A Roadmap for Startups: From Researcher to Founder (Part 1)
In our very first edition of Meet The Experts, we’re thrilled to feature Guillene Teboul-Ribiere—a CEO and long-time business consultant for technology startups. Guillene’s career spans engineering, private sector R&D, and company building across Europe and the U.S., including five years in Silicon Valley. With an Executive MBA in Leadership and Innovation and hands-on experience founding and scaling ventures, she brings a rare combination of technical fluency, strategic thinking, and pragmatic startup insight.
In our conversation, we explored a wide range of topics, including:
Why stumbling isn’t a sign of failure, but a core ingredient of progress
The difficult but necessary mindset shift from researcher to business leader
The importance of strategic alignment within the leadership team
And why corporate hires may not be the best idea for startups
Missteps, Mindset, and Team Alignment
Embrace the Stumble: Failure as Strategic Feedback
One of the first myths Guillene dismantles is the idea that startups must avoid mistakes at all costs. Her own experience proved otherwise. She co-founded a startup that launched with a clearly defined product and market, only to discover that the market wasn’t actually there.
"The first market we had in mind when we launched the company did not exist," she says. "I had convinced four other co-founders to join, and we all had families. When we saw it wasn’t working, I restarted the exploration work and that's how I found that we had two markets actually. One was in Germany and one was in Silicon Valley.”
Flying to San Francisco, she used her network and understanding of Silicon Valley's culture to secure meetings and managed to sign contracts in just a few days. "You don't make appointments two months in advance in Silicon Valley," she notes. "You reach out a week ahead, say you’re coming, and people make time for coffee. That’s how I got our first two contracts." The takeaway? Mistakes didn’t sink the company—they redirected it.
And Guillene is clear about what made that possible: "Overcoming hurdles is the number one skill of someone who's running a business, especially in innovation," she explains. Not talent, luck, personality type or character trait. A skill, one that can be learned and must be practiced.
Putting on the Business Hat
Researchers are raised in a belief system where success is tied to excellence: publish high-quality work, and your academic career advances. Many carry that same mindset into the startup world, believing that if their product is excellent, it will naturally sell. “But that’s not what makes a product sell,” Guillene says. “What sells a product is solving a customer’s problem.”
This change in perspective doesn’t come easy and rarely does it come naturally. It often requires an external jolt which more often than not is failure. "Usually the mindset shift happens after the company hits the wall. That’s when founders become ready to listen to business advice."
Guillene herself made the shift deliberately. After leaving her first career in R&D, she pursued an Executive MBA in Leadership and Innovation. "I had no business background, but I wasn’t in denial."
In other words, not knowing isn’t the problem—as long as you're aware that you don’t know. The real danger is either not wanting to learn, or believing you know things you don’t. It’s this self-awareness that separates those who adapt from those who fail to make progress.
Teams and Alignment: Do You Even Want the Same Thing?
Sometimes the problem isn’t strategy—it’s the team.
“If I’m talking to three or four founders and only one or two are genuinely eager to work with me while the others aren’t aligned, then the issue is not the strategy. You need to work as a team, and the team needs one shared goal. If each founder has a different objective, you’ve got a misalignment problem, not a planning one."
She insists on clarifying this early in her work with clients:
"Maybe they just want to play the startup game for a while, and that’s fine. But if they don't want to go in the direction of the market, then I’m not the right fit."
Hiring: Why Startups Should Avoid the 1-Tip Knife
"Everyone wants to hire someone from a big company with great credentials, someone who seems like a magic wand and is really great at this one thing they are hired for.”
But that’s not actually what startups need. She uses a French metaphor to explain: "Startups need knives with five tips, not one. That corporate expert may be excellent at one thing, but they can’t adapt."
Instead of making a big hire that is burning through the company’s cash, she advises startups to:
Experiment with three part-time roles instead of one full-time employee.
Observe which tasks get traction.
Build a full-time role based on what the company truly needs.
This kind of thinking saved one of her clients. They initially hired a costly software developer who didn't deliver, then switched to consultants who delivered better results with less risk. Now they don’t even want to hire full-time – they learned what they truly needed the hard way.
The Bottom Line
No matter whether you have just started out or are well underway in building your business—make sure three things are clear: your mindset, your team’s alignment, and your ability to treat mistakes as part of the process. Everything else—product, market, hiring—gets easier when those foundations are in place.
Next month, we look at Guillene’s methodology for finding your market, what it takes to get your business to scale, and understanding the crucial difference between explorers and hunters in the market discovery process.