How to Successfully Scale Your Business with Danae Shell

Episode 39 of the The Best Guest podcast, hosted by Victoria Bennion, titled "How to Successfully Scale Your Business with Danae Shell" was published on June 21, 2022 and runs 23 minutes.

June 21, 2022 ·23m · The Best Guest

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Episode Description

Today we welcome Danae Shell to the podcast. Danae is Co-founder and CEO of Valla, the UK's first legal platform for employees. We talk about:

How to scale your business
What to consider when building a team
Where to find help if you're having problems at work

About Danae Shell

Danae Shell, originally an immigrant from the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, taught herself to code on a computer her family bought at a garage sale.

With these skills she built websites to fund her college education then immigrated to Scotland to work as a programmer and social researcher. On the side, she created Knickers, a lingerie blog that became the #1 online publication for lingerie in Europe and ranked #1 for the term “knickers” on Google for five years.

Danae put her newfound marketing skills to use as a digital marketer at a number of startups, helping to scale successful startups like FreeAgent and Care Sourcer, running award-winning campaigns and helping to raise £1.2m in an equity crowdfunding round.

In her work, Danae saw far too many examples of workplace discrimination and harassment, and experienced a few herself. She and her friend Kate Ho got fed up with people having no power to fight back, so they created Valla, the UK’s first legal platform for employees. As Valla’s CEO, Danae has been awarded as a “Disruptive Innovator” and “Rising Star” in the tech industry, and most recently launched Valla’s new Discrimination First Aid training course, a first in the UK.

Key Takeaways

If you're a founder in an early stage company you have to be close to the coalface. You have to be close to your customers. You can't outsource things like sales and marketing. You can have them on board but you need to have the picture of the whole process
How to build a team - Look at what experience and skillsets you have and what you need to bring in to the team
Choose people for your business who can innovate over people who have just done it before
Focus on process, innovation and collaboration within a team
Networking and introductions are the key things to do to find investors
Treat seeking investors like a pipeline
The highest performing teams are the teams that feel comfortable sharing their mistakes with each other without fear of being punished
Bringing up issues is almost the raw material of innovation
The more representation you have in a company, the higher performing the company is