For Richard Tavernor, “far less patience” as a second-time founder means acting sooner when a decision or assumption appears wrong—not rushing every decision. The CEO of Yoono says his experience at his first company, iVendi, changed how quickly he tackles hiring problems, tests whether a product can travel across borders and weighs growth against the economics of serving customers.
In a first-person opinion article for BusinessCloud, Tavernor describes lessons he carries from iVendi into building Yoono. The page does not display a publication date, and its account is Tavernor’s recollection and advice rather than an independently verified history.
What Tavernor means by having less patience
Tavernor says experience has made him quicker to question assumptions and less willing to wait when something is clearly wrong. He describes the change as “immediacy”: “I think of it less as impatience and more as immediacy.” His point is not that founders should make every choice faster, but that they should recognise visible problems earlier and act on them.
That distinction matters in a young company, where delay can allow a poor role fit, an unworkable market assumption or a fragile plan to consume scarce time and capital. His reflections are personal lessons, not proof that every repeat founder will make better decisions.
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Why hiring decisions need attention early
Tavernor calls people the biggest lesson from his first company. He says he made excellent hires, but also appointments that were not right and took too long to address. In his words, “In an early-stage company, every hire has an outsized impact.”
He does not frame every difficulty as a simple case of replacing someone. The problem may lie in the role, expectations or support rather than the person. His lesson is to investigate a mismatch promptly and understand what is causing it, instead of allowing uncertainty to linger by default.
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Designing for international growth after costly localisation
Tavernor says expanding iVendi from the UK into Europe was difficult because the product needed substantial localisation and customisation. In his account, adapting it for different markets consumed time and capital. That experience shaped his ambition for Yoono: to address an international problem without having to rebuild the core product for every jurisdiction.
The distinction is between a product whose essential design can travel and one that must be extensively adapted market by market. His account does not establish how Yoono performs in different jurisdictions; it explains the product ambition formed by his earlier experience.
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Tavernor says he still favors recurring revenue, regulated markets and problems customers have a clear imperative to solve. He now pays closer attention to the potential value of each customer, too. A large addressable market is not automatically attractive if the economics of serving its customers cannot support sustainable growth.
That shifts the question from “How big is the market?” to whether the business can create value and serve customers on viable terms. It is a founder’s decision lens, not a financial benchmark or a quantified claim about either company.
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Matching technical leadership to the company’s stage
Tavernor argues that technical leadership has to work at more than one level. In a resource-constrained startup, a technical leader may need to get hands-on and help deliver the first product. As the company grows, the job also involves building architecture, teams and standards that can support a larger organisation.
As he puts it, “The person who can create a brilliant first version is not automatically the person who can develop a global organisation.” The implication is to assess whether leadership capability fits the company’s next stage, not only whether someone excelled at its earliest technical challenge.
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Planning for vulnerabilities, not just the upside
Tavernor says founders should consider how incumbents might respond, what happens if a route to market fails, whether access to capital tightens and whether a capability that once differentiated the business becomes commonplace. He recommends understanding dependencies, avoiding unnecessary ones and preserving options where possible.
That is a way to think about exposure alongside growth. A company can have a compelling product idea and still be vulnerable if distribution depends on one route, funding on favorable conditions, or advantage on a capability others can readily acquire.
The questions Tavernor says founders should ask
Tavernor presents these as questions he has learned to recognise earlier, not as a tested or validated framework:
- Is this creating real customer value?
- Can it scale internationally?
- Are we properly funded for the opportunity?
- Can we build distribution faster than others can copy the technology?
- What happens if one of our central assumptions is wrong?
He adds, “And, above all, are we moving quickly enough?” For Tavernor, that final question returns to immediacy: not speed for its own sake, but whether the company is responding promptly to what it can already see.
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