The journey of being a founder in a high-tech, high growth business can be both exciting and rewarding. However, without a founder’s focus, determination and tenacity the business has a high chance of failure, with 60% of all UK startups failing within their first 5 years.  

This is why it is essential for a founding team to have an ecosystem of supporters to help them navigate the treacherous startup landscape and ensure they keep motivated to drive their business forward and survive.  

From experience, some of the main challenges for founders are the feeling that they haven’t been supported; they suffer from burnout, they feel isolated or misunderstood and they spend so much time focusing on developing their business that they forget to focus on developing themselves as leaders.  

At SETsquared Bristol, we have been focusing on mechanisms to put founders at the heart of the support we offer in our incubator, helping them to thrive to ensure their companies survive.  

To do this we are kickstarting the following initiatives: 

• New workshops to build company resilience and culture, 
• A reignited mentoring programme to ensure our founders feel supported with experts who understand their journey, 

• Founder leadership training through our ‘Learning to Lead’ self-guided training course modules, 
• One to one coaching as an optional extra, and 
• Access to an online community of other entrepreneurs to access additional support 

In addition, we are also revamping our peer-to-peer roundtables to enable our members to meet and share learnings and problems with like-minded individuals. The roundtables will be in two formats: 

• Sector-specific: Quarterly, roundtables focusing on specific questions. In addition to our popular ‘Consultancy to Product’ and ‘Healthtech’ roundtables, we are adding new roundtables for ‘Hardware’ and ‘Ecotech’. 

• Founder-focus: Half yearly, we will convene a roundtable focused on supporting founders or team members who identify as women, minority ethnic, LGBTQIA+ or neurodivergent.  

Our aim is to build resilience at the heart of the business, remove any barriers to a founder’s journey and enable them to be the best leaders they can.  

If you would like to know how we could support you in developing your high-tech, high growth business then have a look at the support we offer via our incubation page.