From Academia to Enterprise: Fero Labs’ Framework for Building Credibility
Most founders see their academic background as something to downplay when selling to enterprises. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Fero Labs CEO Berk Birand revealed how they turned their PhD credentials into a strategic advantage with Fortune 500 manufacturers.
The Academic Foundation Initially, academia seemed like the opposite of business success. “By the time I founded Fero, I’d spend six, seven years doing a PhD. I’d done internships along the way, but I just had no idea how a company actually operated,” Berk admitted. “We are doing enterprise b2b sales. I had never done sales before. I never done marketing before.”
The Hidden Connection But they soon discovered unexpected parallels between academic and business success. “A lot of what you do as a grad student, writing papers, applying for grants, is about selling a very technical concept,” Berk explained. “I’m not selling it for money. You’re selling it to be accepted at a conference or a trade show or a publication. But ultimately, the exercise is pretty much the same.”
Building the Framework Fero Labs developed a three-part framework for translating academic expertise into business credibility:
- Technical Depth with Humility “Being very upfront, being very humble since day one, very clear that we don’t know anything about steel,” Berk shared. “Our value add here is not steel production. It’s not chemicals production. What we bring in is the data science part, and you guys are the experts.”
- Explainable Innovation Rather than treating AI as a black box, they made it transparent. “Our software also tells them why these predictions, what recommendations are made,” Berk noted. “And as a result, there was this human in the loop aspect that actually reduced the off chance of something going wrong.”
- Measured Growth They recognized when to bring in business expertise. “There comes a point where it’s time to hire executives that have been doing this for a long time,” Berk explained. “They can bring in that relevant experience in terms of processes, in terms of go to market motions, and they can really do pattern matching.”
The Right Support System Choosing investors who understood technical founders was crucial. “Many of our early stage investors have a focus in terms of working with technical founders,” Berk shared. “They have internal acceleration teams that are very much focused on instructing and teaching and coaching technical founders to pick up the sales and go to market side of things.”
Proving Impact Their approach worked. Today, Fero Labs serves “multinational companies that are 5-10 billion plus in revenue, usually with 50-100 plans worldwide.” At one customer’s steel plant alone, their AI recommendations saved a million pounds of raw materials in a year.
The Future Vision This credibility has positioned them to pursue an ambitious vision: “The industrial sector is very much like an organism, where you have factories that produce one thing in one side and then send it to the other. And I really believe that we can go from optimizing a single factory to optimizing the entire organism using AI.”
For technical founders transitioning to enterprise sales, Fero Labs’ experience offers valuable lessons. Academic expertise can build credibility if you:
- Recognize the parallels between academic and business communication
- Lead with humility while being clear about your unique value
- Make complex technology accessible and trustworthy
- Know when to bring in experienced business leaders
The key is viewing your academic background not as a liability, but as a foundation for building trust with enterprise customers. As manufacturing evolves, this combination of deep technical expertise and business acumen will become increasingly valuable.
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