Founders Need More Than Money: They Need Ecosystems

Today’s entrepreneur is commonly divided into two classes. On one hand you have the outliers, the entrepreneurs who build billion-dollar goliath’s, and become overnight millionaire’s in the process. On the other hand you have the struggles, the failures, and the collapses, that make up the majority of entrepreneur’s stories. In the middle you have the lifestyle businesses that are at the core of the American economy. The small mom and pop shops, restaurants, and local businesses, that rarely let you cash-out but ensure that you have a comfortable and sustainable lifestyle.

Despite forming less than 1 percent of all entrepreneurs, our focus has always been on the outliers. The entrepreneurs who amassed user growth, acquired massive rounds of funding, and reached escape velocity as Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel termed it in a recent Master’s of Scale episode. As you might expect, this is incredibly difficult. To be successful you need financial, social, and talent capital to drive your business forward. 

The challenges are only acerbated in the social entrepreneurship community who have access to less funding, a smaller peer group, and limited sectorial resources. So what separates the winners from everyone else? This is most often attributed it to funding. It’s the easiest proxy for success when looking from the outside-in, and it stands to reason that more money means more success. 

However, when speaking with George Tsiatis and Oliver Libby, two of the co-founders of The Resolution Project, it becomes clear that funding is only one part of the equation. George and Oliver have spent the the last 10 years investing in young social entrepreneurs through Resolution, an organization that provides small grants, mentorship, and resources, to never-before-funded ventures. In addition George is the CEO of Group 113 (a creative shop) and Oliver is the managing director of Hatzimemos / Libby (a strategy and venture capital firm). 

As founder’s themselves George and Oliver recognize the struggles that come with building a business and what it takes to be successful. They’ve acknowledge that money is important but are quick to flag that it’s not the defining factor of an entrepreneurs success:

“We’ve also discovered how modest the initial investment of resources, particularly in cash, has to be to get a social venture off the ground and start the career of a young social entrepreneur and to ensure that social responsibility is deeply ingrained into their character.”

George and Oliver continue: 

"It only takes a few thousand-dollar grants and a handful of hours of mentorship a month to give them the leverage points they need. We don’t want to minimize those resources, but it does show just how much they’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this. This combination has unlocked over one and a quarter million beneficiaries over that time."

Remarkably the monetary contribution does not need to be massive to spur an entrepreneur onward. If anything entrepreneurs need to know that someone believes in them and their big idea, and with that comes points of leverage available to them. Beyond that, they need a small resource investment (at least at the start), a peer-set, and a resilient team. 

George and Oliver both understand the emotional rollercoaster of startups and how important the right team is to be successful. As such they refuse to evaluate ‘solopreneurs’ and index hard on team dynamic. Oliver even describes himself as a serial co-founder:

“I’m a serial co-founder. I’ve never built anything worth building alone. I think it’s very hard to conceive of doing it alone.” - Oliver Libby

George echoes his sentiment from the perspective of the support group of peers, mentors, and advisors you are surrounded by:

“They’re going to be your best sounding boards for when the going gets tough, and the mentors you build will have to be there to challenge you and pick you up when you hit a rough patch—or, more commonly, fight through rough patch after rough patch. It’s a tough and lonely path, so make sure you pack appropriately, and bring good company!"

Despite funding and accelerating social enterprises, George and Oliver don’t see The Resolution Project as an investment vehicle, rather as an ecosystem creator, where one of the primary benefits is the network of entrepreneurs, partners, and resources available to help entrepreneurs develop. In their eyes this has far more value than a cash-deposit. In fact, peer-groups and ecosystems are not a new concept in the business world, but have most frequently been leveraged at the CEO and executive level of global companies. Recently this idea is beginning to make a resurgence in the entrepreneurial context.

It might not have started out as such but building and connecting ecosystems has become a huge part of Resolution’s vision moving forward:

"Our Pathway Partners program works with some of the oldest, most accomplished organizations in social impact: from Ashoka, to Echoing Green, to the Unreasonable Institute, and Venture for America. We’re working with so many terrific partners to help walk Resolution Fellows through the social impact ecosystem, this “Pathway to Action.” It’s a big part of the vision, and something that we may not have assumed was going to be a part of the vision when we started the organization in 2007.”

It’s a testament to The Resolution Project that over time they have identified and focused the organization on the areas that best help them fulfill their core mission:

"We started The Resolution Project in order to show the power of youth, that tomorrow’s leaders can start today. - George Tsiatis & Oliver Libby

This ecosystem concept has it’s place in the for-profit startup world through accelerators programs where the most commonly cited value-adds are the other companies in your ‘cohort’, shared networks, and partner agreements. Some do this better than others and that’s what makes programs like YCombinator stand out from the pack. Yet, it is equally clear that an accelerator is not required to create this sort of ecosystem. Often these groups can be created through former co-workers, classmates, neighbors, interest groups, and can even be a random assortment of people brought together as friends of friends. What’s important is that you have a community that you can learn from and lean on when you hit the inevitable rough patches. 

As entrepreneurship continues to rise in prominence, the question of what separates the winners from everyone else, will be asked more and more frequently. From my conversation with George and Oliver it’s clear that there is much more than funding to that equation. Often, it comes down the people and ecosystem you are surrounded by that defines your true chances of success. 

I’ve had the pleasure of being supported by and working with George and Oliver for the past 4 years. The Resolution Project was highly influential in my growth as an entrepreneur and leader, and I jumped at the opportunity to speak with George and Oliver on their approach. A huge thank you to the both of them for making the time and Jared Proudfoot for helping facilitate. Check out our full conversation which is a goldmine of insights and valuable advice on everything from balance, to healthy team-dynamics, to making investment decisions, to trends impacting the workplace:

SG: George, Oliver, you do a lot between Resolution and other endeavors. How do you describe your job? 

OL: Resolution’s a big part of my life. I’m the Co-Founder, Chair of the Board, and I mentor eight amazing fellows. It fits in nicely with what I do in the venture world at Hatzimemos / Libby. My professional life is about helping great entrepreneurs build amazing organizations that have a positive impact on the world.

GT: As the CEO of Resolution and as a business owner as well, a lot of my job is to trust others, to establish responsibility and accountability, to build and maintain culture, and keep my eyes on the long-term goals. I’ve always believed that all business should be business for good—it should be just, fair, kind, and, ultimately, humane. So, when the other organization I co-founded, Group 113, earned its B Corp Certification in 2016, that was big moment for me and validated years of work and that those two worlds—business and impact—belong together. It might look like those other activities are unrelated, but to me they’re perfectly aligned.

SG: What lead you to start Resolution? What was the original vision for it?

Both: We used to run a model United Nations conference at Harvard called World Model UN. It was a place where we forged friendships, traveled the world, and met thousands of incredible college students from all around the world. We got together as an alumni group of the conference several times after graduating. It took a few years—maybe two or three years after graduating—to develop the idea of going back to the World Model UN conference and seeing if we could support a couple of student projects at the conference. Frankly, we had no idea what we were even talking about at the time. We went back to the conference as the WorldMUN alumni project, or World MAP, to hold an info session that was a participatory development meeting. We thought there might be a few dozen students who would be interested, but to our amazement, students were hanging from the rafters. They were brimming over with ideas and begging for resources and we felt somewhat sheepish that we had nothing to offer that year. So, we went back and started The Resolution Project in order to show the power of youth, that tomorrow’s leaders can start today. That was the original vision. 

SG: How has your vision for Resolution changed over time? What is your 5-year today?

Both: The vision has definitely evolved, but its core remains the same. It’s like discovering an ancient statue poking out of the desert sands somewhere—as you wipe the sand off and dig around, you see more and more of the idea. It’s not that it didn’t exist, it’s that we’ve discovered how amazing Resolution Fellows can be—how incredibly impactful and real their ideas are and how driven they are. We’ve also discovered how modest the initial investment of resources—particularly in cash—has to be to get a social venture off the ground and start the career of a young social entrepreneur and to ensure that social responsibility is deeply engrained into their character. It only takes a few thousand-dollar grants and a handful of hours of mentorship a month to give them the leverage points they need. We don’t want to minimize those resources, but it does show just how much they’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this. This combination has unlocked over one and a quarter million beneficiaries over that time. It has also had a transformative impact of the Guides, our mentors, inspiring many of them to careers that incorporate impact. 

We have also been building our impact for rest of the sector. Our Pathway Partners program works with some of the oldest, most accomplished organizations in social impact: from Ashoka, to Echoing Green, to the Unreasonable Institute, and Venture for America. We’re working with so many terrific partners to help walk Resolution Fellows through the social impact ecosystem, this “Pathway to Action.” It’s a big part of the vision, and something that we may not have assumed was going to be a part of the vision when we started the organization in 2007. 

SG: What has been the most surprising part of the experience? 

Both: The most surprising part has been, without a doubt, the fact that it’s become global. We thought that young leaders could have an impact, and we hoped that we could help, but if you told us, when we filed our incorporation papers, that with only a few million dollars of investment over a decade we could help 350 Fellows change 1.25 million lives around the world—we would have set a more modest goal. 

SG: You have juggled at least one other job if not many over the course of building The Resolution Project, how have you managed to find the right balance? 

OL: A lot of people think of balance as 50/50—of being on the center of a seesaw. I don’t think of it that way. Number one, I think that things have blended together. I have amazing colleagues from my professional life at H/L that have become sponsors, volunteers, mentors, and supporters, and have taught me many lessons useful across both organizations. I’ve learned so much about growing enterprises from working in the venture space. But equally, working with Resolution Fellows and hearing what’s hot on campus in terms of business models, areas of impact, and what’s coming next has been key to my profession. Travelling the world with Resolution, meeting incredible people through Resolution; these have also fed right back into my professional career. So, it’s been less about balance than about finding the shared DNA between the things that I do and making sure it all makes sense holistically. It certainly does for me. I’ve never lost a minute of sleep for Resolution that wasn’t imminently worth it.

GT: The scale is definitely pitched to Resolution these days! I did it differently than Oliver, in that I did like to keep them separate but aligned, and that worked for me. I used a lot of tools and imposed a lot of structure for time management so that I’d lose as little time and productivity shifting gears from one activity to another. Coming from client services, that’s one of those things you have to figure out for yourself to make it work, and I was able to fight through it.

SG: What advice do you have for someone looking to start their own organization?

OL: I’m a serial co-founder. I’ve never built anything worth building alone. I think it’s very hard to conceive of doing it alone. At Resolution, we actually require that our Fellows have a co-founder or at least a signed-on team member, because we recognize this. Without George and Howard and the very small, intrepid group that started The Resolution Project, it would not be what it is today. We probably wouldn’t have made it. It takes a team – that’s probably the best thing I can say if you’re starting a new organization. You just need people to think about things in a different way and to complement you and pick you up when you’re down. 

GT: Really ask yourself if the world needs this new organization. Then actively engage everyone you know to talk you out of it. Then check how passionate you are about it after everyone else has trashed it. If you still want it and if you still know that no one else is handling this issue the way you are, then you have put yourself in a great position to succeed, both by checking your temperament for resilience, and by checking your competitive landscape for the added value you need to bring. Those same people that you ask to talk you out of it—they’re going to be your best sounding boards for when the going gets tough, and the mentors you build will have to be there to challenge you and pick you up when you hit a rough patch—or, more commonly, fight through rough patch after rough patch. It’s a tough and lonely path, so make sure you pack appropriately, and bring good company! 

SG: What do you look for when evaluating both a founding team and a project?

Both: We really only evaluate teams—projects just give us the basis for that evaluation. We always look for how the teams communicate and collaborate, how they divide their responsibilities and play to each other’s strengths, how they disagree and negotiate their differences. When founding something, things will always get harder before they get easier, so if a team can’t perform well on these items at the idea phase, they’re unlikely to make it when it comes to delivering. Of course, we’re also looking at grit, preparation, leadership skills, complementary skills, technical basis, a personal connection to the issue, and many other data points—evaluating people is complicated! 

SG: Oliver, given that you double hat as a venture professional, does this differ from what you look at in the private sector?  

OL: In venture, there are definitely some things we look at that are different from Resolution. I don’t want to say it’s the same rubric. But actually, when you think about it, we’re really early stage in my firm and most of the dispositive factors that make a backable entrepreneur at least have their direct analogy in how we choose our Resolution Fellows. Ultimately, we’re looking into someone’s eyes, and, after a limited interaction, whether it be a due diligence process or a Resolution Social Venture Challenge, we’re making a determination on whether we think this person has the goods and can deliver a great enterprise. Obviously, scale and resource requirements are very different, but the calculation and trust in a person being able to deliver is at the core of the investment decision in both organizations. 

SG: What are the most common mistakes founders make early on?

Both: A big one we see often is that founders try to eat the elephant in one bite without proof of concept. While complex, systematic solutions can be the right thing to do, it means that you have to understand every part of the issue in a very, very nuanced way to know you have the answer (and to convince others that you do). Why start with national distribution when you can prove out your concept locally?

Another one is thinking you have the answer to someone else’s problem. We are big fans of change from within communities because communities need to own their futures and having embedded problem-solvers, leaders, and changemakers in communities makes them more resilient and adaptable in our increasingly uncertain world. 

SG: Both of you two have worked closely together for a long time. What do you think makes an effective partnership? 

Both: The two of us and our third co-founder, Howard Levine, have worked together closely for a very long time—even before Resolution. There are a few things that have made our partnership so effective. The first thing is we all ante up the fact that we have the organization’s and each other’s best interests at heart. What that then unlocks is the ability to have what we call “task friction” without having “relationship friction.” We have gone head-to-head many times on an issue of policy, a strategic decision, or a Fellow candidate on whom we’ve had a different view. Those discussions can be long and full of back-and-forth, but the key is that relationship friction is totally absent. We are able to get up from that and say “I’m glad that we’re all safeguarding the best interests of Resolution. Thank you for sharing those things, let’s go grab a drink.” The task-versus-relationship piece is very important. The other thing is we complement each other really well. It’s a little reductive but each of the three of us brings a very different approach to leadership and understanding the organization. That melding of the three approaches is what has yielded success. No one of us, and probably not even any two of us, could have done what we’ve done. 

SG: What is a trend that you think people should be paying more attention to? 

OL: The future of work is changing. We are getting a real window into what that means when we look at our Resolution Fellows. It’s not just the kind of thing that they’re doing. It’s how they’re preparing, how they’re approaching linking their venture to the rest of their lives, how many different balls they have in the air, where they’re doing their work, how connected they are etc. The entire modality of how people are approaching entrepreneurship is changing.

I think the other thing that people should pay more attention to is the ecosystem creators. A lot of attention goes to the pointy end of the spear out there in the trenches. That’s awesome and deserves help, but those organizations can get much farther if there’s a core group of ecosystem creators out there like The Resolution Project and any of our Pathway Partners. We often get buried in paragraph 18 of the terrific story about the field impact. We celebrate the fact that our fellows get a lot of visibility, but it’s important for the world to pay attention to the ecosystem creators as well, because we need resources, help, volunteers etc.

GT: Communication modes are changing and segmenting by generation and sub-generations. This is interrupting the way that organizations do business, the way that people consume media and marketing, and frankly frames their worlds. It is hypertargeted and, by definition, less inclusive, meaning that we all have to work harder to bridge generational gaps.  

That said, millennials are making their mark on the workforce, but in unexpected ways—everyone was paying attention to their buying power as consumers (which won’t hit companies for another decade or so), but it is actually their position as desired skilled workers (notably for tech positions) that is driving their influence in companies. To compete for their talent, companies are having to articulate and define positions on social issues in ways they never have before, to develop employee engagement programs and volunteering opportunities that weren’t seen as a corporate responsibility, and to define a mission that resonates. We’re seeing the business world evolve in direct response to their influence.

SG: What is the biggest misperception people have about entrepreneurship? 

Both: First, is that everyone should do it. Second, is that entrepreneurship equals a technology company that sells for one billion dollars on the New York Stock Exchange. We have Resolution Fellows that struggle with this on a daily basis. Not every entrepreneur needs to be Elon Musk (despite the fact that Elon is awesome), and not every enterprise needs to be a tech company that approximates the Angry Birds experience. Entrepreneurship can as easily be an amazing young person who’s building affordable and stylish housing for people in townships in South Africa. That Fellow is just as much an entrepreneur as Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe he has less money in his bank account at this moment, and maybe the venture’s scale is not as large today, but it does not mean that it requires any less skill or perseverance in entrepreneurship. 

SG: What is the number one skill you are trying to learn today? 

OL: I wouldn’t say this is a skill, but one thing Resolution has not put at the forefront is visibility and thought leadership. We’ve been fairly quiet about what we’re doing. I think George and I and the team are working on talking about what we’ve learned at Resolution—in an elegant, truthful and authentic way. It’s important for us to talk about what we’ve accomplished, because fundamentally, visibility does bring a lot of benefits. Previously we’ve received a lot of organic attention, but it wasn’t really organized. I think there is a lot of authenticity in waiting to ensure that what we’re doing is working. Now that we know that, we’ve got to get out there and talk about it.

GT: I’m working on a lot of skills, but one sticks out as a focus right now. Personally, I’ve been working on a very particular part of time management around switching from time on to time off. I have lots of productivity hacks and systems when I’m working, but I’ve managed a lot of it by blending everything together when I could just better manage the hand-off from one to the other. I’ve been in the entrepreneurial grind for 12 years, so I’ve formed a lot of deep-seated habits that take some time to adjust. I know I need different types of time off too—time to be with family, time to run errands and take care of my personal admin, time for vacation, time to bounce back from rough sequences, time for myself, etc.—and that’s been critical to understanding how to shift gears efficiently. I’ve been watching a lot of my friends who have recently become parents and seen some of their hacks, and it’s been helpful to creating the kind of separation that makes me better at work and at being a great spouse, family member, friend, and colleague. I’ve got a lot more to do on it, but it’s been a great process.

SG: How do define success?

Both: Proving to the world that young people have solutions today. Proving that with the right support, they can make a massive impact. We have all sorts of other metrics of success, up to and including the Pathway Partnership and making sure we connect the rest of our ecosystem, but fundamentally what it comes down to for us is that there are hundreds, and eventually thousands, of young people who started their careers in social impact. They built that feeling of the importance of social impact in their character, with Resolution as the catalyst, very early in their lives. There are wave after wave of Resolution Fellows who are doing good work in the world and changing lives, because they understood that with Resolution, tomorrow’s leaders can start today.

A huge thank you to George Tsiatis and Oliver Libby for taking the time to answer my questions and Jared Proudfoot for facilitating our conversation. For more on The Resolution Project check out their Website, LinkedIn Page, or HuffPost column.