Third-generation entrepreneur knows the importance of a founding team

This week I sat down with Sharon Mirsky, co-founder and COO of Firedome, a startup focused on IoT growth by offering advanced cybersecurity features to connected devices. Firedome is headquartered in New York with a fully remote workforce across Israel, Belarus and Brazil. They are committed to “securing the connected future.”

I asked Sharon about her journey to becoming a startup co-founder.

Entrepreneurs – born or built?

“Serendipity, maybe, but it also runs in the family. My grandfather was an entrepreneur. He was a chemist and one of the first people to bring the Formica manufacturing process to Israel. My father is an entrepreneur. My mother also… and my brother. So, I guess it was bound to happen.”

If there was ever an answer to the question of whether startup founders are born or built, Sharon, a third-generation entrepreneur, makes a strong case for a genetic component, even if it took her a while to give in to the impulse.

“I tried to escape it. I worked in large organizations for many years, but I wanted to see things moving faster. After I moved to New York with Nokia in 2012, I met Eyal Bino who was working with startups at the time. Serendipity again. We started working together and set up ICONYC, an accelerator for Israeli startups here in New York. It was my first venture after working for big corporates, and Eyal convinced me that it was better to work with several startups than to pick just one.

The reality is that as a founder in Israel, or anywhere, it’s hard to make the jump to the US market and we wanted to help. As a first-time founder from outside the US, there is a business culture gap that is not easy to bridge. A lot of the time, founders find they are out of their depth, not knowing how to raise money here, or find their first customers. Israeli founders understand the startup ecosystem in Israel, but when they come to the US, it’s a different ball game. Our goal was to take the experience we had with the ecosystem in New York and share that with Israeli entrepreneurs looking to establish a US presence.”

Of course, this was a journey I could well relate to. It was only around 10 years ago, that I founded a startup in Italy. I remember all too well trying to raise money in the US and people telling me, “But you aren’t here!” Trying to land those first customers involved hiring consultants to do business development. It’s a struggle for many companies that base themselves outside the US but are trying to address the US market.

After establishing her expertise at ICONYC, Sharon was hired as CEO of another startup to lead a company turnaround before serendipity struck again.

“I met my current co-founder, Moti, in a playground in New York. One thing led to another, and we founded Firedome about three years ago. I brought my network, my connections to VCs, my working knowledge of the New York business ecosystem that I had honed at ICONYC and elsewhere and assumed the role of COO.”

When I asked Sharon about the three most important bits of advice she had for entrepreneurs starting out with their first startup, she didn’t hesitate to call out the working relationships she has with her co-founders, Moti Shkolnik and Orr Chen.

Co-founding is the future

“Choosing your co-founders is so important. My co-founders, Moti and Orr are amazing, and they inspire me every day. There used to be a mentality that product was the most important thing. If we build it, they will come. But nowadays we are addressing the business value we bring to the market. All three of us share that customer-centric and value-driven mentality, and that drives our decisions.

The second piece of advice would be to bring your idea to market as early as possible. Talk with anyone you can, especially potential customers and VCs, no matter how early you are. At Firedome we were having sales conversations even before we really started the company, and it really helped us.”

I had to jump in on that and share with Sharon the advice people gave me early in my career as an entrepreneur saying, “Don’t share your idea with anyone.” I quickly realized that it just didn’t add up. I asked Sharon what her take was on that kind of paranoid fear of someone stealing your idea.

Execution beats ideas

“I don’t buy it. It’s all about execution. The ability of founders to be agile and remain connected to the market and their customers’ needs is key. An idea is simply a starting point and there are so many great ideas. An idea is just the beginning. Most likely, the initial idea will change significantly from where you begin to where you end up as a successful company. Successful companies are aligned with the changing market conditions and are quick to adapt. My experience has been that the initial idea has never been as important as getting feedback and understanding the dynamics of the market you are addressing. It really becomes a journey of how the idea evolves as you understand who your customer is and what problem you are solving for them.

R&D is a tool, not a target

The third bit of advice for younger entrepreneurs is to be as customer-centric as possible,it will help you at every stage. R&D is the tool to help you sell your product and then support your customers. That’s their main goal. Building the best product ever before you have any customers is a waste of resources.”

This resonates so strongly and calls me back to Clay Christensen talking about understanding your customers’ “jobs to be done” before you build the product.

I wanted to drill down with Sharon about the importance or lack of importance of a unique idea.

“The idea is just the beginning. Don’t let the fact that another company is exploring your idea stop you. In fact, it’s probably a bad sign if you’re the only one tackling a particular problem.”

I like the idea of concept validation from competitors! Also, other companies working in the same space are evangelizing the business for all of you and making it easy for VCs to believe that there is something there worth investing in.

Being one member of a founding team seems to have been key in Sharon’s experience with Firedome. I wondered whether she thought her advice might be different for lone entrepreneurs.

“I don’t think single founders are that common anymore. I think business now is far more multifaceted than it once was and no one can be a jack of all trades. Having a founding team enables you to combine your collective expertise and have your co-founders focus on their specialty fields. Also, there is just so much to be done, it’s too difficult to do it alone, especially in the early days when you don’t have the money to hire.”

Finally, I asked Sharon how Firedome handled the challenges of the last 12 months and what her experiences of managing a startup during the pandemic had been.

“From a productivity standpoint, COVID-19 didn’t affect us. We helped our team in all sorts of ways to cope with the situation. We understood early on that this situation was here to stay for a while, so we developed routines and tools to stay connected and let go of our. Becoming a fully-remote team gave us the opportunity to dramatically expand our talent pool, hire the right talent and grow much faster. From a sales perspective, we found that we can sell without being in front of the customer which was a welcome surprise. We worked right through the pandemic, and sales continued to grow.”

Sharon’s positivity and the way she is building Firedome, leveraging everything she learned earlier in her career is inspiring and I can’t wait to see what comes next for Firedome.