Czech investor Jan Staněk: don’t delegate sales, test ideas early

Venture investor Jan Staněk, managing partner of the Brno-based fund Purple Ventures, shared the key lessons he has learned from working with hundreds of Czech and foreign startups. His main advice to founders: build a prototype as quickly as possible, bring it to market, and don’t be afraid to ask for feedback — even when it hurts.

According to Staněk, feedback needs to come as early as possible. “You need to get feedback as soon as you can. And you need the courage to ask for it, because it hurts,” the investor admits. It is the speed of testing hypotheses, not a perfectly polished product, that determines whether a startup survives or fails.

Staněk also said the popular notion of “work-life balance” irritates him, citing the example of a Polish founder whose absurd plan involved trying to balance work and personal life instead of focusing entirely on launching the business. In his view, at the early stage of a startup such balance is more myth than real strategy.

He also pointed to one seemingly minor detail that instantly tells him a startup is doomed: how founders handle sales. According to Staněk, when a founder stops handling sales personally and hands the function off to a hire, it often signals the project’s imminent end — founders themselves must be the first to feel the market’s reaction.

Jan Staněk also touched on the fear of failure common among American entrepreneurs: in his observation, what scares them is not so much losing money as losing time and reputation. That is why, the investor believes, startups should aim to “fail fast” — this saves resources and speeds up the move to the next, more promising idea.