Power Hour #12 - The Science behind scaling Startup Teams

In this fast-paced, one-hour demo-talk, the aim is to bust the “founder-as-super-hero” myth and show why teams are living systems, not org charts. Through real-world stories and a lightning interactive exercise, the goal is to highlight how informal flows and feedback loops drive growth far more than individual leadership skills. The session will introduce the Ecocycle model to map where your initiatives sit - exploration, growth, maturity, or creative destruction - and reveal the hidden bottlenecks that keep founders stuck in fire-fighting mode.

This Power Hour led by Pedro Portela, Founder of the School of Systems & Complexity, the session packs practical tools to shift decision power from a single hero to a distributed team. If you want to scale without becoming the exhausted fire-chief, join us at UPTEC and take home a fresh, systems-level lens for building resilient, high-impact companies.

Pedro Portela is graduated in mechanical engineering from the Faculty of Engineering of Porto in 2004, where he soon became involved in projects with the European Space Agency (ESA). A few years later, he had the opportunity to co-found the Luso-German company that would produce the thermal insulation that would land on Mars in 2016. For six years he worked as a project manager, systems engineer, human resources manager, manager and, frequently, conflict mediator. After leaving the company, he dedicated himself to studying the behavior of social systems in complex environments. He took a permaculture course and twice visited one of the most radical sustainability schools in the world, Schumacher College in the UK, where he received a certificate in Leadership and Organizational Facilitation in 2016. In January 2023 he completed his certification in Coaching from the International Association of Coaches Therapists and Mentors. He currently works as a consultant for the Humanity United Foundation based in San Francisco, a foundation with philanthropic origins by Pierre Omidyar. Using complexity science and complex network theory, it tries to answer the question: “How can a small group of people, working as a team, change a society?”. The case study is the multi-generational conflict in South Sudan.

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