British Brothers: Scansafe Founders Roy and Eldar Tuvey (Part 6)

SM: Talk about the dynamics of managing the company with your brother.

RT: From day one it has been clear to us about our responsibilities. I am based here in the US so I run North American operations. We are both members of a broad management team for the organization.

SM: Has being brothers in business every caused conflict for the two of you?

RT: For sure. There are big pros and cons, we think the pros seriously outweigh the cons. It was tough initially to be in a professional environment and context with your brother. Right now, and for so many years now, it has been the best thing possible because we have complete trust in each other which is hugely important. We have complementary skills. Eldar is more strategic and visionary. He is creative and comes up with lots of ideas. I am more execution and operationally focused. We both are in the front line and we do sell and talk to customers all the time. He is more on the product side and I am more on the execution side.

SM: Do you have a co-CEO title?

RT: Effectively he is the CEO and I am the President.

SM: How did the VCs you raised money from respond to the idea of funding two brothers?

RT: It has been an issue both times. At the end of the day they get comfortable with the people they are investing in and they realized we are rational individuals who complimented each other from a skills perspective. They did have certain areas of nervousness but I think it is all about how you manage your investor relations. Our backgrounds have been helpful in that regard.

SM: It is something VCs are either going to do or won’t do. Some VCs will not fund couples, yet there are successful companies like Cisco and Flikr which have been founded by couples.

RT: Our VCs were not in the ‘yes we do’ or ‘no we don’t’ camp, they evaluated it case by case. One of the major things they did is talk with the people in the management team and find out if it was a closed knit organization where we made all the decision together, or if there were big egos at play. They wanted to learn the dynamics of the working relationship. From a practical perspective we have an interesting dynamic in our company because we were a UK founded business but the core of our business now comes from the US. It has two heads in that way.

At the same time, if it was a normal company, someone else would have come out to the US and getting that internal buy in and investing the territories would be more difficult. Now there is no politics involved, and there is not one area of the company saying “oh, that is the US branch” because there is one of us on each side. Both territories count.

This segment is part 6 in the series : British Brothers: Scansafe Founders Roy and Eldar Tuvey
1 2 3 4 5 6 7