How to Skill Your Startup

TechPortfolio spoke to Sonia Strimban, manager, Venture Operations at MaRS Discovery District about the ideal evolution of startups within the accelerator community and the issues startups run into when it comes to finding employees with the right skills.

Why the Right Skills Matter So Much

Most startups don’t fail because their founders aren’t smart. They fail because the team is missing something the business needs at that moment. A brilliant engineering team with no one who can sell, or a sharp commercial team with no one who can build, will hit a wall sooner or later.

The numbers bear that out. When CB Insights studied 431 venture-backed startups that shut down since 2023, it found that running out of capital was cited in 70% of cases, but it called that “almost always the final cause of death, not the root problem.” The deeper causes it identified were poor product-market fit (43%), bad timing (29%) and unsustainable unit economics (19%). Each of those is, at least in part, a skills problem: knowing your customer, knowing your market and knowing your numbers.

That’s the backdrop for Strimban’s view that a startup’s hiring needs change at every stage.

Sonia Strimban, Manager, Venture Operations, MarsDD

We have such a large portfolio: we support 1,300 companies. The skill requirements change at each stage of the business.

In the beginning, when the startup is starting out and there’s a cofounding team, they’re either tech heavy — they’re coming out of lab, coming out of R&D, or university — and they’re missing the business side. The engineering skill is there, but they’re lacking the go-to market business capability, to understand how to productize, how to speak to customers, and attract investment.

Sometimes you have the opposite — a business team which has a great idea, they can design a great business plan around it — but they don’t have the tech capability on the team to build a MVP.

Our first intervention is to make our team aware of this. Nobody is going to give you money for an overdeveloped product without a business model.

The second level is when they have built the product, when they have early traction and validate it. You’re looking a more mature capability to help launch and avoid some early business pitfalls, such as scaling too fast, hiring unnecessarily, and keeping it lean. You’re looking for an executive who has domain expertise and the background to manage a growth phase.

At series A [funding], typically, we see the most benefit in an executive in sales and marketing. If you’re not selling and you can’t accelerate growth, you’re pretty much toast. You need somebody who has revenue growth capability.

The last phase in the scaling phase is when they need someone with an operations skillset. A lot of founders are completely lacking that skillset. To scale a business from a ground up… You need a real COO/CFO capability and many people are lacking this.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Three Stages, Three Kinds of Hire

Strimban’s answer boils down to a simple map. At the start, the job is to fill whichever half of the founding team is missing, technical or commercial, so the company can build a minimum viable product and explain why anyone would pay for it.

Once the product has early traction, the need shifts to experience. A startup at that point benefits from someone who has seen a growth phase before and can steer it away from classic mistakes like hiring too early or scaling faster than the business can support.

At Series A and beyond, growth itself becomes the job. That’s why Strimban points to a sales and marketing leader first, and then to the operational and financial depth of a real COO and CFO once the company is scaling. Founders who were perfect for the first stage often aren’t the right people to run the third, and recognizing that is part of the work.

What’s Happened at MaRS Since

MaRS was founded in 2000 by John Evans to help turn Canadian research into businesses, with an early focus on health and biosciences, and it has since broadened its reach to cleantech, software and artificial intelligence. In 2025, MaRS said that since 2010 it had helped ventures generate $11.5 billion in cumulative revenue, raise $19 billion in funding, and create and maintain more than 33,000 jobs.

The organization has also gone through significant change at the top. In September 2017, MaRS named entrepreneur and investor Yung Wu as its new CEO, succeeding Ilse Treurnicht. In 2024, under CEO Alison Nankivell, MaRS cut 20 staff in June and a further 11 later in the year as part of an effort to reset its business model. Nankivell told BetaKit that some of MaRS’s activities had made it “overly dependent on government revenues,” and set a target of a 50/50 split between public and private funding “in the next few years.”

In February 2025, the board appointed Grace Lee Reynolds as CEO. One of her stated priorities is “enhancing support systems to increase the odds of success for science and technology ventures,” which is very close to the skills question Strimban was describing in 2016.

What It Means for Founders

The practical lesson is to audit your team against your stage, not against an ideal. Ask what the business needs to prove in the next 12 to 18 months, and whether anyone on the team has done that before.

If you’re a technical team, find someone who can talk to customers and investors early. If you’re a business team, don’t spend months polishing a plan without the ability to build. And as the company grows, be honest about when it’s time to bring in sales, operations and finance leaders who’ve scaled a company before, even if that means founders handing over parts of the job they’ve been doing themselves.