leave, he will take away relationships, experience, knowledge of how business works, and how funding works.  Now he’s quite technical but we want to offer him a more rounded exposure to the business too.

It sounds like those recruits were drawn to you, so it wasn’t so much a selection process?

Yes and you really don’t have the resources to go out and track down talent. That really comes when funding is secured. What I have seen is after some startups secure funding, they think they’ve made it - they’re celebrating and popping champagne. But I see securing funding differently. I see it as now we have people to whom we owe money.

For me the celebration is warranted when you win clients. That’s the big win, because when you have clients you can pay back your investors, you can pay and reward your employees. So for us, that’s the big focus.

There is lots of research and interest in the area of wellbeing for people in startups, especially with the competing priorities and hands-on nature of startups, the self-imposed deadlines as well as external pressures. Do you do anything in particular to manage these stressors?

I’ve learned the value of mindfulness and meditation, especially when things are more stressful.

For the past six months, Omaru and I have lived in different countries. So how do you wake up in the morning and motivate yourself? I wake up and say to myself, how am I going to be today? What kind of day am I going to have? Will I be productive. Almost like an athlete, you wake up, take stock of yourself, set your goals and off you go. It’s like a conversation with myself or, I meditate and I visualize. 

I live in a city apartment, so I don’t have a lot of space but I’ve got a whiteboard where I write down my goals that faces my bed. So when I wake up, that’s the first thing I see. So if I’ve got deadlines and dates I can focus on them. It’s sort of like a vision board.

I read some stuff on Stoicism back in the day and what I really like about it, is you separate the world into things you can control, and things you can’t. So I can control how much preparation I can do for my pitch and whether I’ve got business cards and my flyers to give out.  I can control how much work we put into what we’re doing, but I can’t control the reaction. I can optimize as much as I can for that though.

And I think being really clear about what you can be accountable for and what you can press and change is important, versus stressing about everything. Thinking, “oh no they don’t want to invest” and then stressing about that doesn’t help. There’s only so much you can do and I think sometimes we burden ourselves way too much with things that are bigger than us.

So for me being able to draw that line between if I do my best, my absolute best and leave nothing on the table then I believe the rest is Fate or The Universe or whatever you want to call it. It all comes back to that outcome independence.

It’s also important to note that keeping up with that level of performance day in and day out can get exhausting, so that’s why I believe that self-care is important. Sometimes you’re run down and you’re procrastinating because your body is run down and it needs to procrastinate. So what I find is that when I’m procrastinating, I procrastinate. By that I mean I turn it from procrastinating to “I’m taking the day off”. If I can’t concentrate and do quality work then I’m going to the beach. So that way tomorrow, I know that I spent the previous day recharging at the beach rather than wasting it procrastinating over the laptop.

So I think it’s important to tune into that and really look after your mental health. When I was in Singapore I went over by myself. It was busy and Omaru was back here with his family and I found that I had to allocate time to chill and to go out and be social every now and then. I think that is really important, you have to be empathetic to yourself.

Sometimes you have to give yourself advice like you would to a third party. If someone came to you and said, “I’m feeling a little bit stressed” what would you say to them? And a lot of times that’s when we give our best advice – when it has to do with other people. So I’d say that’s really important.

And then, your work environment. We’ve always tried to make sure that we have a really good environment. I remember when I first joined, I said to my CEO that my first contribution as the Chief Operating Officer was that no-one should work on their birthday. It's a little thing, but just one day a year, it’s your birthday, you just don’t have to come to work. It’s a simple thing. I do believe that creating an atmosphere where you actually enjoy working is really important and it’s the start of a culture.

And secondly, if you’re in a startup and you don’t agree with the way things are going, then you’re better off cutting your losses early and trying something else. One of my friends that I met in Singapore, they’re doing really well in the HR tech space, he was part of another startup a few years earlier and he realized that it didn’t suit him, so he branched out and got a new co-founder and now he’s doing really really well. 

In the early days, it’s very easy to destroy and rebuild, it’s very easy to pivot and you have to be ready for that, but self-care is the first step. Your first relationship is always with yourself – it’s a little bit like when you’re on a plane in an emergency situation – first you have to put the mask on yourself and then you can worry about your loved ones, your family, co-founder and friends but you really have to take care of yourself first.

Are there any books that have helped you in your startup journey?

Yes there are a few, and they are quite unrelated. The first book I got a lot out of, and it wasn’t startup-focused per se, is The Power of Now. I’m a serial planner, I was brought up in a very goal-focused way of living life and without having read that book, I would have been the person who joined a startup and said, “oh no we haven’t made it and I’m really stressed” because I’m goal-oriented. But instead I am constantly reminding myself that the results are going to sort themselves out and that I need to fall in love with the process.

It’s a bit like when I came back from Singapore there was more of me that came back than when I went. I wanted to get to an ideal weight and you can get a bad body image by seeing yourself in the mirror but, if you pause and go, “you know what, I just want to fall in love with the process of eating well and feeling fit then the results are going to take care of themselves”. 

So same thing with our startup, I just want to fall in love with the process of doing a really good job, pushing this thing that we’re passionate about and some people are going to like it and some are not, but if we persist enough then we will definitely connect with someone. So that spirit, that culture of we’re really going to give it a good shot, pay attention to every customer/client experience, every employee’s experience and so forth. So The Power of Now is really important to me.=

And the other influence is more the Stoic philosophy, I can’t recall the actual titles – the author Marcus Aurelias and the other guy who grew up as a slave, but they both come to the same conclusions. I know that Stoicism can be quite callous in parts but what I really love about it and the biggest thing I took away, is that your experience of the world can be divided into two – things you can control and things you can’t. And really you must try not to ever waste a breath of air stressing about the things you can’t control, just figure out the levers or drivers of what you can control and use them.

So for us we just need to focus on doing a good job, work at making our product better, and give back to the ecosystem.  All these things are what comes out of relationships – really realizing that the most important thing you have in a startup is the human capital and that’s not just the people who are with you but also the people around you. Those are the people who introduce you to opportunities, those are the people who speak well of you, who get you to where you need to get to.

What advice would you give to school leaver weighing up starting a business or going to university?

I think that’s a really hard one. I would never suggest that someone not go to University because I did go to University and I know if things didn’t work out, I could go to a recruiters’ office and get myself a job. But I don’t think things will go that way!  

I also think there are a lot of other things you learn at University – most of my network in Australia are derived from my time at University and those are things that come in handy. I’d say there’s definitely a lot to learn from Uni, no matter what the course is – you learn how to consistently work towards achieving an outcome and often with very little reward aside from your marks. There’s a discipline that comes with that. There’s a discipline that comes through learning and through learning how to work together and how to work in teams. I did many group assignments at University so I think, course aside, there’s a lot of valuable things you learn there and, depending on what course you do, you also probably meet like-minded people and those people become your networks later 

So what about a university graduate considering a job in a corporate or doing their own startup? Any advice?

I’d still encourage someone with a startup idea to start as early as possible. If you could do it while you are at Uni, or as a side hustle during your first job, then I would do that.  Start with ideas, whether it’s a service or this or that, and then learn the principles of business, learn how to make mistakes early on so that by the time you graduate you are a seasoned person – even if that’s just connecting with the ecosystem. 

The good thing about a startup is you’re going to get exposure to everyone early on, you’re going to know everything that happens from marketing to sales to billing to accounting.

But that said, both my CEO and I are very fortunate that we came from a corporate environment and we know how to talk to corporates. So if we were doing a B2C it would still help us with VC funding, but with enterprise customers it has really come in handy because when we walk into a room we’re ex-corporate and they kind of know we’re one of them. So I think that’s a personal choice. Some people would say drop out and be a Zuckerberg, by all means that is an assessment that you need to make, but I would say just make sure you’re very comfortable with the possible outcomes – success or failure.

As much as other people may have said to us, we shouldn’t have quit our day jobs, we should have done it on the side, we had really reached our tipping point. I personally got a lot of value out of University. I still find that when I reach out to people on LinkedIn who went to the same Uni that they are more inclined to respond and accept quicker. So I do think there is value in University, especially if you approach every experience with the mindset of “what can I learn from this?”.

What are your views of an MBA?

My older sister did an MBA, and she got a lot of value from it. But when we compare notes, I personally believe that working in a startup has been the best “MBA”. I think that this is “it”, but without the training wheels.

I haven’t done an MBA, but I think that MBA’s teach you how to run an established company yet, in a startup – everyone needs to be a Swiss Army Knife. You might grow it to the stage where you need a bread knife and a carving knife. 

Personally I wouldn’t do an MBA to start a startup, if you had one then I think it might come in handy – especially when you need to strategise and plan. But personally if I had a great startup idea, then I would take the $24k per year or whatever the cost of the MBA, and put it into my idea.

I always ask myself what is the return on this investment. So for example there was a professional certification I was doing for finance, my CFA, I had completed two levels and had one more to do, and I then I walked away from it. Someone said to me, “when are you going to do the third level?” and I thought to myself, well if Aiculus takes off, then having a CFA accreditation to my name is not really going to help us and if it doesn’t take off then I can always pick it up where I left it, if I need it. So it’s really about optimizing. 

And the beautiful thing about being in a startup compared with being in a larger company is that you can do so much with so little. One business class flight for employees to take them all to the US – equals a good four months of funding and operating a business.

So finally, I’d look at the MBA – as a personal decision. And ask yourself “what am I going to get out of it?” – if it’s that promotion, are you going to get that in a startup, if it’s I just want to learn, I will never come between anyone saying they want to learn. But there is a lot of content available on line. Unless you really want the certificate go for it, but if it’s learning, well you can do that in lots of ways. That said, sometimes qualifications help with VCs when they are doing their due diligence – they want to know you have studied and have a base level of intelligence and a degree says that to people.

That’s all great advice Solo. Thank you for your time and best wishes.

You’re very welcome.

This article was written by Luke Henningsen and he is Co-Founder of the growing startup community at Ucities which is being developed to help provide a dedicated space for founders and startup people to network and support each other. He also leads a business called Scale & Swing, which delivers executive search to startups looking for senior talent at a startup-friendly price-point. Feel free to reach out to Luke on LinkedIn or at Scale & Swing or join the growing community at Ucities.