How to assemble a supergroup: Tips from an entrepreneur whisperer

If your startup needs to put together an entire team from scratch, don’t waste time scrolling on LinkedIn. Call Dave Whelan.

As the managing director at Bespoke Strategy, he helps entrepreneurs build businesses by bringing together the right cadre to accomplish the mission. It’s kind of like Nick Fury rounding up The Avengers, except these teams have real-life heroic impact.

Working at the intersection of technology, health and wellness, Whelan has helped launch organizations like the New York Genome Center, a nonprofit genomics research institute looking for new therapies to treat cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and neuropsychiatric conditions. And he ran BioscienceLA, a nonprofit on a mission to promote innovation in life sciences and healthcare in Los Angeles, from 2020 until earlier this year.

Along the way, he's collaborated with investors, founders, and accelerators and served as an advisor to several healthtech companies. All of those experiences are informing his next big thing: a new international venture strategy for Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health.

It’s a lot to juggle. But if Whelan has his own superpower, it’s navigating complexity. He shares what he’s learned about finding the right mix of talent all while keeping collaborators on the same page with Dropbox DocSend.

Hire the best people

Growing up in a small town in central Pennsylvania, Whelan spent a lot of time studying the strengths of his heroes. But he wasn’t immersed in Marvel comics.

“I was reading books about Silicon Valley,” he says. “In the pre-internet, post-PC revolution era, I was inspired by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Gates.”

Even as a teen, he knew he wanted to work with entrepreneurs. So after high school, he headed west to follow that dream, earning a bachelor’s in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University and an MBA with Honors from the UCLA Anderson School.

As soon as he entered the workforce, he got his first opportunity to build a team as an executive recruiter. There, he started to understand what to look for in a person when you’re building a new team: a mix of complementary skills and the ability to work well with all kinds of collaborators, from coworkers to clients to external partners.

So when the New York Genome Center asked him to help evaluate candidates, Whelan had already learned a key insight: Hire people who are better than you at the job you need them to do. Carrying that ethos forward, he’s become an expert at helping founders build teams that give them the freedom to focus on their mission.

Find the right set of tools

Since he began working as a strategic consultant, Whelan has collaborated with a broad range of clients in aerospace, software, entertainment, and more. But in recent years, he realized that his true passion is healthcare entrepreneurship.

“In many ways, that's the original impact investing,” he says. “When you’re creating a healthcare company, you’re doing it to save and prolong lives. That motivates me because I feel like we’re really making a difference.”

On any given project that can look like being strategy consultant, chief operating officer, CEO, or the de facto head of IT, he says. “I usually know a bit more about technology than whoever is around me, so I end up setting that up.”

But sometimes, his clients are the ones who open the door to a tool that changes the game.

Seven years ago, while working with a startup in fundraising mode, Whelan was looking for secure ways to share and collect feedback on confidential documents.

“We wanted to have the right set of tools to share our investor decks and financials,” he explains. “In the past, I’d either gotten a PowerPoint attachment or a Google presentation. Then somebody sent me a business plan with a DocSend link, and I was like, This is cool. It was super smooth and easy to read through the presentation.”

After that, DocSend became Whelan’s default method for managing confidential documents. It not only provides a secure way to share documents, but also helps keep everything organized and easy-to-manage. What he appreciates most is having the flexibility to update a presentation without having to change the URL.

“The great thing about DocSend is that everyone who encounters it on both sides of the transaction really seems to love it,” Whelan says. “That’s kind of rare with a technology tool. Usually it's good for the sender but not necessarily for the receiver, or vice versa.”

When Whelan joined the BioscienceLA team in 2020, he noticed that communication with board members was being handled through emails with numerous attachments. So he introduced them to DocSend, giving the team a permanent record of board meeting minutes and the ability to track which board members viewed specific documents and when. And his new team at Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health uses DocSend now, too.

“Founders ask me, ‘Do I need to get some tool for data rooms?’ And usually, I'll say, for 95% of what you're doing, you can do it in DocSend.”

Surface future talent

Whelan believes meaningful impact happens when information is shared—whether that’s with employees, investors, board members, or the next generation of STEM and healthtech professionals. In 2021 BioscienceLA launched BioFutures, a program that provides STEM career opportunities and mentorship to college students from historically underrepresented communities.

By subsidizing internships at some of Los Angeles’ leading life-science companies, BioscienceLA hopes to promote diversity, collaboration, and innovation in the field. Interns get career-defining experiences (“Everything that I’m learning is something I would never learn sitting in a classroom,” BioFutures alumna Saira B. says) and companies get access to an untapped talent pool.

To get the program off the ground, they would need something that could allow companies and interns to understand program requirements, submit applications, and read legal documentation.

"There were companies that were charging tens of thousands of dollars potentially for something like this,” Whelan recalls. “And we didn't have the budget for that.”

Instead BiosciencesLA combined tools they already had—DocSend and Airtable—to create an organized landing page. With one link, companies and interns had access to essential intake forms, databases, templates, contracts, tax documents, and more.

“Everyone who looked at it thought that it was super impressive, super professional, and it looked like it was designed exactly for this process,” Whelan says.

It also lightened the organization’s operational lift, functioning as a FAQ page for applicants and streamlining all the content generated by both groups. During its pilot run, BioFutures funded 100+ internships and built a database of 300+ students and 150+ companies looking to work together.

Those numbers are impressive, and get Whelan closer to his ultimate metric.

“I'm still working on changing the world,” he says. “I've definitely changed organizations, changed industries, changed regions—and hopefully the world will come at some point.”