Engaged Investments in Prague: when startup evaluation finally reaches the team

Engaged Investments is a conference aimed at Central European investors, taking place in Prague. It brings together VCs, angel investors and more and more startups that get to introduce their solutions and become visible in the demo area.

I've been going there since 2022. The first time I was there I was still opening up the first thoughts of Fstage.vc — what we do, how we see investing and where we want to go. It was a clumsy beginning, but very useful. Some of the jokes were on us, some of the lessons were painful. But those kinds of experiences are often the most valuable.

Now I was back in Prague in a different role — with Sparkly HR.

Talking to investors about evaluating teams

This time there was an opportunity to step on stage with Sandra Kolbrah from BSW Ventures. Together we gave a longer talk about how to evaluate startups in the first place.

Sandra covered the broader logic of startup evaluation. I focused on the Sparkly HR part — that is, how to evaluate a startup's team.

It's a topic that everyone talks about but very few do systematically.

Everyone says the team is the most important thing. But if you ask how teams are actually evaluated, the answer often stays at the level of gut feeling, experience and a few good questions.

Investors look at market, product, technology, financials, traction and the cap table. But the team — the most important part — often stays the least measured risk.

That's exactly where Sparkly puts its focus.

On the Angel Stage jury with Douglas Wong and Tobiáš Rataj

On top of the stage talk, I also sat on the Angel Stage investor jury at Engaged Investments. That was an experience of its own — sitting together with other angel investors, listening to startup pitches one after another, asking questions and giving feedback.

On the jury next to me were Douglas Wong — angel investor and entrepreneur — and Tobiáš Rataj, investor and mentor with an ex-UiPath, ex-Rossum background. A strong lineup, and a good crowd to learn from.

Jury work gives you a different angle than being on stage yourself. You're no longer telling your own story — you're listening to other people's stories. And then, in a very short time, you have to decide where the strength is, where the gap is, and what the next right question should be.

It's also good training for your own startup. Because you end up facing exactly the same kind of questions when you sit on the other side of the table.

The venue was beautiful, but attention was scattered

There weren't as many people in the hall as I would have expected for such a topic. At the same time, the venue was very special — a building hundreds of years old, many rooms, many corridors, and very easy to get lost in different side passages where in every room some conversation or discussion was going on.

In an environment like that, attention is naturally scattered. One part of the value happens on stage, another part in the corridors, a third part at coffee breaks and a fourth in the evening conversations.

So in that sense it was good that the people who were there at least got the topic.

There wasn't new material. But there was new depth.

Essentially we didn't present anything completely new. But before the conference, deep analyses had been done in Estonia on people from several different companies, in order to show the conference participants very practically how different people actually are.

And that work was a lesson in itself.

Manually digging out those parameters, comparing, systematising and making them understandable was much harder than it seemed at first. But the goal was to learn a lot, very fast. So it meant long days, basically being on potential customers' backs to get the necessary information.

It wasn't comfortable. It wasn't pleasant. But it was necessary.

Because if you really want to understand how people differ inside companies, general theory isn't enough. You have to go into the data, into the people and into real roles.

The most painful differences

Putting those slides together, I left out a lot of information. Not because it wasn't important, but because everything at once is impossible to take in.

I focused on what is most painful and most different.

One example is learning speed.

I've seen in my own earlier teams that some people learn incredibly fast. They get a new system, a new tool or a new situation quickly and immediately start moving with it.

Another person learns much more slowly.

But that doesn't mean one person is good and the other is bad. That's too simple and wrong a conclusion.

The right question is: in which role are this person's strengths most valuable?

A fast learner can be very good at creating something new, leading change or moving in an unclear environment. A slower learner can be very strong in a stable, precision-demanding, repeat-value role where speed isn't the most important metric.

If we only look at a person through a “good” or “bad” lens, we waste talent.

If we look at a person through the role, context and the needs of the work, we finally start making better decisions.

One slide I still use

The more time passes, the more I realise how valuable a picture I put together for that conference.

I've used that same material repeatedly afterwards to explain to people how much we differ from each other and how much value is actually hidden in those differences.

Differences enrich — but only if we manage them consciously.

If we don't understand differences, they turn into conflict, mismatched expectations, slow work, burnout or bad hires.

If we do understand differences, we can turn them into the strength of roles, teams and the company.

That's a very important principle for Sparkly.

AI makes the human role even more precise

AI is coming and it takes away a lot of work that the human doesn't actually need to do.

But then a much more important question appears: what is the human supposed to do?

There isn't as much of it left as before. And what remains is much more detailed, more nuanced and more human.

Setting direction. Responsibility. Decision-making. Communication. Understanding context. Sensing values. Distinguishing right from wrong.

These are no longer just “soft topics”. They are the core of how a company works.

And that's why understanding people's differences becomes more and more important.

For investors, it was a lot at once

Looking back, the material was probably too detailed and too dense to fully take in as a single conference talk.

Evaluating a startup is not a simple topic. Evaluating a team isn't simpler. If you put those two together in one talk, it's very easy to go too deep.

But the point of the conference was exactly to open the topic and show that this kind of information exists. That evaluating teams doesn't have to stay only at the gut-feeling level. That a person's fit with the role, the phase, the team and the company context can be looked at much more consciously.

Did everyone immediately get it? Probably not.

Did they understand that there is some valuable information coming from here? It seemed so.

Time will tell how those conversations move forward.

Why we should be running more workshops on this

One clear conclusion from Prague was that this topic can't really be explained well in just one stage appearance.

It needs workshops.

You have to take a specific company, a specific team, specific roles and specific people. Then you can go in deep and show where the differences appear, where the risks are and where the actual untapped potential lies.

Because valuing a person doesn't mean saying nice words to everyone.

Valuing a person means putting that person into a role and environment where their strengths can actually work.

Back to being a startup

Engaged Investments has been an interesting milestone for me.

In 2022 I was there as an investor opening up the thoughts of Fstage.vc. Now I was there with Sparkly, talking about how investors could evaluate startup teams better.

In one sense the circle has closed. In another sense a new circle is starting.

Because in the end a lot depends on a person's profile. You can want to do many things, but in reality the things that start to happen are the ones that fit you.

Wanting alone is not enough.

Experience helps. Mistakes help. Uncomfortable stages help. Long days with data help. Investors' questions help. Customers' confusion helps.

All experiences are good for something.

And from Prague this time one thought rang loudest: if we want to evaluate startups better, we have to learn to see teams much better. Not as a slogan, but for real.