Venture builder researcher | Serial entrepreneur (3 x exit) | Entrepreneurship lecturer | Board member | Consultant
Are you ready for the venture studio revolution? As part of a PhD project I am researching venture studios (venture builders, company builders, start-up studios or start-up factories), which are gaining traction as a worldwide phenomenon as we speak. More than 700 venture studios are launched to date. But I believe we are just witnessing the starting point. One way of describing a venture studio is by its characteristic of initiation new firms, co-founding these new ventures in collaboration with individual entrepreneurs. Another way is to look at venture studios as “expert venture developers” using a core team of specialists automating the process and taking advantage of the synergies and accumulated knowledge on how to create multiple tech firms in parallel. Venture capital firms will need to consider buying agencies to get access to common stock, Incubators have to start acting more of co-founders, Accelerators will have to offer longer term residencies. It all leads to the venture studio model. 💡What is the reason for a venture building revolution you might ask? Because of tech cost. We are now at the tipping point between old and new (see image). Soon, new is the only way forward. Venture studios are the core of producing the new. This will give venture studios a tremendous competitive advantage. 👇 If you are interested in what’s going on in venture studios? Then I wish to draw attention to the comprehensive whitepaper called "Redesigning Entrepreneurship" by Farhad Alessandro Mohammadi, Matthew Burris, and Manuela Maiocco, see comments for link. What are your thoughts on the future of venture studios? #venturebuilders #venturestudios #startupstudios #research _____________________ Did you like this post? Connect or Follow @john-erik hassel
This graphic is a bit wrong, honestly. From a technical perspective, the reason creating new code is cheaper than maintaining old code with current AI technology is because current AI systems have a very limited "context window" -they can only keep a limited amount of data in memory at once (this is what "tokens" are about -essentially the amount of words, characters, etc, kept in memory by the system). That context window is rapidly expanding, and very soon, a typical codebase will be able to be committed to memory all at the same time as part of the input. Once that happens, old codebases will become radically more practical and cheaper to maintain thanks to AI tools that will be able to contextualize new code into an entire codebase by themselves. In fact, at that point, I think there will be a rash of reusing older codebases once it isn't necessary to find those rare programmers who want to learn them.
What about maintenance of code? 90% of time you don’t write new code, but maintain existing solutions. AI is proven to generate unmaintainable code, espesially when things get complex
Thanks for the shout out John-Erik Hassel! As building companies becomes more cost effective and a mature practice, studios will become a normal business creation strategy used everywhere from deep tech to building small businesses. Right now building that company creation engine is a per studio effort with customization needed to align with the specific studio build, support, and follow-on strategy. As these playbooks mature, we may see the development of "no-code & no-build studio playbooks" that deliver powerful efficiencies building on elements from dozens or hundreds of established playbooks.
A question I always have when contemplating how Venture Studios work: What happens when one company drastically outperforms the others? It seems inevitable that an 80/20 outcome would occur. Does the venture studio still allocate equal resources to each company in its portfolio! Maybe in theory. In practice, I believe the venture studio would double down on what’s working, and let the lesser companies wither on the vine. Am I missing something?
we're dubbing our agency-led venture studio as "Venture-Studio-As-A-Service" - it combines both worlds into a business category I do agree “expert venture builders” will become a norm
Thanks for sharing. I believe all VC’s will be replaced by Studios in the next 10 years so spot on!
John-Erik Hassel fully agree we are #701🤓
700? much much more! think we should be in the mid/high 4 digits
It’s the next generation venture asset class, some say, :), more sustainable and strategic approach to design and developing early stage companies from scratch.
Founding Partner at Highline Beta | Author of FocusedChaos.co
1moVenture studios will have to go beyond being "expert venture builders" fairly soon. It won't be enough. Every studio has some version of a system/framework/playbook for validating + building companies. They're all roughly the same, b/c the best practices for how to build ventures are fairly well known. Applying those best practices isn't easy, but it's doable by lots of people. Building isn't the hard part. Building the right thing is. Getting that right thing into enough people's hands is hard (i.e. distribution over product). Funding is hard, b/c money isn't infinite or evenly distributed. Driving exits is hard, b/c venture builders don't necessarily have the right relationships with acquirers. Venture studios HAVE to be expert venture builders, but that's table stakes in the drive to repeatably build good businesses that generate returns.