Want to build a successful and impactful technology company? Don’t go it alone.

If you start a technology company tomorrow, by this time next year there is a 20% chance that it will have failed. After that, there’s still a 50% chance it will fail in the first 5 years. And those are conservative estimates! Even if you have an excellent idea, beating such odds is hard. If there were a way for you as an aspiring tech entrepreneur to to turn those odds in your favor, you’d be interested, right?

Luckily for you, there are now a plethora of startup studios, incubators, accelerators, innovation hubs, and venture builders that can, or at least claim to offer this, turning startup-building into a repeatable method, centralizing the resources needed for success, and creating platforms for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ideas to succeed. According to data from the Global Startup Studio network, companies launched via these platforms move significantly faster to seed and Series A funding stages and founders have much higher chances of a successful exit later.

What’s the catch?

Whether or not one of these options is right for you will depend a lot on what they can offer you as a founder, and what will be required in return. These businesses make their money in different ways and have different incentives, but the setup usually involves trading equity in the venture in exchange for the support. Sometimes support simply means “money” and sometimes it means something more holistic. Some options allow you to keep a lot of the equity, but you’ll have to generate your idea in advance and have a team already in place, in exchange for investment and light-touch help to scale. Others offer you a ready-to-go idea to work on, but you might have to follow someone else’s vision, roadmap, KPIs, or dance to the achingly slow tune of a corporate backer, and in terms of equity you might only get the scraps from the cap table.

So is there an optimum setup??

We think that whatever the specifics of a venture builder’s business model, the ability to attract and incentivise the right entrepreneurial people to co-found ventures is going to be the bedrock of any success. So what is it that you as an aspiring founder really want? From our experience we see that you might wish to maximize the support you receive, whilst also maximizing your capacity to implement your vision. Today we also find that entrepreneurs are interested in doing something impactful; something that addresses a tangible challenge in the real world, rather than creating yet more hype around the latest tech buzzword.

At Flagship Founders we want to create an approach that comes as close as possible to achieving the above. I want to highlight four areas that we think are key.

• True Ownership for Founders

While we provide a validated idea for founders to take on, and open up our industry network to make it a success, we also believe that true founders want true ownership. This means when a co-founding team is in place, we expect them to drive the decisions, vision, strategy, and culture, rather than rely on us for step-by-step instructions. Of course we can support and be robust sparring partners, but ultimately it’s you as Managing Director of your company in the driving seat. Crucially, we are going to match this rhetoric when it comes to how we divide the equity in the company we are building together.

• Finding the Right Co-Founder

Part of the recipe for success in building a technology company is having the right partner with you on day one, and every time we have launched a company we have done so with two co-founders. It’s more effective to work collaboratively, and more fun. Rather than leaving this crucial part of the founding process to chance, we will seek to deeply understand your skills, strengths and weaknesses, and put together a shortlist of potentially great matches for you. Then we facilitate a process to help you discover, and assess from among them, the very best co-founder for you and your company. The final decision on that person will, of course, remain yours.

• Aligned Long-term Incentives

Having the right co-founder and venture-building partner on day one is important, but only if everyone has the same expectations for success over the long term, and feels incentivised to work as hard as they can in the same direction. Our model of shared ownership means that our incentives and your incentives as the co-founder are fundamentally the same: growing the company to make it profitable and valuable.?

We are also not interested in launching multiple companies on a hypergrowth model in the hope that some become unicorns while expecting many to fail. Nor are we interested in building businesses in which profitability is something “figured out” only after a massive scale has been reached. We think a lean and resource-savvy approach to startup building, combined with strong unit economics and scalable fundamentals baked into every business model from the start, means we can strive for healthy company valuations in the long term but chart a sustainable and consistent course to get there. Importantly this approach means we can continue to build upon our existing network and reputation as a trusted partner for investors and customers in our chosen sectors.

• Sector Focus

When we launched Flagship Founders in 2020 we decided to focus on maritime logistics and global shipping, and gained backing from key players within the industry. While not many people in the tech ecosystem in Berlin or elsewhere spend much time thinking about shipping, that belies its importance. 90% of global trade and 3% of global CO2 emissions (somewhere between the emissions of Germany and Japan if shipping were a country) are two statistics that hint at the crucial role ships play as the backbone of the world economy, and the scale of the challenges yet to be solved. The world of maritime trade also remains behind the curve of digitalisation that has been transforming other aspects of economic life for the last decades. For aspiring entrepreneurs looking to do something impactful, this presents an enormous opportunity.

Furthermore this focus means we can capitalize on the synergies, industry knowledge, and networks developed by growing a portfolio of companies in this sector, compared to taking a more scattergun approach. This added to our own team’s expertise and track record of building successful companies, fully maximizes the support we can offer to each startup, and maximizes the chances for success.

Does that mean we are looking for people with existing expertise or ideas for a startup related to shipping? Absolutely not. We understand that this sector can be difficult to comprehend from the outside. That’s why we in-sourced the capability to identify and develop the ideas for the next successful maritime technology startup and validate them with our industry partners. We can provide you with that initial idea, plus the network and market access to realize its potential. What we need are people with the curiosity, vision, and drive to take these ideas and make them their own.

With three companies launched so far, Kaiko, Tilla and zero44, and ideas for more in the coming months, the opportunity to transform this crucial part of the global economy is bigger than ever. Are you ready for the challenge?