Today we welcome Shan Gu, Founder & CEO of Foci Solutions, where Shan’s team helps organizations build strong software engineering teams and self-sustaining talent engines, with the belief that the best engineering teams are ones that invest in each individual’s development and learning.
Foci’s development pods work with their clients’ software teams to provide coaching and mentorship on solid engineering principles and practices, while helping customers accelerate their product delivery velocity. Part-in-parcel, Foci also helps clients develop internal training and learning frameworks to rapidly ramp up new staff, ensuring a more resilient and self-sustaining workforce.
We can’t emphasize enough how valuable this approach can be for innovative founders, especially those driving unique R&D to develop truly innovative products and services. We pick Shan’s brain to understand how he got into this space, the successes he’s seen since launching Foci Solutions, and what’s on deck for the rest of 2024.
The bar is higher for fundraising in 2024
As Shan explains, the “money rich” funding environment the startup community enjoyed immediately post-covid is simply not there today. This calls for founders to have a more holistic long-term strategy in place to attract the investment they need to achieve growth.
This includes having a CEO in place earlier than ever and even pieces of your go-to-market strategy lined up before going to investors for capital.
It also means tapping into all avenues of non-dilutive funding to ensure you’re stretching your dollars as far as you can before handing over equity in the business.
When Shan Gu founded Foci Solutions, they wanted to solve real problems and develop real products—not just do training for the sake of training. Instead, they aim to use research and development as an accelerator to their consulting practice, managing an entire R&D lab that allows them to derive new testing or product development methodologies that can be applied to their solutions for customers.
It also allows Shan’s R&D teams to continually execute on work that unlocks access to non-dilutive government funding—including tax credits like SR&ED in Canada.
You can watch the full interview with Shan Gu on Boast’s YouTube channel here.
