Venture Studio Index - August 22, 2022
Equity splits vs startup volume, Nike Valiant Labs, 4 EIR roles and 7 more studios
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Venture studio news
Studios that launch more startups tend to take higher equity stakes. Alternatively, those pursuing fewer, higher conviction bets appear wiling to accept lower ownership:
Analysis from John Schnettgoecke from ALGRTHM Venture Studio (LinkedIn)
SuperLayer, a web3 venture studio, raises $25mm. Funding was led by Polygon, a layer 2 scaling solution, which benefits from any startups SuperLayer builds on their network. Good example of strategic LPs for web3 studios (Blockchain News)
Post from a new hire at High Alpha Innovation on why he decided to join the venture studio / corporate co-builder. Good breakdown of venture studio model and HAI’s unfair advantages (Myles Grote)
Expert network interview transcript discussing frustrations of a former EIR at Nike Valiant Labs, the shoe company’s internal incubator:
That was the issue with the EIR as they became frustrated, well, you're just asking me to project manage. You've already decided the way you want to do it, why do you need me? So you get less quality people and less quality ideas if you don't give them the power to do that. Those two elements for me are probably the most important. The EIR program becomes so big that it becomes unwieldy and you start to have too much going on.
That's also a little bit of what Nike did. We have 13 different start-ups going on. The resources got spread instead of actually having fewer. I suppose the key thing is killing things early. Don't let them drift on because otherwise, you're sucking those resources into something that isn't going to go anywhere.
That's, of course, a really hard thing to judge and a part of it is like is the EIR themselves working for you in the right way? Is the startup actually going to have the scale that we want it to have? A lot of the things that we were doing were never going to be billion-dollar things. I think that was a realization of NIKE at $1 billion bets, not $100 million bets.
All this makes the case for external incubations - i.e., venture studios (Tegus)
Redesign Health startup, Lively, benefits from new FDA ruling clearing hearing aids for over-the-counter sale. Their publicly traded competitor, Eargo, jumped 77% on the news that it now plans to sell devices in stores. One reason healthcare is an attractive industry for venture studios is that investments in regulatory expertise and relationships can scale across multiple startups opportunities (WSJ)
Interesting jobs
Anchor - Founding Concept Development Lead
As the founding Concept Development Lead, your role is to both shape our ideation process and to serve as the principal investigator. You will work directly with Anchor’s founders to determine which concepts we focus on and to drive the ultimate investment decisions. You’ll have the opportunity to engage with our expansive network of business leaders, entrepreneurs, investors and trusted domain experts across hospitality, healthcare, banking, real estate, construction, and sports. Ultimately your logic, creativity, and hustle will determine an initial multimillion dollar venture investment and the founding of a new business.
Mach49 - Entrepreneur in Residence
Portfolio T, as a wholly owned subsidiary of Mach49, is the Venture Studio for a global technology and digital company currently operating in stealth mode…the success rate of Mach49 ventures is over 90% because we're driven by our mission and supported by a network of smart, friendly, execution-focused pros….Preferred background from AdTech with deep knowledge on customer "tracking" and targeted "advertising / monetization."… Knowledge of Tokenization of Users' preferences and blockchain is a standout plus
1840 Ventures - Entrepreneur in Residence, Global Travel Concierge Startup
Arcadia Sciences - Entrepreneur in Residence
Submit new venture studio roles to jobs@venurestudioindex.com or reply to this email
Database additions
This week we added 7 additional venture studios and 13 startups to the database, which now totals 346 studios and 1,727 startups.
Note many recently launched studios and startups are still in stealth, so recent years are understated. See data methodology and limitations for more info on the data.
This latest version of the database also reflects updated employee counts, which drove our analysis: The fastest growing venture studio startups.
We continually identify studios and startups from our team of researchers and submissions from the community.
Submit new studios and startups to data@venturestudioindex.com or reply to this email