Marc Moens

Marc Moens reveals what he wished he'd known when starting up his business.

When you are about to start a company, just as when you are about to invade a foreign country, there are, to quote Donald Rumsfeld, known knowns, known unknowns, and there are unknown unknowns.

"As your company grows, you make sure your skill set grows."

Known unknowns

This is the easiest category. There are doubtless a lot of things you know you don't know. However, when you know you don't know something, that's actually quite good. When I started, I knew I didn't know anything about financial reporting. That turned out to be less of a problem than I had anticipated. As your company grows, you make sure your skill set grows. And then you reach a point where the company is big enough to hire someone who can take over this task and who is properly skilled to do it. In my case, we got a finance director after our first funding round. Until that point, I did the financial reporting to the board and to the target investors myself, with a lot of help from my mentor and our friendly accountants. It wasn't a big deal; it was a known unknown.

So known unknowns are, kind of, easy. But they are important, because there are so many helpful people around, and you need to make sure you call on the right people at the right time with the right questions. I remember early meetings with representatives from organisations that assist start-ups. They said "We can help you with X, Y, and Z. Do you want to come on a course?" I said "Actually, I need help with A, B, and C." They said "Hmm, interesting. Anyway, we can help you with X, Y, and Z. Do you want to come on a course?" Knowing what it is you don't know and where you need help is important.

Known knowns

That there are known knowns may seem obvious: perhaps you are the world expert in cold water ducts, and that's what your company is going to be about. So that's a known known.

"The only way you can decide whether it is worth giving all this up is by having a clear idea as to why you are doing it."

But before starting a company, there is a more important issue that I think people should turn into a known known, and that is your reason for starting the company. I don't think there are good or bad reasons, but you need to know what your personal reason is. Setting up and running a company is an all-consuming activity: you will spend less time with your partner and your children than you imagine; your holidays and weekends will be different from those of friends who are not doing a start-up. If you think work is something that you have to do while you'd rather be doing your hobby, then you are likely to become unhappy in your start-up. The only way you can decide whether it is worth giving all this up is by having a clear idea as to why you are doing it. It could be the money, although I think there are less risky and less time-consuming ways of earning reasonable amounts of money. It is more likely that it is something you need to get out of your system - proving to yourself that you can do this. Or you've spent a lot of time thinking theoretically about a bunch of problems and you now want to show this has some practical use. Or perhaps your career has reached a plateau and the only way you are going to move up or remain sane is by starting your own company. Whatever your reason, make sure it is a known known, so you can remind yourself over the years why you are doing this.

Another thing you should make sure you have very clear, is knowing what your role is and what the role is of any co-founders. For example, a tech start-up might need a technical brain who has invented version 1 of the product and is already dreaming of version 2. You may also need an engineering genius who can implement and deliver version 1.1 and then version 1.2 and 1.3, and who will make sure the product has Marc co-founded Rhetorical Systems in 2005, which developed leading edge textto- speech systems. In December 2004, Rhetorical was acquired by ScanSoft, a US-based speech company. Marc left ScanSoft in 2005 and since then has been involved as an advisor in a number of IT startups. Marc graduated with a PhD at the University of Edinburgh where he ran the Language Technology Group and worked on information extraction, text summarisation and other language engineering technologies. 12 documentation and is robust and runs on different platforms. This person is probably different from the technical visionary. You will also need someone who can sell the vision behind the company. This goes beyond talking about the brilliance of the technical invention or the robustness of the first prototype; you need someone who can deliver the vision to potential investors, to landlords who think it's too risky to rent out space to a start-up, to potential employees who might be taking a risk joining an unknown venture, and to customers. You also need someone who can turn the technology into something the customer wants to pay for.

It is unlikely that a single founder can do all these things. You need to know what you know, you need to know what should be your role in the company, and, if you have co-founders, you need to know the responsibilities of each of your co-founders. The founders are likely to have an equal stake in the company, but it shouldn't follow from that, that there is no hierarchy between them when decisions need to be made. In the scenario above, you would need to decide if the engineering genius can overrule the technical visionary, and whether the latter can overrule the customer-facing evangelist.

"Getting some of these apparently small things wrong can have very visible consequences."

If you are the sole founder, or you are the leader of a team of founders, it may come as a bit of a shock to realise that nothing in your brand new company will happen unless you make it happen. This isn't just about designing the product and having a sales strategy and attracting customers and shipping a product on time. It's all the other things you may have taken for granted in your career so far: having a staff manual and a policy about statutory holidays, arranging work permits for new employees, making travel arrangements to go see a customer, making sure there is paper by the photocopier, and that the wastebaskets get emptied. In fact, making sure that there are waste baskets... and desks... and chairs. If you're in charge, you have to make sure all this happens. Getting some of these apparently small things wrong can have very visible consequences. Because of that, the small things may start taking up time and attention, which you should be spending on the more important things. So make sure you have someone alongside you who can organise this, and a lot more, without even needing to be asked.

Unknown unknowns

Amongst the things I didn't know I didn't know, is the importance of having a mentor. When you start your first company, you need someone who has been through it before, who is willing to stand by you, who will listen to what you are trying to do, who will step in when necessary and be invisible when that's appropriate; someone who can give advice on small, practical issues, comment on larger strategic issues, or offer advice on life issues. At my first company, we were lucky: we didn't set out to find a mentor, but a mentor found us and became our chairman, or was it vice versa. It's important you find that mentor very early on in your start-up process. And don't wait for it to happen by accident. Make it happen.

There was one major unknown unknown at the start of my first company: the market for our product was a lot more complex and fragmented than I had anticipated, with an intricate eco-system of large and small companies providing all or part of a solution to which we only contributed a small component technology. This made it quite hard to get traction in this market or to get lock-in with customers. We did well in turning this restriction into a unique selling point, but it was harder than anticipated.

"Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty."

I now always recommend that people try and understand the market eco-system they are entering with their new product or their new company. However, if I had known then what I know now about the complexity of this market we entered all those years ago, I might have decided not to start the company at all. Mark Twain said that education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty. When you start a company, cocky ignorance is not necessarily a bad asset.