Ventures
Helping longevity startups (and their founders) overcome technology and scaling challenges
I got interested in longevity around 8 years ago and back then I really didn't know how to contribute. Now that I'm almost 30, and after surviving to many startups through different stages, I'm back and ready to create an impact in the field. I recently left my job as CTO and I want to put everything I learned to good use.
My end goal is to accelerate the longevity field. And starting a startup is the way I think I’ll bring the most impact. I'm looking at two possibilities:
- Start an aging therapeutics company. I definitely need a cofounder for this.
- Start an infrastructure company to accelerate the field. Lab automation, robotics, tools, drug discovery, etc. Maybe I need a cofounder for this.
But I'm new to the longevity field, so it's going to take me a minute to understand clearly what the aging field needs. So meanwhile I want to help some of the cool founders and startups out there to overcome technology and scaling challenges.
What I do
As startups grow and tackle complex technical challenges, they need experienced support to ensure their products and processes are successful. That's where I come in. I bring a wealth of experience in product development, engineering, hiring and management to help startups overcome their unique challenges.
I immerse myself in your company for a few months to tackle your specific needs, leaving you with streamlined processes and a roadmap for continued success.
I will probably be doing this for a limited amount of time and will only be able to work with one startup at a time.
How I do it
Challenges I help you overcome
Product strategy and roadmap
Common problems
- Unclear vision on what should be built
- Inability to put the product at the center of the strategy
- Disconnect between product and business plan: no impact on P&L
- Huge backlogs and no clear prioritizations criteria
- Features are too complex and have low adoption
What I do to solve them
- Implement business cases framework for valuing features
- Prioritization methodologies that adapt to each company’s objectives and culture
- Build a team structure and culture that promotes independence and accountability
- Set goals for each product team, based on selected product KPIs that directly impact a business plan
- Challenge current features scope and roadmap definition
Product driven culture
Common problems
- Lack of product discovery
- Lack of proper feature documentation
- “Product debt” and “We do too much stuff”
- Overcomplicated feature definition
- Corner cases are not well-covered
- Inconsistency
- Lack of visibility of a feature's impact
- Huge distance between product people and the rest of the company
What I do to solve them
- Implement a culture of continuous discovery
- Create an inclusive & business-oriented product culture
- Put into practice a documentation style that fits company culture, engineering team seniority and work style
- Define and implement feedback loops
- Integrate an iterative lean approach to shipping product
Top level product and engineering team
Common problems
- Unable to attract tier 1 engineering and product talent
- No criteria for interviewing top management engineering and product candidates
- Issues dimensioning tech and product team
- Weak sourcing of tech and product candidates
What I do to solve them
- Lay out a specific engineering and product culture
- Set up a solid recruitment process from job offer to interviews scripts
- Lead the execution of part of the interview process
- Create a fluent and stable candidate pipeline
Fast development cycle
Common problems
- The idea-to-production process takes too long
- Delivery is consistently delayed, deadline after deadline
- Releases are a painful and chaotic experience
- Product Quality is a problem: bugs, errors and inconsistencies
What I do to solve them
- Work on the delivery time, quality and scope trade-off mentality at all levels of the company
- Implement agile methodologies with flexibility and common sense
- Create culture and processes of quality
- Make the engineering team aware of and involved with business related challenges
Scalable architecture & infrastructure
Common problems
- Ever increasing technical debt
- Lack of automated testing
- Complex scaling solutions
- Mobile and backend developers don’t communicate and go separate ways
- Scaling issues during peak time
- Unrealistic capacity planning
- Uncontrolled rising costs
- Frequent outages and increased downtime
- Lack of visibility and proactive monitoring systems
What I do to solve them
- Set up and implement a roadmap towards Clean Architecture for all layers of the stack
- Adopt an automated testing practice using the relevant frameworks
- Foster a technology culture that values architecture and design as much as implementation details
- Implement API-first systems in which mobile and web engineers are able to consume equivalent, first-class APIs
- Dynamic setup for autoscaling based on traffic
- Analysis and fixing of performance bottleneck
- Containerized deployment system to improve elasticity
- Implementing proactive monitoring
Solid business insights
Common problems
- Either tons of disconnected metrics to look into or not even the most basic ones are available
- Inconsistency between different sources of information
- No capacity for real-time analytics
- Too much dependency on analysts to retrieve every piece of information or do the most basic analysis
- No company-wide dashboard available
What I do to solve them
- Implement a tailored business intelligence stack, from databases to visualization software
- Business and product modelization for defining main company KPIs
- Set periodic and company-wide reporting
- Make information available through a company dashboard
- Audit all KPIs and integrate sources
- Implement A/B testing capabilities
Who you are
You are a founder who:
- focuses on longevity or infrastructure for longevity (lab automation, bioinformatics, drug discovery, etc.)
- are trying to bring tech and product to bio
- wants to create or scale a top level tech team
- needs to hire tech or product executives
- needs to design and implement processes to scale the company further
- wants to launch or scale a product
- faces some of the challenges I've mentioned or other challenges related to tech, product and scaling your longevity startup
If so, contact me. I’m also on twitter 🐦 as @stanete (DMs are open). Check my LinkedIn too.