Encouraging talent to lead confidently and freely is what we’re all about at York IE. Startups don’t scale without strong leaders and cultures.
We focus on building great teams of complementary parts that drive successful companies while helping individually nurture and enable talent on their quest to realize rewarding careers. By fostering environments for the humans in our universe to self-reflect, admit shortcomings, be honest with themselves, and adapt we see increased productivity and pride in the resulting work product.
People aren’t perfect but they can aspire to become the most perfect versions of themselves. Even the most gifted will fall on their face once or twice, bloody their nose a bit, and have an off day. But they learn to do what is needed to evolve, improve, be ready for the next day. They surround themselves with the right people and provide better collaboration and output for all in their circle.
Only you as a leader truly know how your startup is doing and how you are performing — and you simply can’t be afraid to stare it head-on and adjust. You shouldn’t be operating scared. Is this how your board, investors, advisors, mentors, and executives make you feel? If you don’t feel like you’ve got this support, call it out.
The York IE Approach
We support startup entrepreneurs and all of their flaws. Our perspective on business and our way of operating for our own firm is that we empower our staff to execute on their jobs, but also look for gaps in our business to plug in and help us grow by playing to each person’s unique value, interests and strengths. This is how we inspire a team and get them committed for the long term on our vision to reshape the way startups are built, scaled, and monetized. It’s important for people to know they can focus on looking ahead, not looking back, and live and learn. Be loyal and play the long game as rising tides lifts all boats… These tenets are core in our DNA, we see it in each team member.
If this is our ethos as we build our startup, York IE, which is really just a startup helping startups, then shouldn’t it also be how we help architect and influence culture for our companies? If we don’t create an environment where they don’t feel like they can mess up, make mistakes, course correct — it becomes that feeling of operating with fear that so many venture capitalists and boards create — then aren’t we no different than the industry we’re trying to disrupt? We’re steadfast here to be a disruptor and offer a differentiated product to entrepreneurs.
We play this out across our investment portfolio and advisory services engagements. Our vertically-integrated strategic growth and investment firm is focused on working with and for entrepreneurs, not the other way around. They are our clients. They are our partners. We are an extension of their operating teams. They are who we answer to. We don’t have traditional LPs (limited partners) in our investment vehicles for a reason because we want to ensure that our time and attention is focused on our value differentiation in the market: our operational, growth, GTM, and strategy expertise for our founders, executive teams, and companies overall. We invest capital, resources, services, time, energy, passion, and more. We’re all in this together. We bring an army of reinforcements and a deeply engaged network. We want all founders to know we have aligned incentives and they are not alone.
Time to Evolve
As a society, a global economy, a technology sector, and a startup ecosystem, we must be positive and support each other now more than ever. There is so much social shaming and negative press out there knocking those who aim to conquer the business and career mountain top.
At York IE, we want to make the startup and investor game a better place for sure, but how about also making the business world and world overall a better place at the same time, driven through job creation, encouragement, and innovation. We’re dreaming big and making an impact day by day!
