Lessons from Solugen: Building a high-performance team
by Clara Ricard, Gaurab Chakrabarti
There isn’t a cookie cutter playbook to scaling deep-tech companies. But there are valuable lessons to take away from those that have navigated the scaling journey successfully.
Gaurab Chakrabarti and Sean Hunt co-founded Solugen back in 2016. They have grown the company to over 180 employees and secured a $213M DOE Loan Guarantee for a third commercial plant. A key driver of success in scaling from lab to commercial scale was their ability to build a high-performance team.
In software, there is an established playbook for this and it relies on hiring from the large pool of operators who have gone through the scaling journey before. But in deep tech, the talent pool with the scaling know-how is limited and companies have to recruit directly out of academia or industry instead.
In this post, Gaurab shares his practical tips on building a top performing team through focusing on speed, creating a productive culture, and generating continuous innovation.
1. Focusing on speed
In deep tech companies, you often have to hire candidates from academia or industry. But many struggle to adapt to the fast, scrappy pace of startups, to an environment where speed is valued and failure is part of the journey.
Gaurab’s tip: look beyond typical qualifications
“The best hires often looked overly academic on paper,” says Gaurab. “But they were hungry for a fresh challenge—ready to break free from lab routines and apply their expertise in a dynamic environment.” During interviews, Gaurab gauges the candidates’ mindset by looking for “childlike excitement” and enthusiasm. “I’m less interested in their past environment and more in their passion for our mission and their ability to adapt to fast decision-making.” He also recommends reading How to hire A players from Eric Herrenkohl, a favourite of his on all things related to hiring interviews.
Gaurab’s tip: pair experience with raw aptitude
Juniors with a growth mindset move fast and uncover problems quickly. Seniors bring the expertise to solve them. Pairing them combines speed with quality, speeding up problem-solving and learning. This pairing can be more formal like a mentoring system, but it doesn’t have to be very structured. At Solugen, Gaurab explains that this would happen organically thanks to regular casual socials to bring the team together and enhance natural collaboration.
2. Creating a productive culture
In deep tech companies, intellectual debates are often inevitable but they can be detrimental to progress. The focus should be on solving customer problems, not chasing perfection.
Gaurab’s tip: progress over perfection
“Progress is better than perfection” is rooted in the company culture at Solugen. From onboarding to daily operations, the leadership team reminds the company of this value. Senior leaders are encouraged to lead by example, they talk openly about their failures and lessons learned.
Gaurab’s tip: think big and act now
“Think big and act now” refers to channelling overly academic debates towards solving practical customer problems. Gaurab uses this phrase to reinforce the idea that solving real (and big) problems is the priority. “Whatever the customer needs to be true: that’s our goal”, he says. It encourages the team to think about how their ideas can be applied to meet customer needs. The best way to translate this into daily employee actions is to praise team members when insights are applied in practical ways that benefit the customer, and ensure goals are tied to customer outcomes.
3. Generating continuous innovation
In deep tech, getting your org structure right is critical to maintaining the pace of innovation over time and retaining talent. Too flat? Decisions slow down as leaders get stretched thin. Too hierarchical? Processes bog down new ideas. In both cases, your best talent might look elsewhere.
Gaurab’s tip: defining Grand Challenges
At Solugen, Gaurab organized the company around three Grand Challenges, each with ongoing projects whose success is measured by clear outcomes.
Deploy: What we’re executing today.
Launch: Innovations we’re delivering consistently.
Develop: What we’re building for the future.
Each Grand Challenge has distinct time horizons and success probabilities, and so for each, the team and the success metrics of the project reflects that. Throughout its lifetime, a project would often move across Grand Challenges, from Develop to Deploy.
Gaurab’s tip: allow rotational leadership
For each project, Solugen appoints a “Project CEO”—someone with the right mix of skills for the project phase. A Sales Director might lead a commercial project, while a Scientist takes the driving seat for product-focused work. Rotating project ownership brings fresh perspectives, develops the leadership skills of the team, and broadens their access to highly visible, business-critical work.
This is a rotational role. The ultimate goal of the Project CEO is to successfully complete their project and relinquish their CEO credentials. When a Project CEO passes the torch onto their successor for the next phase of the project, it’s a moment for celebration, reflection, and reward.
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While every company is unique, it’s valuable to learn from successful climate tech founders on how to think about hiring, culture-building, and organisational design. We love to learn about what it takes to scale deep tech companies and there is so much more to this topic than we covered in this blog post. If you are a founder building to make the climate transition a reality, we would love to meet you.