Review of Kasia Gawełko

I worked with Kasia to support me in the transition from being an academic to being CTO of a university spin-off. Developing a spin-off from research is an exciting and rewarding time, and in there are many skills from the research side that become valuable in the startup context (even more than in the private sector in general). However, I felt I lacked skills in some important areas and these contributed to high levels of anxiety and lack of confidence in my ability to succeed. With Kasia I worked to better understand my own personality, personal work style, and how I like to work with others. Moving from a time of doing research projects mostly independently or in very small teams, to managing a larger project and delegating tasks was something that was an important part of my personal growth. What struck me most was that the challenges I faced were not related to "textbook" management tasks (such as project scheduling or division of responsibility), but to my personal and emotional attitude to my work. Having been very personally invested in the project leading to the spin-off, I became aware of my own reluctance to trust other people with its success. Addressing this involved process of learning to build trust in others - not a blind trust, but one based on building an understanding of each person's competence, empowering people to use their particular skills, and developing feedback loops to ensure expectations are met. This allowed me to build a more productive team and reduced my workload by allowing me to avoid re-validating or re-working things that were already done. An essential part of this work was also building better communications and mutual understanding, through better listening to my own sense of empathy, and through a clearer understanding of how to distinguish between factual problems, the emotions that arise around these, and both practical and personal expectations that should be clearly communicated. Today, our team is growing and developing away from the academic context. While winning awards and building traction, I feel that with Kasia's training we are also working towards a company culture and team vision that is one we can be proud of and where we are excited and motivated to work.

Jonathan Chambers, CTO, Planeto (Geneva, Switzerland)