Venture Studio Index - October 4, 2022
Venture Studio Index - October 4, 2022
Customer development interviews, a new kind of studio-company partnership and five new venture studios
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Venture studio news
High Alpha partners with Twilio to launch Stitch, a consultancy helping marketers integrate Twilio’s products. Twilio provides developer-friendly messaging tools, while companies like Braze build software on top of Twilio to serve business users on marketing teams at large companies. Twilio customers skew earlier stage and pay $10-15K annually on average, while Braze customers skew enterprise and pay ~$215K. Stitch may help Twilio bolster adoption among mid-market and enterprise marketing teams who don’t have the technical resources to build on top of Twilio directly. There’s likely an opportunity for more developer tool companies to partner with studios to launch startups facilitating enterprise business user adoption (press release)
LinkedIn thread on the cashflow pain of the venture studio model, discussing the need to sell a stake in the GP early on (Jeff McDermott on Linkedin)
Interesting job descriptions
Prufrock Labs - Business Athlete
“You’ll dig into the market opportunity, draw up a business case, draft an Amazon style 6-pager. And once your business gets funded you’ll act like a founder for that business as we take it to market and drive scale. You’ll wear hats of product manager, business analyst, business development, market research. And if you put your finger on an idea that you find particularly exciting and you prove yourself to the team, maybe you will even run that business as founder.”
Note: Prufrock Labs is a new venture studio founded by two former Amazon executives
Pioneer Square Labs - Future CEO: Modern Factoring Company
“Minca is a FinTech company with a mission to enable government contractors to thrive by giving them access to affordable capital. Minca will focus its initial offerings on a factoring solution to contractors who fulfill construction work orders for the government, but could later expand its offerings and become a one-stop-shop to give financial and operational solutions to small businesses.”
AI Fund - CEO/Co-Founder: Zest Intelligence
“Zest’s mission is to improve the lives of users by guiding them through incremental lifestyle changes that build healthier habits resulting in natural and sustained weight loss. This is accomplished through evidence-based education, cognitive-behavioral interventions, and building healthier habits through daily guidance and progress tracking. The approach has been shown to shift the user’s mindset, making willpower unnecessary for behavioral change. Zest partners with other health, wellness, and related providers (ex: insurance companies) to distribute their mobile health solutions at scale.”
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Database additions
This week we added 5 additional venture studios and 6 startups to the database, which now totals 368 studios and 1,762 startups.
Submit studios and startups to data@venturestudioindex.com or reply to this email