There is an opportunity cost to the startup you build — it’s the other startup you could be building. To ensure you’re building the most valuable startup possible you need to leverage the skills and knowledge you already have. This is your Edge.

Your Edge is your secret weapon. It’s your unfair competitive advantage compared to other founders.

An individual’s Edge is their unfair advantage in solving a problem, compared to other founders.

It takes the form of a technical skill or area of expertise, usually from your academic or corporate career. Ask yourself:

What are the things you know about that few others know?
What can you build that few others can?
What unique or rare insights do you have that others don’t?

An idea should always be solving a problem. But, there are many problems you could work on.

A problem derived from your Edge will give you an unfair advantage compared to other founders and improve your chances of building a globally important company.

This piece will help you work out what kind of Edge you might have.

Technical Edge

We love funding technologists who want to apply their skills to hard problems — even if they’re not yet sure what problem they want to solve. Most individuals joining EF fall into this category.

Technical Edges have usually worked on a specific technology for a significant period of time. If you have a PhD or a postdoc, you are most likely to be a Tech Edge. You could also have worked in a commercial research lab. Maybe you’re a professor.

As a Tech Edge you are obsessed with a particular technology. You are at the cutting edge of your field and are working with the world’s best researchers and academics. You love your academic career, but you’re frustrated by the amount of impact you can have. You want to see what your work can do in the real world.

Why should you use your Tech Edge to develop an idea?

Having a Tech Edge means you have deep expertise in a technology that very few other people do. It’s your unfair advantage compared to other founders.

You may feel in your lab you’re surrounded by academics who know more about this technology than you do. Ask yourself, how many of them are starting startups? You aren’t comparing your technical ability to your lab-mates, you’re comparing it to the rest of the founder population.

At EF, we like investing in startups that take technical risk. This means we want you to build something that’s on the edge of your ability, that’s on the edge of what’s possible.

Some examples:

Zehan graduated from Imperial with a PhD in Medical Imaging Computing. EF helped him to apply the visual processing skills from his PhD to the problem of helping computers to imagine. Twitter acquired his company Magic Pony Technology for a reported $150m just 18 months after it was founded.

Trisha (CTO, immunito.AI) is a specialist in AI and machine learning. Following her Master’s degree in computer science, she worked in industry applying AI and machine learning to real-world problems, such as in logistics and advertisement.

Danesh holds a PhD in Nanophotonics from the National University of Singapore. Before joining EF, he had designed and built photonic systems for A* STAR and Sumitomo Electric Labs. He had also published 10 papers in top photonic journals. He used his Tech Edge to start Transcelestial which is developing a space laser network that will be able to transfer data 1,000 times faster than current wireless technology. Read more here.

Catalyst founders

If you don’t have a technical Edge, you could be a Catalyst founder.

A Catalyst is someone who activates and accelerates their co-founder’s Edge. They have no easily identifiable Edge of their own, but they are highly motivated and have skills that can unlock others’ potential. It’s unlikely they will end up working on one of their own ideas, instead they leverage the expertise of their cofounder.

Catalyst founders have many of the following traits:

Strong communicators
Good at sales
Full stack engineers
High energy
Product management skills

If you are a Catalyst, it’s likely you are a restless polymath who is constantly seeking out new growth curves. You might have been an early employee in a startup, worked in consulting or had a very broad career dipping in and out of different industries and roles. You’re competitive, hard working and ambitious — you just need the right outlet for your potential.

Rob co-founded Magic Pony Technology with Zehan (above). He is a quintessential Catalyst founder. During his Masters in Electrical and Electronics at Imperial College he interned at Raspberry Pi, the startup not-for-profit. He then became their first engineering employee, before going onto do product evangelism for them around the world. Read about Magic Pony here.

Rohit graduated with a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. There he worked on cutting-edge projects like NTU’s Solar Car, a state-of-the-art Healthcare Droid, next-gen multi-touch HCI systems and represented Singapore in international engineering competitions. He then worked for 4 years in RBS’s FX Electronic Markets Team where he received multiple awards in security, low-latency communication systems and highly scalable distributed software systems thus becoming the youngest Associate in company’s Asia-Pacific history. He started Transcelestial applying his own tech and commercial experience to with Danesh’s Tech Edge.

Zeena Qureshi (CEO, Sonantic) had wide ranging experiences prior to joining EF. As a founder she had raised money from renowned investors, but we were even more impressed by her market mindedness and ability to identify opportunities for impact in areas from overseas aid to the energy sector.

What’s next?

Once you understand your Edge, you understand what problems you are best suited to solve. The problems where you have an unfair competitive advantage compared to other founders.

If you’re ready to get going, apply to Entrepreneur First. We support individuals who have outstanding Edges to build their own deep tech startups from scratch.