Article
How you communicate predicts whether you succeed
Rose Marie Rusanen
Venture Associate, Reaktor Ecosystem
Over the past year, I studied early-stage success factors across more than 40 professional services ventures within the ecosystem, combining a quantitative founder survey with 11 in-depth interviews with founders and investors.
The single strongest statistical predictor of early-stage venture success, across this entire study, was the quality of communication within the founding team.
Ventures characterized by open and collaborative team communication had over four times higher odds of belonging to the high-success group compared to ventures with weaker communication practices. The finding held consistently across every model in the study.
What open communication actually looks like
It would be easy to read “open and collaborative communication” as a soft idea: be nice to each other, share feelings, communicate actively. In practice, the interviews describe something way more deliberate.
High-performing founding teams described communication as something they designed and put effort into from the very first days. One founder structured the whole week around it: Monday to align on tasks and divide the work, Friday to close it out together with a “Power break”. Another started every week with a meeting of feelings before anything else: how did the weekend go? Different routines, the same instinct to keep the team in sync before the week pulls everyone in different directions.
The teams that struggled had communication patterns shaped by avoidance: difficult conversations were left unsaid, misalignment was allowed to build, and conflict was something to work around rather than resolve.
Why communication predicts success in professional services specifically
The correlation analysis found that open communication was strongly associated with constructive conflict resolution, shared vision, and balanced work distribution. When a founding team scores high on one of these, they tend to score high on all of them. Communication quality appears to be a proxy for the overall health of the founding team relationship.
In professional services ventures, the founding team is the product. The team’s ability to make decisions together, learn from mistakes, support each other, and present a coherent front to clients and recruits: all of this runs through the quality of how they talk and interact to each other.
One investor summarized what strong founding teams have that weak ones lack: “Good team dynamics create a more effortless start.” That word “effortless” is somewhat misleading for something that is, in practice, the result of deliberate effort. High-performing teams in the study didn’t communicate well just because they had good chemistry. They interacted well because they built systematic practices that sustained it.
A structural investment, not a cultural ambition
If communication quality predicts success this strongly, it’s worth treating it as an infrastructure investment rather than a cultural aspiration. The practices need to be consistent, honest, and genuinely oriented toward shared understanding and collaborative ways of working.
The implication is simple and harder than it sounds: build the communication structures before you need them. The founding phase is when they’re easiest to establish, and the practices need to be iterated along the way with a goal of creating sustained, deliberate communication over time.
My favourite take away and the thing highlighted in the data is that co-location really helps the team to communicate better. So easy steps for success:
- Speak openly
- Co-locate early
- Build deliberative routines for collaboration
- Have a heart and be a caring human
About the Author
Rose Marie Rusanen
Venture Associate, Reaktor Ecosystem
