Lessons in Business Development for Researchers and Founders (Part 1)
Welcome back to our Meet The Experts series. This time, we’re excited to feature Matti Kawecki, longtime business developer and consultant for tech startups. In our conversation, Matti (who currently works with xG-startup MOXZ) shared how his career path and a few hard lessons along the way shaped his conviction that business development is not a nice-to-have, but the lifeline that turns potential into traction.
From Engineer to Explorer: How Founders Can Shift from Technology to Business
When researchers decide to become founders, they often carry the belief that great technology will naturally lead to great business. But as Matti Kawecki, an engineer-turned-business developer, knows first-hand, this belief can be costly.
Matti’s professional journey began in Saxony, where he studied electrical engineering after growing up in Poland in a family of engineers. After roles at Siemens (as a Strategic Procurement Specialist), he co-founded several companies in the wastewater and IT industries. It was the IT agency that he started with his brother that pulled him into the world of business development, and since then, he has been at the intersection of sales and tech.
The Researcher’s Trap
Matti points out a challenge he has often come across: startups chasing technological perfection while relying on subsidies instead of paying customers. This results in businesses surviving on external funding without proving how their product meets any real customer needs.
For Matti, cash flow is paramount. He admits that some founders find his approach too brutal on their dreams, because he always brings the conversation back to money.
But for him, asking potential customers to pay (even for early trials) is the only real way to verify if an idea has value. “You have to talk to people,” he stresses. “See what fits, what doesn’t. Before you build anything, find one person who could actually be your customer, ideally someone you could even co-create with.”
So how do you move from mere “interest” to co-creation? “You don’t start by selling,” Matti explains. “You start by asking: Do you have a problem with X? How do you handle it right now? I’m not selling you anything yet, I just want to verify the use case.” He emphasizes that the best conversations happen face to face, on-site, or at events, where founders can read reactions and adapt quickly.
Shifting the Mindset
For researchers, academic success is tied to perfection. In startups, the opposite is true. “You should do things fast and cheaply, just to show them to people.” Matti explains.
That means founders must learn to:
Prioritize iteration over perfection.
Talk to customers before building.
Accept that failure is feedback and not a final verdict.
Founders must also be willing to go outside of their comfort zone. For Matti, this meant confronting his natural shyness. “I’m heavily introverted,” he admits, but he forced himself to practice by joining NGO boards where he had to present and speak in front of others. Over time, this deliberate training made him more comfortable in public roles.
It shows that being an introvert is not an insurmountable hurdle; it just requires approaching growth deliberately, one step at a time.
Fail fast, fail small
Matti is open about failure, seeing it not as something to hide but as something to learn from. He stresses that resilience is essential: “We need to fail more often. Fail fast, fail small.”
This mindset was shaped early in his life. He saw how his father, an electrical engineer, responded to setbacks by reinventing himself as an entrepreneur. That example taught Matti that failure is never final, it’s part of the process. Later, when one of his own ventures didn’t work out, he treated the experience as training rather than defeat, asking what he could do differently next time.
“Failure is always there until you succeed,” he says. “It’s not binary. You just have to handle it with distance and calm.” He remembers a moment at Slush Helsinki 2016, surrounded by founders and VCs (most of whom were American): “One Finnish founder said, ‘I ruined my life,’ and everyone laughed, because we all knew that failure is part of the process.”
Matti, now a mentor for two incubators in Finland, says with a grin: “They often tell me I’m too brutal, but better me than the market.”
He shares a painful example: “In 2010, I co-founded a company with a friend. We spent €30,000 to earn €20. One of our two customers was family. It hurt, but it was priceless learning.”
He also reminds founders to consider cultural differences when testing products. “Customer behavior varies. Choose your test market wisely. It doesn’t have to be local. Sometimes another region can be the right place to experiment.”
The Bottom Line
The leap from researcher to founder isn’t just about leaving the lab. It’s about leaving behind an ingrained mindset. As Matti puts it: “You can’t just think in terms of technology. To survive you need cash, so you need to think in terms of money.” Part of the mindset shift is also learning to accept failure: in startups, mistakes aren’t the end, they are data points that tell you what not to do next. They are the tuition you pay for learning how to succeed.
In part two of this series, we’ll explore the practical side of the discussed mindset shift: how business development differs from sales, why co-creation with customers matters, and how focus beats perfection.