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Why does what we do work?
Papers, chapters, and articles that feature our work as well as talks and presentations
A collection of real user experiences and their outcomes
Our IO to IPO blog housing simplified and digestible insights for the working professional
Links to podcasts and videos we have been featured in
What is Symeta? What are our values? Who are our leaders?
Learn more about who our leadership team is
Some of the questions frequently asked by clients
Our framework comes to life through our proprietary suite of research and assessments:
These tools are the data engines that provide the actionable intelligence to succeed. They are designed to be concise, powerful, and scalable, from an initial pre-investment analysis to an ongoing lever for value creation.
A startup’s performance—its ability to innovate, secure funding, and scale—is the direct result of human capital: the collective behaviors, skills, and psychological makeup of its founding team. You can have the perfect business plan, but without the right people to execute it, it will fail. Human capital is the foundational layer for all business activities. This is why we built the SENSE— to empower you to optimize human potential.
Symeta’s Entrepreneurial Needs and Strengths Exploration (SENSE) assessment is a powerful individual-level and team-level tool that empowers founders and leaders to grow their entrepreneurial skills. It bridges the gap between scientific data and real-world performance, helping you translate and express your human capital into entrepreneurial assets.
The SENSE assessment measures motivational drivers and 20 psychological traits across five categories:
These individual traits are the root of entrepreneurial behavior and are predictive of the 12 Pillars. It’s important to understand that these traits are not the pillars themselves, but they enable an individual to perform well within those tasks.
By providing a deep, data-driven understanding of your personal strengths and potential blind spots. The report goes beyond simple personality types, revealing your core psychological traits—such as motivations, dispositional tendencies, and thinking styles—that influence your behavior. With this knowledge, you can:
Ultimately, the SENSE assessment provides a clear roadmap for personal and professional growth, enabling you to leverage your natural assets and build a high-performing leadership team and venture that aligns with your authentic self.
For teams, the SENSE assessment is a key to building cohesion and mitigating conflict. It is a powerful tool to quickly gain an in-depth understanding of your team’s behavioral blueprint, the most critical predictor of a venture’s long-term viability and success.
It provides a shared language to understand why each member approaches stressful situations from a different perspective. This isn’t about judging traits, but about recognizing the unique set of tools and filters each person brings to the table. By understanding each other’s psychological makeup, a team can:
This shared knowledge fosters a high degree of psychological safety and trust, transforming a group of talented individuals into a truly high-performing, resilient team. The SENSE assessment acts as an invaluable guide for building a team that is not just diverse in skills, but also aligned in its behavioral architecture.
Success is not just about who you are and how you behave, but also how you work with others. Our proprietary ABCs of Teams model reveals the hidden sources of drag and friction that can silently sabotage a venture’s potential.
The ABCs of Team’s Model:
A is for Awareness: A high-performing team begins with a clear understanding of its psychological makeup. This starts with each individual member gaining self-awareness and gaining awareness of the unique assets and liabilities of teammates.
B is for Balance: Successful teams build a cohesive structure that enables them to operate as a single unit. This involves aligning on a shared mission, assigning roles and responsibilities based on human capital assets, and developing norms that support healthy team behavior.
C is for Cooperation: High-performing teams work to operate effectively by mastering their collaborative dynamics. This means developing processes to streamline operations, managing healthy and unhealthy conflict, and communicating openly and honestly.
The Team Health assessment moves beyond the individual to analyze the collective behavioral dynamics. The assessment helps you proactively identify and address those hidden sources of drag and friction, providing a data-driven roadmap to build a high-performing team.
This assessment provides:
The greatest ventures are not born from a single brilliant idea, but from the unwavering strength and efforts of the people behind the idea. The common perception of the lone, heroic founder is a very outdated myth. The truth is that the resources required to scale a startup in our complex, ever-changing business landscape quickly exceed any single individual’s capabilities. The most successful ventures are not built by a single visionary but by a high-performance team—a collective of complementary, aligned individuals.
Our work at Symeta is dedicated to defining and enabling this high-performance. Through a multi-year, meta-level task and process analysis, we have synthesized findings from over a century of research and thousands of scientific studies. We also analyzed popular press and non-academic sources to align our scientific understanding with the real-world practice of entrepreneurship. The result is our definitive framework: The 12 Pillars of Entrepreneurship™.
These 12 Pillars are not just a list of competencies; they are the behavioral blueprint for success itself—the key dimensions of performance that differentiate ventures that thrive from those that fail.
The 12 Entrepreneurship Performance Pillars are:
The key insight is that no single founder can perform every one of these pillars at an expert level. The power of a founding team lies in its ability to collectively cover all 12 dimensions. Our framework gives you the definitive language to identify behavioral gaps and build a well-rounded team, ensuring your venture has the comprehensive talent it needs to succeed.
At Symeta, our mission is to empower funders and founders to optimize behavior and drive success at the individual, team, and organizational levels. We know that the path to entrepreneurial success is fraught with challenges.
Consider the stark reality that 90% of startups fail, often due to people-related issues like:
We believe that with the right insights and tools, these odds can be overcome by aligning your people, strategy, and culture. The ultimate value of the Symeta Framework is not in the data itself, but in the tangible results and accelerated growth it unlocks. Our clients gain an unrivaled competitive advantage by translating behavioral data into strategic action, leading to measurable ROI.