An Innovator’s DNA
May 2022
It’s no secret that building a company from scratch is not for everyone, let alone making a company that’s profitable and high-impact. And yet, every entrepreneur in our portfolio is doing just that. We asked our founders what they believed should be at the core of an innovator’s DNA. Here’s what they had to say:
You need to be able to motivate yourself and motivate others when you don’t have all of the answers. It’s that resilience and self-motivation that inspires other people to move and throw themselves into the dark. I think that’s one of the most important aspects of building something new.
– Guilherme Bonifácio, COO of Mercê do Bairro
At your core, you have to care about what you're doing. If it’s not something that you’re passionate about, you won’t do it.
You need to go to sleep thinking about it. You get excited about it when you wake up. You need that passion to continue when times are tough and persist when things don’t work out. It’s really fun and amazing when things are working, and it’s really challenging when things don’t work. I think that beyond anything else you need that motivating factor to endure in the ultra marathon. You need that in your DNA to be able to endure.
– Crystal Nyitray, Ph.D., CEO of Encellin
You need a little bit of naivety or optimism. It’s easy to sit there and think, it’s never going to work. It’s easy to find a thousand reasons why it’s never going to work. Find the one. Find your one reason, and build a team around you that believes in that one to make it happen, and then show everyone else that you did it despite a thousand reasons you wouldn’t.
You need to believe in the goodness of the world and the goodness of people and that things will work out. If you sit around and thinking the worst in people, then it’s just really daunting.
– Maricel Saenz, CEO of Compound Foods
Question what’s around you every time. I believe an innovator's DNA requires curiosity. With every customer conversation and every detail that we find, we have to wonder, how could it be even better than it is right now?
– Diego Libanio, CEO of Mercê do Bairro
Creativity. On one hand you need an idea to make a business, the technology, but also you have to be creative on a daily basis to work around problems. For example, we have had a lot of supply chain issues with materials not arriving, so we have to be creative in that sense. We bought materials from alternative sources instead of a typical biotech chemical supplier.
– Anne-Sophie Mertgen, Ph.D., CEO of Micro Meat
Definitely perseverance. With each startup it gets a tiny bit easier, but at the end of the day it’s still extremely stressful and consuming. You have to continuously follow up and be thoughtful, professional, and persevere through the no's and resistance. There’s a lot of people who will support you, but at the same time there’s a lot of people who will infer that your idea will never work.
I love the negative energy because I get home at night and I can’t wait to prove them wrong. That fuels my fire to want to achieve more.
– Brian York, CEO of Cubbo
I think you have to be really really dissatisfied with the status quo. I think for anybody to innovate or invent something new, there has to be this absolute dissatisfaction with what exists. I remember when we were looking at existing solutions and said “What? There isn’t any solution? There isn’t something I can adopt for my team right now in 30 seconds, 60 seconds, if I wanted to?” And that dissatisfaction really drove us to build something ourselves.
