Lessons from an Early-Stage Startup Over 4 Years

In this interview, Simon Schillebeeckx shares what four and a half years of building Handprint.tech taught him about moving from academia into entrepreneurship. He discusses founder disagreements, overhiring, long sales cycles, and the cost of developing software. His central lesson is to validate customer demand before building, while creating a business that makes positive environmental impact valuable to companies.

My name is Simon Schillebeeckx. I am an assistant professor at Singapore Management University and co-founder of Handprint.tech.

Handprint.tech is a nature tech platform that connects companies to the most impactful organizations on Earth. Our general goal is to help companies capture real business value from the creation of positive impact in the world. Maybe the most confrontational thing about building a company and building a team is that you're constantly realizing you can only do a very small part. You're completely reliant on everyone else to pull their weight.

Handprint.tech is a small company of 10 people, but it is already making an impact, having restored 3.5 million square meters across 35 countries. Let's dive into his story. Simon was born in Belgium. From a young age, he wanted to do something meaningful.

I mean, I went to study commercial engineering in Belgium. After writing my dissertation, I chose to do another degree in corporate social responsibility, so I moved from Belgium to the UK to pursue a second master's degree.

However, I was told that if I pursued CSR, I would not make any money

because nobody in business really cares about it. But I was like, I was driven to do this and I thought, yeah, so for me, that's been the beginning of my pathway in the sustainability space, but

I still wanted to continue. After working at a small boutique firm, I eventually enrolled in a PhD program at Imperial College London.

When I went into academia to do my PhD I was very convinced that this was going to be my pathway. Sitting in my office just thinking and writing, I was, I really enjoyed doing this.

But suddenly my supervisor told me he was leaving the college. 

I was about 2 years and 11 months into my PhD when my supervisor called me into his office and said, You have to finish your PhD in 3 months because I'm moving to Singapore, and I said, no, I still have at least 1 year, and he said, Yeah, not anymore. I'm leaving, so you have to finish in 3 months, but if you manage. To finish, I'll take you with me. I was reflecting on the fact that 6 hours before that meeting I had been dumped by the girl I was seeing and thought, sure, all right, let's move to Singapore. So I moved to Singapore at the beginning of 2015, initially as a postdoc and then from July 2016 as a professor.

The fundamental problem that Handprint is trying to solve is making it valuable for companies to do something good in the world. Convincing a company to give money to an NGO is very hard. Why on earth would they do this? But if you can show that by doing so they are going to have more loyal customers or the cost of customer acquisition is going to go down, then it makes sense. Matthias and I met in Singapore pretty much. Immediately after I landed, so we became friends. It wasn't until many years later that we started thinking about working together. In December 2019, we founded Handprint.

So initially the name of the company was the Green Company, and then we ended up going for Handprint.tech. And the reason we picked Handprint as a name, Handprint is a scientific concept that is the opposite of a footprint, a footprint. Is all of the bad things that you do simply by virtue of living or by virtue of being a company, whereas Handprint is this idea and a construct that measures your positive impact. I think having a tech domain, if you're in the tech business makes a lot of sense. Having a tech domain sets the balance right. We are a tech company. Most people who visit the website will see us as a tech company.

There is no degree that you need to be an entrepreneur. Do it without, sure, I think the main reason why a degree can be quite helpful is you've developed some kind of grit. You've developed a level of persistence to do something for a prolonged period of time. I teach business model innovation at university, so a lot of what I do with my students is to work with startups or to work with larger companies. So I had all this theoretical knowledge of how to do this or what should be done. 

Once you actually have to do it yourself, it's a very different thing. I think there is a reason why there are very few academics that become successful entrepreneurs. Academia is about slow, in-depth search for truth. When you are an entrepreneur, every day has 10 deadlines. 

Collaboration in academia tends to be quite simple because you work with people who are very similar, who have been trained to think and write. In the same way as you, if you hire those kind of people in your company, you're screwed. You need different people. You need a lot more trust based on a lack of understanding, and that is a very big shift as well because it's hard to do as academics. We typically do everything ourselves or we work with a very small group of co-authors that are very similar to us. So I think these are really big challenges that I'm still grappling with every day.

We've been around for 4.5 years. I mean, I think in a company of any size there will always be many struggles. There's been important disagreements among founders about strategic direction, but you have to deal with them. Like you can't just let them fester. You have to bring them out into the open, discuss, accept when you get your way or when you don't get your way, and then move on. There was a moment that we grew too fast. 

We overhired. We were overly optimistic as entrepreneurs tend to be about our potential to rapidly turn one of our pieces of technology into a product that would really make revenue, and we basically overstretched and then that meant that at some point we had to let go of 16 people or something and then doing this and having the discussions with the leadership and it's like, OK, who are these people going to be and then the evaluations, the emotional.

The toll that has taken on many of us is quite painful. And then I think in terms of the process, one of the things that we've really struggled with and continue to struggle with is that none of the founders really come out of a sales background. Developing a practice for how you sell complex technology to companies really isn't easy, and this is typically a very long term process. We've had sales cycles of over 2 years and as a small startup, having Sales cycles that take that take over 2 years, that's not super appealing, so you need to figure out how we can accelerate this, so that's been a continuous learning.

What for me has been a big struggle is as a non-product or a non-tech person. What would be great if we could do this and then this would happen. Then I talked to the product team and they said, yeah, sure, give me $150,000 and I'll make it happen. I was like, no, it's just a simple thing. So for me, that has been a massive learning: developing high-quality software is costly and it takes a long time.

I've learned a lot about the things that I can't do. Maybe the most confrontational thing about building a company and building a team is that you're constantly realizing that you can only do a very small part. You're a small part of the puzzle. You're completely reliant on everyone else to pull their weight. My job is to maybe motivate them. But this collaborative effort is what makes or breaks the company.

And the other thing that I have learned, we started building our first product too soon. We didn't do enough user research. We didn't get LOIs, letters of intent signed by customers. And if I would go back to the beginning with this knowledge in mind, this would be the one thing, we are not building anything until we have 10 LOIs. If you build this, and it can do A, B, C, and D, I will buy it for this much money. Until you have that, I wouldn't start building a new company.

It's impossible to convince someone with rational arguments that they should care about something. Caring for something or about something is an emotional thing. The reality, I think, is that we're never going to convince 100% of the people. You need to have a very small vocal minority, probably less than 10%, that really make decisions that can change the world.

When I look at Southeast Asia, where I've been living for the last Decade, it's understandable people have very different concerns than people in Europe where I'm from. The level of economic development is not there. There's a lot of corruption. So one of the things that we are seeing in some of our reforestation work we're doing, we do a lot of mangrove restoration. 

Most of them are in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, incredibly important ecosystems, and they're being cut down. And even if you give them money. There will still be people cutting them down, and it's not because these people are horrible people that have as a goal, we want to destroy the planet. 

No, they have as a goal, that if I cut 10 trees down now and I can sell the wood, then I can eat for a couple of days. And so if your primary concerns in life are, will I have food tomorrow, then having these higher level goals of we need to protect. Planet and all life on the planet sound very distant. This is not what people have in mind.

The mission of educators and climate scientists is to close that gap, demonstrate to people that even within their lives they can make meaningful changes. They can do small things that actually will benefit themselves, will benefit their community, and will benefit the world. That large companies, if they want to be successful, they need to be sustainable. 

You can't be sustainable in the long run. The world that we know right now, which already has changed substantially, just won't be around for the next couple of centuries. We are in a phase where all of the scientists, the climate scientists, are telling us that we are facing extinction level events if we are not changing the economy to. Towards a more environmentally sustainable system, the future for our children and our children's children is going to be substantially more difficult.

We've kind of stated as an unofficial goal. We want to win the Nobel Prize for Peace, which is pretty unusual as a company. It won't be easy, but if we succeed as a company, it could happen. That's the goal. That's a stretch goal for Handprint.