Venture Essentials Workshop Series

Finding Talent for Deep Tech Startups

On April 14th, Outset Ventures hosted its subsequent workshop in the ‘Venture Essentials workshop Series’ called Finding Talent for early stage Deep-Tech Startups.

This dynamic workshop series brings together industry experts and experienced founders to give you a thorough breakdown of essential topics related to science and engineering ventures.

The workshop was co-presented by Nicola Dunn, Stephanie Gray (Senior Client Partners at Human Kind) and Dr. Ollie Crush (Chief Scientific Officer at Mint Innovation).

This extensive 90-minute virtual workshop was specifically designed for the needs of early-stage science/engineering start-ups and entrepreneurs and covered the topics below.

  • Useful methods and frameworks to develop a talent finding strategy for young companies.
  • Insights and experiences around finding key talent
  • Current challenges with talent finding and skills shortage
  • The Importance of an employee Value Proposition and Talent Retention

About the Presenters

Dr. Ollie Crush

Co-founder and CSO of Mint Innovation, a cleantech company founded at Outset in 2016. Mint grew to 10 employees before graduating from Outset in 2019, and now numbers 32 across NZ, Australia, and the UK. Ollie has been heavily involved in all aspects of recruitment, onboarding, and employee retention, and like any scientist, he’s tinkered with different approaches throughout the growth of the company. Ollie will share his experiences on what works and doesn’t work in the NZ start-up context.

Stephanie Gray

Stephanie has extensive leadership experience, having led and grown high-performing teams in financial and government environments across New Zealand and Australia. She brings this experience, insights, and knowledge into the leadership programmes she runs for her clients and through Humankind’s public leadership programme. She enjoys partnering with clients to create employee experiences that matter whilst also supporting them in achieving their business outcomes. She brings generalist HR skills and experience in culture, diversity and inclusion, HR strategy, and service design.

Nicola Dunn

Nicola’s passion for people and her interest in what makes them tick started long before her career in HR. Her background is in people leadership and coaching at a senior level, across mid to large private entities. With a firm belief that everyone comes to work to do their best. Nicola loves navigating how to create environments where people can truly thrive, with great employee experience leading to great business outcomes. Nicola has led complex change programmes, union engagements, culture development and has a breadth of senior generalist experience in the employee experience space.

Stay tuned for more workshops in the Venture Essentials series in 2022!