titute (Offshore Research Institute) As an ambassador, this is an experimental project to explore the life of human society at sea, the ultimate goal is to explore human society Organizational form.
In the summer of 2014 at the Founders Fund San Francisco office.
In 2014, I finally got the opportunity to interview the Founders Fund. Although I didn’t get the job, I was prompted at the time, “You can actually make a seed fund from China.” Back in New York, I seriously studied this possibility. At that time, many people in China were very interested in the projects in the startup incubators such as YC, TechStars, and 500Startups. Maybe I can start a micro-fund as a connector.
While studying them, I accidentally discovered a New York investment fund that I think is different: Betaworks.
Betaworks
Region: New York City
Established: 2008
Success Story: Giphy(just acquired by Facebook in 2020), Digg, Bit.ly
Betaworks is a New York “Internet Product Lab + Seed Fund(startup studio + venture fund)” , Driven by the founder’s industry insight + data analysis capabilities.
“BetaThe atmosphere in this Betaworks office space is very good, making me think that all of them are able to make products.
I was impressed by Betaworks founder John Borthwick, who wrote a good article, and later read his annual shareholder letter and his blog, I think this person can foresee what will happen 2 to 3 years later He is an investor with an Internet idealism complex, and guides the company’s operation and investment direction with his rigorous market analysis capabilities and humanistic values. I think the product strategy he believes is: Creating the tools underlying the Internet, and the valuable interaction between people.
Company created and transformed in Betaworks in the past.
Betaworks was one of the first companies to try to combine the “internal creation company” and the “seed fund”. In recent years, they have been evolving this model, launching vertical industry incubators that cooperate with large companies, as well as training camps that look for external projects based on the technical directions that Betaworks Ventures is interested in, and creating for the group of technology creatives. An offline membership club space Betaworks Studios: Club for Builders, through the content to gather talents who can create products.
If you are interested in digging into their core concepts, it is recommended to read John Borthwick’s blog post:
And they were very interested in the “Repair the Internet should look like“, created a public “startup idea” document, hoping to find entrepreneurs to solve these problems:
Expa
Region: Silicon Valley
Established: 2014
Success stories: Uber, Haus
Let’s talk about another cool venture studio: Expa.
Expa’s model can be summarized as: a product design firm + VCPE fund
First a product design company, then a venture capital fund.
When it comes to Expa, we must first mention the founder Garrett Camp, Garrett Camp is a product designer, and later founded the web discovery platform StumbleUpon. Later, the most successful company he hatched was Uber.
Uber’s earliest concept was put forward by Garret Camp. He was inspired by the fact that he saw James Bond’s car with an automatic navigation screen in the 007 movie, and it can be called at any time. Car service as cool as the car. So he exchanged this idea with his friend Travis Kalanick(later co-founder and CEO of Uber), Travis was still preparing Their own entrepreneurial project, so they decided to hire a talent to start Uber. Garrett Camp plans to purchase the car in one step, and hire a fleet to launch an unprecedented “car application”, and Travis Kalanick is more interested in the idea of operating on the Internet model, so everyone knows the later stories, in Under the leadership of Travis, Uber created a taxi software that connects passengers and private car drivers, subverting the taxi industry.
Because when he founded Uber, Garrett Camp was the CEO of StumbleUpon, he convinced Travis Kalanick to become the leader of this company, and after he made this project from 0 to 0.1, he retreated behind the scenes. Later in 2014, Garrett Camp founded Expa, a new company based on the experience of creating Uber. Garrett hopes that Expa will be different from traditional venture capital funds first because he likes to directly participate in the process of creating companies. So he imagined that Expa should be a “A company good at creating companies (company that creates companies)” and hopes that ” Improve products through design and improve people’s quality of life.”
About the logic of the operation of Expa, excerpt a few pictures shared internally by them:
Internal Creation
Strategic Consulting
Foreign Investment
Good investment name
Product Methodology
Because Garret is a designer, the entire company pays great attention to the details of the design, which can be seen from the unity of the style of the company’s logo. In addition, their main partners are all non-U.S. nationals. They started their business in the United States with a work visa, so the companies created by these immigrant entrepreneurs attached great importance to the global market from the beginning.
After Uber, Garret’s main focus was on incubating a startup project that reformed home ownership, Haus, and entered the “real estate + finance” field. Travis Kalanick, after Uber, used his own funds to set up a VC fund 10100(10100 means the process of a startup from 10 to 100 people), firstThe incubating project is CloudKitchens, which has entered the “real estate + catering” industry. In fact, after they have their own disposable funds, they use their accumulated experience and core capabilities to try to open new markets of huge scale, and these markets have not been deeply transformed by the Internet.
Expa and 10100 have not yet hatched new companies on par with Uber, but many people believe that the venture capital system they built has a higher probability of success.
This system is digitally transforming traditional industries + systematically creating company networks.
Science Inc.
Region: Los Angeles
Established: 2011
Success Story: Dollar Shave Club
Another venture studio company that has been successful in recent years is Los Angeles’ Science Inc., and founder Mike Jones was the CEO of Facebook’s former Myspace. Before Mike Jones founded Myspace, he set up a technology consulting company while in college to help customers near Los Angeles develop web pages. At that time, he was a student and made a lot of money. In his words, he opened the first company. It is his business school. Later, after experiencing the ups and downs of Myspace, he wanted to set up a different company, which can continue to create cool companies and help others create cool companies.
So he founded Science Inc. The name is because he thinks that the success of a startup requires excellent timing and great luck, but it is possible to find the equation of success in a scientific way.
Now Science Inc. is more like a Technical consulting company + venture capital incubator. Products focused on three directions:
1. subscription e-commerce subscription/membership e-commerce
2. Marketplaces trading market
3. mobile entertainment Mobile entertainment and content
Science Inc. is best known for incubating Dollar Shave Club(DSC) this subscription-based men’s razor company. The company was acquired by Unilever in 2016 for US$1 billion, and the acquisition of DSC has spawned a wave of new consumer brands in the United States.
Mike Jones has never been involved in retail and consumer product investments before helping to incubate DSC. DSC founder Michael Dubin just finished shooting a promotional video that became viral on Youtube before finding Mike Jones. Any investment. After watching this video, Mike Jones decided to invest because he felt that Michael Dubin would be a marketing wizard. This business model seems to have a great impact on traditional manufacturers.
Science Inc. has been involved in the field of blockchain entrepreneurship projects in the past two years. It has not been very successful. It seems to be a bit off. After the success of Dollar Shave Club, it has not yet hatched a “unicorn” level company. Most of the projects are still done in the form of helping incubation or investment, rather than being created in-house.
But they opened up a new idea for the new venture studio company, which is that the boundary between Internet companies and consumer products companies has become increasingly blurred.pg/interlace/1/q/85″ data-w=”973″ data-h=”730″>
Jack Abraham, founder of Atomic.
Jack Abraham sold his first company, Milo.com, for $75 million to eBay at the age of 24. After working briefly at eBay, Jack Abraham began to make personal angel investments in Silicon Valley. Later he invited three A friend formed a team as founding partners, Andrew Dudum, formerly the co-founder of Ever app, and later as CEO of Hims. He was also a classmate of Jack Abraham while studying at Wharton. Dayton entrepreneurship; Chester Ng, formerly the founder of the app development company SweetLabs, later joined after several companies at Atomic, and played a similar role as chief operating officer; Andrew Salamon, previously invested in hedge fund bridge water, and later at the same time Serves as CEO of sleep monitoring technology company Rested (Hims and Rested are companies that are internally incubated by Atomic).
The establishment of Atomic comes from the thinking of a few founding partners on a question: Is the efficiency of early investment and entrepreneurship getting lower and lower today?
Traditionally creating a startup company, you will first think of an idea, a name, it may take 2 months to register a trademark, and then do user and market research, product development, and wait for the right time. And find a team that supports you until after the product is available and find that no one cares about your product.
If this rate of return and success rate are so low, would you still be willing to invest your own money to become an angel investor and invest your precious time in starting a business? It was time to disassemble and create a new company model.
So they initially accumulated resources patiently. In addition to their own funds, they established contacts with well-known investment institutions and established relationships with partners in the industry. They were familiar with Silicon Valley’s network and potential founders, and analyzed the future ten. It’s a big market worth investing in, research and analyze these industries, and build your own core teamintensive, more meaningful, can scale quicker, have a higher chance of being enduring business. (Create a better entrepreneurial system, which is more efficient and needed Less external capital, more social value, and can be scaled up faster, and eventually become a longer-term sustainable business.)
In an interview, the founders of Atomic mentioned that the reason they designed the company in this way was itself an experiment about innovation, breaking the past innovation system with innovation.
Experiment on your company, experiment on your brand.
I appreciate Atomic’s own company and brand as a person. Today’s people are constantly changing, find their position in the rapid change. They chose to dig deep into the huge market that has not been completely transformed by technology and the Internet, and see the following three huge market opportunities with a long-term perspective:
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How to work in the future (future of work)
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Health consumption and medical care (health and wellness)
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Real estate and housing (real estate and housing)
While investing the most resources is in the market of the big health industry, especially in the post-epidemic era, the importance of health is basically the priority of most people, and this is huge and outdatedIndustry is accelerating change.
On the other hand, this Silicon Valley company founded by Internet people pays more attention to brand culture and creativity(branding culture and creativity) , Because they believe that the cost of creating a company today is getting lower and lower, but it is getting harder and harder to build a brand in a new era, and creativity plays a decisive role in the initial stage of the brand. So when they create a new company, they work closely with the best creative marketing agencies in New York and London to let the most professional people in the industry do what they do best-consumer insights, brand culture shaping, digital communication solutions, Content marketing, offline space, etc. Atomic’s brand creative studios include: Gin Lane and Partners & Spade. (I have written an article about Gin Lane, a creative marketing company, “ To counter the overworked era, these New York-based designers shut down the company and received a $14 million investment》)
Before creating a product, we must create a brand that consumers love very much and are willing to spread.
This company culture is well received by Pixar Animation Studio(Pixar Studio) Henrik Werdelin, the founder of PreHype, who was born and raised in Denmark, has the calm attitude of the Nordic people, but in this large talent pool in New York, he mentioned that he wants to create an interesting space and create with interesting people. Valuable company. If you want to understand the thought system behind this founder, I recommend reading one of his articles on Mediumblog article, introduced how he arranges his busy work every day, and leads his life to become a happier and happier person. The above venture studio companies were all established before 2015, and can be said to be the first generation of companies leading this field. And in the last three or four years, there have been several new venture studio companies that are different, and some of them have already had some influence: Silicon Valley: Obvious Ventures DVx Ventures New York: Human Ventures Juxtapose Redesign Health Innovation Department And in New York City, the home base of the DTC brand, there are more new types of funds, from capital to startupsAre innovating their own business models. New York City’s rich Internet industry talents and creative marketing industry talents provide the most important foundation for new companies. In China, Some successful companies are more and more like a venture studio company, such as the vitality forest in the beverage field and Xiaomi in the field of home appliances. Last time I was in Hangzhou, I also learned that several companies with product capabilities and industry resources are adopting the form of shareholding cooperation incubation to “streamline” to create new companies that provide capital, talents, and core industry resources. Continuing this topic, and introducing several new venture studio companies, I will write another article. The author believes that there will be more and more small and medium-sized companies similar to the studio model in the future, but they can stand and play in a comfortable position in some large-scale industries. More and more people in China are also aware of the meaning of “the whole company is the best product“. This article comes from the WeChat public account:Fan Yang (ID: beingmorehuman), author: Fan Yang