When Setbacks Become Turning Points: What Founders Teach Us About Scaling

ChangeSchool MD Viren Lall reflects on an afternoon spent listening to entrepreneurs discuss the moments that nearly broke them, and what they reveal about growth, leadership, and reinvention.

Last week, Viren Lall, Managing Director at ChangeSchool London, spent an afternoon at Prince Philip House listening to three founders discuss the moments that nearly broke them. What struck him wasn't the polish of their successes, but their willingness to sit with the uncomfortable truth that scaling requires losing parts of yourself along the way.

The Royal Academy of Engineering's "Scaling Stories: From Setbacks to Scale" event brought together founders, mentors, and ecosystem partners for an honest conversation about what growth actually costs. Moderated by Vineet Nijhawan of Mass Ventures, the panel featured Clare Trant, Eloise Taysom, and Amrit Chandan, three entrepreneurs who have navigated the turbulent waters of scaling deep-tech ventures.

This wasn't another celebration of the entrepreneurial journey. It was something rarer: a sustained examination of the moments when the path forward disappears entirely.

The weight of impossible decisions

The conversation opened with a question about hard decisions, and what emerged wasn't a catalogue of strategic pivots but something more fundamental. These weren't decisions about product direction or market entry. They were decisions about identity, relationships, and what founders are willing to sacrifice.

Clare spoke about the isolation that comes with making choices no one else can make for you. There's a particular loneliness in knowing that the decision is ultimately yours, that advisors and mentors can offer perspectives but cannot shoulder the weight. She described how the pressure compounds when you're responsible not just for your own livelihood but also for your team's.

Amrit reflected on the constant trade-offs between growth and sustainability, between moving fast and building foundations that last. The challenge isn't choosing between right and wrong, but between two rights that cannot coexist. Do you pursue the large contract that will strain your team beyond capacity, or do you grow more slowly and risk losing market momentum? These decisions don't get easier with experience. If anything, the stakes only rise.

Eloise discussed the personal cost of these choices. The relationships that suffer, the health that deteriorates, the sense of self that erodes when you're always in response mode. The founders who succeed aren't necessarily those who make better decisions, but those who find ways to live with the consequences of impossible choices.

Setbacks as involuntary reinvention

The most powerful moment came when the conversation turned to failure. Not the sanitised version we often hear in retrospectives, but the raw experience of being told you're not the right person to lead the company you founded.

One panellist shared the experience of being asked to step down as CEO. The board believed the company needed different leadership for its next phase. The immediate response wasn't acceptance or even anger, but a profound sense of loss. Your identity becomes so intertwined with what you've built that separation feels like amputation.

What followed wasn't a neat arc of redemption but a messy process of reconstruction. The challenge wasn't just finding a new role, but understanding that the skills and instincts that got you to one stage might actively hinder the next. The founder who thrives on chaos and creation may struggle when the organisation needs systems and structure. Recognising this gap isn't failure. It's a different kind of courage.

Another panellist described a product launch that failed spectacularly. Not because of poor execution, but because they had solved the wrong problem. Months of work, significant investment, and the realisation that they had been so focused on what they could build that they had stopped asking what customers actually needed. The setback forced a fundamental reassessment not just of the product, but also of how they gathered feedback, validated assumptions, and knew what they knew.

The pattern across these stories was striking. Setbacks don't just require new strategies; they require new ways of thinking. The founders who emerge stronger aren't those who bounce back quickly, but those who allow the setback to change them.

The questions that linger

During the audience discussion, several themes kept surfacing. Founders wrestle with knowing when persistence becomes stubbornness. How do you distinguish between a challenge that requires more effort and one that signals a fundamental mismatch between your solution and the market? There's no formula. Pattern recognition helps, but even experienced entrepreneurs struggle with this distinction.

Another recurring question centred on asking for help. Founders are selected and celebrated for their self-reliance, yet scaling requires building systems where you are no longer the answer to every problem. The transition from doing to enabling is difficult. It requires acknowledging that others may do things differently, perhaps less well initially, but that this distributed capability is what allows growth.

The conversation also touched on the relationship between personal resilience and organisational culture. A founder's ability to navigate setbacks doesn't just affect their own trajectory; it shapes how the entire team responds to challenge. If leadership treats every setback as catastrophic, that anxiety permeates the organisation. If leadership acknowledges difficulty whilst maintaining purpose, that steadiness becomes cultural.

The panel didn't offer solutions to these tensions. What it offered was something more valuable: recognition that these challenges are inherent to the scaling journey, not aberrations from it.

Beyond the panel: learning through connection

The afternoon included breakout sessions called "Scaling Circles," where smaller groups explored specific challenges. These peer-led discussions created space for the kind of honesty that's difficult in larger settings. Founders shared not just what they had overcome, but what they were still struggling with. The format itself was instructive. Often, the most valuable support isn't advice, but the recognition that others are navigating similar complexities.

The event also marked the graduation of the 2025 Shott Scale Up Accelerator cohort. Watching these entrepreneurs receive their certificates was a reminder that scaling isn't a solitary pursuit. The accelerator model works not because it provides resources, though it does, but because it creates community amongst people facing similar challenges at similar stages.

The Academy's regional reach

Before the panel began, Gillian Gregg, the Academy's Associate Director for Regional Engagement, described the expanding network of regional enterprise hubs. What began as a pilot in Belfast in 2020 has grown to six hubs across the UK, with plans for Southampton and Greater Coventry in the coming year.

These aren't just co-working spaces, though they offer hot desks and meeting rooms. They're access points to a support network of people who have worked with founders and scaling companies. Tech transfer experts, start-up advisors, and most importantly, a community of peers who understand the specific challenges of growing an engineering or deep tech venture. Gillian emphasised the importance of simply dropping in for coffee and conversation. The hub network recognises that resilience isn't built in isolation, but through connection with others who can listen from experience. As hubs expand, they increasingly host collaborative events that bring together research fellows, enterprise awardees, and policy leaders, creating opportunities for cross-pollination across the Academy's wider network.

What this means for executive education

A week on, Viren reflects that what lingers isn't any single insight but the cumulative effect of sustained honesty. The willingness of experienced founders to acknowledge that they still struggle. That growth requires grief for who you were before. That setbacks don't just interrupt progress, they redefine it.

The event succeeded because it resisted the temptation to tidy up the narrative. Scaling isn't a linear progression from challenge to triumph. It's a series of reconstructions, each one requiring that you let go of certainties that once served you well.

For those of us who work with scaling companies, whether as advisors, educators, or programme designers, the lesson is clear. The support that matters most isn't technical expertise, though that has value. It's creating the conditions where founders can acknowledge difficulty without it being interpreted as weakness, where setbacks can be examined without defensiveness, and where the question "am I still the right person for this?" can be asked without triggering a crisis.

The founders on that panel didn't present themselves as having arrived at wisdom. They presented themselves as figuring it out, still making hard choices, still learning from what breaks. That honesty was the most valuable thing in the room.

Beyond the formal programme, Viren valued the opportunity to connect and have new conversations with Ben Holland, Richard Tamblyn, Kathryn Evans, and Valeen Oseh-Ovarah, CSPO. A particular highlight was hearing Keno Mario-Ghae share his journey from Cambridge University to his current role at Hedley Studios.

The afternoon was made possible through the contributions of many people. Thank you to Vineet Nijhawan, Clare Trant PhD FRSA, Eloise Taysom, and Amrit Chandan for curating a brilliant reflective panel. Deep gratitude to Cristina Lisii for the invitation to attend this event. Thanks also to the hosts who created the space for this conversation: Ana Avaliani, Director of Enterprise at the Royal Academy of Engineering, along with Gillian Gregg, Sarah Gummer, and the entire team who made this gathering possible. Most of all, thank you to everyone who attended and contributed to making this an afternoon of genuine reflection rather than performance.

At ChangeSchool, we believe that the most powerful learning happens when we create spaces for authentic dialogue about the realities of leadership and growth. Our programmes are designed to help executives navigate complexity not by offering simple answers, but by building the capacity to sit with difficult questions and emerge stronger from inevitable setbacks.

Viren Lall is Managing Director at ChangeSchool London, a global award-winning executive education organisation that delivers to top accelerators and designs next-generation EMBA programmes.

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