#9 Jan Schnorr on taking your time to build quality startup teams

Jan Schnorr co-founded C2Sense as a spin-off from MIT and served both as CTO and CEO before leaving his company in 2019. He now spends his time as “management consultant for startups”, helping scientists build their companies and initial teams – both in the US and Germany, amongst others as a Startup Scouting Consultant at the Max Planck Foundation. 

We learn about the first steps of building C2Sense, the support of the MIT ecosystem and differences and similarities between the Boston ecosystem and Germany, Jan’s home turf.

Jan shares his learnings and reflections on his time in various roles building up his company, jumping from researcher to CTO to CEO. He talks about the importance of knowing yourself to be at home in every role and designing it to fit your own personality and skillset. We talk in-depth about his understanding of leadership, the valuable lessons he learned as a cub scout leader in his home state around motivating people to join a cause and the role of empathy and unfiltered feedback. Jan has a deep motivation for building teams, and he shares his learnings on choosing the right people, the importance of clearly defining roles in advance, and talks about how investing enough time and energy into good hiring pays off for a startup.