The Biggest Mistake Technical Founders Make: Choosing the Wrong Start up Team

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Many startups don’t fail because the technology is weak or the market doesn’t exist. They fail because of early co-founder and team decisions that are difficult to undo later. In this video, I break down the biggest mistake technical founders make when building startups: choosing the wrong co-founders and business partners. Based on over a decade of advising science, biotech, climate, and deep-tech startups, I explain how strong founding teams are built through self-awareness, complementary skill sets, aligned values and character, deep trust, and early conversations around equity, roles, and accountability. This video is especially relevant for academic founders, clinicians, engineers, and first-time startup founders transitioning out of academia who are navigating co-founder selection, startup team building, and early-stage company formation.
If you’re searching for guidance on how to choose a co-founder, avoid common startup team mistakes, or build a strong founding team before raising capital or applying for non-dilutive funding, this video will walk you through the patterns that separate teams that endure from those that break apart.

A bit about me:

I remember how challenging it was to transition from a PhD scientist into an early-stage startup founder, executive, & operator. Over the past 10+ years through building start-ups myself and advising hundreds of founders, I’ve seen how difficult it can be for technical and clinical founders to turn strong science into fundable, commercially credible startups.

I’m an Executive Startup Advisor and Non-Dilutive Funding Strategist working with scientists, clinicians, academic PIs, and technical founders spinning high-risk, high-impact R&D innovations out of leading universities and research institutions, including Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, Columbia, and UCLA. I’m also a Techstars and MassChallenge mentor and have advised hundreds of early-stage founders across biotech, pharmaceuticals, life sciences, medical devices, diagnostics, AI, climate, energy, defense, and hard tech—often supporting teams tackling some of today’s most complex global challenges and navigating early fundraising and commercialization for the first time.

My work focuses on advising early-stage, R&D-driven startups and helping founders make sense of early fundraising, clarify commercialization strategy, and position complex technical innovation in a way that resonates with funders, partners, and investors. I bring this perspective not only as an advisor, but also as a 3X startup founder, having built start-ups in emerging, cross-disciplinary technical spaces where there is no clear playbook. My past work has received support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, with media coverage in CNN, NBC, BBC, and The Boston Globe. I’ve secured patents, published peer-reviewed research, won pitch competitions, and held leadership roles across R&D, product development, go-to-market, sales, business development, and commercialization.

Over the past decade, I’ve helped startups and research-driven teams secure $50M+ in non-dilutive funding across healthcare, biotech, life sciences, medical devices, and hard tech through highly competitive federal grants and SBIR/STTR contracts. One of my earliest clients was awarded one of the first $25M+ ARPA-H contracts, setting an early benchmark for large-scale non-dilutive success. I’ve also served as an SBIR reviewer for both NIH and NSF, participating in multiple study sections and evaluating proposals across technical merit, commercialization strategy, and program fit—experience that directly informs how I advise teams on building competitive funding strategies.

Read about my journey in Train Like a Scientist, Think Like an Entrepreneur: https://tinyurl.com/frunjcfe

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