Marcel Botha is an entrepreneur, architect, and investor. He specializes in guiding product development teams from concept to viable product through experimentation with a focus on product acceleration and digital manufacturing. He has put these talents to work by starting and currently leading five different companies. 

One of which is 10XBeta, a product development and engineering firm working in electronics, medical devices and specialized robotics. As the Founder and CEO of 10XBeta, he works to build expert multidisciplinary teams to solve unique, complex problems by leveraging a global network of manufacturing partners that has developed hundreds of products over the last 12 years. 

One of these products – and companies he leads called Spiro Wave – co-created innovative low-cost emergency ventilators at breakneck speed right as Covid-19 was shutting down New York City. 

Spiro Wave Ventilator Project

o Building an emergency ventilator during the peak of Covid-19: compressing 12 to 24 months of work into 30 days @15:04

o What it took to build Spiro and how that created clarity @10:32, 17:42

o Creating a meaningful product under duress and its impact on the team @11:14, 15:04

o When working a hundred hours a week, make sure it's meaningful @9:47, 11:51

Team Wisdom

o The job of a leader is not to make people happy, it’s to offer inspiring challenges @29:36

o As a leader it’s important to keep your team focused on the North Star @15:14

o The dynamics, experience and efficacy of a team is critical @7:35

Being a Leader

o Being empathetic while making tough decisions @22:42

o The importance of one-on-one conversations to being empathetic @26:25

o Understand your risk profile and how it might impact the people around you @34:00

o How being from South Africa influenced his leadership @37:04

o Marcel’s 6-year-old daughter is worth listening to @41:17

On Being an Entrepreneur 

o Balance the euphoria of startup culture - where less than 2% of people are successful - with the discipline of building long-term valuable companies @35:08

o Receiving feedback in a meaningful way is critical to success @35:24

o Marcel’s perspective on leaders dealing with complexity @39:57

o Content and product development is a constant sequential and sometimes parallel, series of failures and experimentation @8:48

o Too much bureaucracy in decision making gets in the way of innovation @13:41

o Leave space for thinking about interpersonal moments, not just KPIs @26:52

o Project selection criteria: meaningful to the world, scalable, will have an impact @12:07

Articles

· New York Times: New York Needed Ventilators. So They Developed One in a Month.

· The New Yorker: The Engineers Taking on the Ventilator Shortage

· Fast Company: How 3 companies joined forces to build the Spiro Wave ventilator in a month

· Worth: 15 Entrepreneurs Who Have Thrived During COVID

To learn more about my work in executive coaching, leadership development and team effectiveness check out my website, connect with me on LinkedIn or email me at winnie@winnifred.org.

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