How do you leap from research lab to Silicon Valley start-up?

The Silicon Valley ecosystem is permeated by an intoxicating mindset of optimism, risk-taking and seemingly limitless ambition, which underpins the proliferation of world-defining start-ups it produces.

But when you’re in a lab far removed from its rarified culture, the question of launching a Silicon Valley start-up can seem out of reach. Without privileged opportunity, how would you make the leap from pursuing your research to building a business that changes the world?

The opportunity to launch a start-up has never been more accessible than it is now, however. Covid and the rise of artificial intelligence have upended myriad business norms, and, historically, times of financial turmoil, like we are experiencing today, have seen many of the best start-ups get off the ground.

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But where do you start?

Here are eight actionable steps you can take now, whatever university you’re based in, to begin your own start-up journey.

1. Develop a mindset of “why not?”

Unless you’ve been there and experienced Silicon Valley first-hand, it’s difficult to grasp what’s so different and special about the place. It replaces “surely not” with “why not?”, creating what can feel like an alternative reality in which anything is possible – and that mindset drives vast opportunity.

Perhaps you cannot reach Silicon Valley, but you can choose who you spend time with. There’s insight in the well-worn phrase: “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” If you want to launch a start-up, seek out people with a similar goal and those who have done it before; spend time with them and digest their content online.

2. Ask yourself: what problem can I solve?

Too often, people drift with a pipe dream of becoming a start-up founder or get stuck with a particular technology or idea but forget to look outwards to find a problem they can solve. All great start-ups solve a relevant problem; the best start-up founders start with the problem and work back to the solution.

3. How big can it be?

Silicon Valley is built around the pursuit of enormous outcomes and accepting high failure rates – because when successes happen, they happen on a vast scale. For that to hold true, the problem being solved must be big, exceptionally big. Does your identified problem affect millions of people? Could it become a multibillion-dollar market? If the answer is “no”, can you reimagine what you’re doing to find a bigger context? If not, it’s unlikely to fit with Silicon Valley start-up expectations (no matter how interesting it is for you to pursue). You must think big.

4. Who cares?

With a positive mindset and a clear problem, now you need to sense-check whether anyone else cares about the problem. What do people do today because your solution doesn’t exist? Is there a pressing unmet need for this product (or service or app or technology), or is it peripheral? Look at The Mom Test, by Rob Fitzpatrick, for how to validate an idea. But also ask yourself: “Do I really care about this?” And be honest with yourself. Launching a start-up is all-consuming, so you need to be passionate about what you’re doing to sustain your effort in the tough times.

5. Start

So, you’ve ticked all the boxes above? What are you waiting for? Get going, start! The greatest cause of start-up failure is failure to start. Too many people count themselves out before they’ve even begun. What’s holding you back?

6. Embrace risk

One of the biggest barriers people face is their own fear of failure. In my experience, this is especially true in universities because you and your peers are typically high achievers in an academic context but have almost no commercial experience. It’s normal to fear failure, but, drawing on Silicon Valley’s example, you must first accept the reality that launching a start-up is inherently high risk and yet still replace “surely not” with “why not?” Surround yourself with others who share and encourage that appetite for risk.

7. Experiment and make friends with momentum

The good news is there’s far more that’s transferable from research to launching a start-up than you might imagine. Specifically, a start-up is an experiment. It’s about being a good investigator, then defining a hypothesis and a method to test it. What’s the quickest, cheapest, most effective way of testing your hypothesis? Take confidence from the skills you’ve developed as a researcher and transfer them to testing your start-up ideas. But more than that, switch your mindset around success and failure. You succeed if you run a good experiment that produces robust results, whether those results prove or disprove your initial hypothesis. The same is true in start-ups; when you run your experiment, you may not get the results you wanted. It may feel like failure, but it’s not; you’ve gained valuable data. Learn from it and move forward. The quicker you cycle through the experiments, the better. Momentum is key.

8. Get support

Finally, seek out support. Launching a start-up is hard, especially when you’re doing it for the first time. You need all the help you can get. Most universities offer support, so ask around internally, find out what help is on offer and get involved. Join local clubs and societies. If they don’t exist, start one.

Launching a start-up is a roller coaster; the highs and lows come with a lot of hard work but also many unexpected treasures and life-changing opportunities along the way. So, buckle up and enjoy the journey!

Ben Clark is the director of Future Worlds, the on-campus start-up accelerator at the University of Southampton. He has previously held leadership roles in multiple start-ups in the UK and Silicon Valley, both venture funded and bootstrapped.

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