A couple of weeks ago, our CEO Elliott Parker joined Ben Yoskovitz (Founding Partner, Highline Beta) and Stefan Peintner (CEO & Managing Partner, WhatAVenture) for a lively Innov8rs webinar exploring the evolution of the venture studio model—specifically, the growing momentum behind vertical venture studios. Moderated by Tommy Knoll at Innov8rs, the conversation unpacked how focusing on specific industries or problem spaces is changing the game for corporate innovation and venture building.

What is a Vertical Venture Studio?

The panel kicked off by defining what “vertical” really means in the context of venture studios. Rather than casting a wide net across broad sectors like “insurance” or “health,” vertical studios go deep into tightly defined niches—think “energy transition” instead of just “energy”. This focus allows studios to build repeatable playbooks, leverage networks, and compound knowledge in ways that generalist models can’t match.

Why Go Vertical? Key Takeaways

• Faster, Cheaper, Smarter Experimentation
  Elliott shared that the move to vertical studios was driven by a need to run more experiments, faster and at lower cost. By concentrating resources and expertise in one area, studios can launch more ventures, learn quickly, and increase the odds of finding those rare, high-impact winners.
• Strategic Relevance for Corporates
  Stefan highlighted a challenge many corporate venture builders face: spreading themselves too thin and losing executive buy-in. By focusing on verticals that are strategically relevant, corporates can ensure new ventures align with core business priorities and justify continued investment—even in uncertain times.
• Compounding Knowledge and Networks
  Ben and Elliott both emphasized how vertical focus helps studios build deep networks with entrepreneurs, investors, and domain experts. Over time, this leads to smarter bets and more valuable portfolios. Elliott cited our work in agtech with Purdue University as an example—after launching a dozen companies in the space, the team developed a nuanced understanding of the market and built relationships with key players, creating a flywheel effect for future ventures.

The New Studio Model: Lean, Focused, and Collaborative

All three panelists agreed that the future of venture building lies in lean, focused teams supported by shared platform resources. Ryan Larcom on our team also recently wrote about this as a key takeaway from the Global Takeoff Summit in May. Instead of building large, expensive studios from scratch, the new model uses a “hub and spoke” approach: a central team provides core support (product, legal, recruiting, fundraising), while small, nimble teams go deep in each vertical. This enables more experiments at lower cost, increasing the chance of success.

As Elliott put it:

“The best strategy for revealing the future is to run as many experiments as you can, as cheaply as possible.”

Vertical venture studios offer a compelling path for corporates and venture builders to do just that—combining focus, speed, and strategic alignment to unlock new growth.

Watch the full webinar and access the transcript below to dive deeper into the discussion:

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Vertical Venture Studio

Webinar Transcript

Tommy Knoll: [00:00:00] as Melanie mentioned, we're now gonna move into, a vertical venture building, with Stefan, Ben, and, and Elliot. I'm not gonna steal their thunder and go into this, but, there is an, I believe an emerging, oh. An evolution of the, Venture Studio model as it relates to, to corporates.

And, to kick off, I would love to just have our panelists, introduce yourself, just tell us a little bit about your organization and, and then describe how vertical venture building is being deployed in your organization. What does it look like? and, and really what is it? So I'm gonna, I'm gonna start with Ben.

If you wouldn't mind. And, then, Elliot and Stefan. Ben, would you mind, kicking us off here? Thank you. Sure.

Ben Yoskovitz: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Tommy. [00:01:00] Nice to see everybody. founding partner of Highline Beta. So we're a, venture studio and venture capital fund. So in the business of building and funding new businesses, often we're doing that with corporate partners, or family offices.

historically we have a. 22 companies in the portfolio. Historically, we've worked across a number of different industries and verticals, insurance, financial services, a bit in the sustainability and logistics space. but of late, we've been really doubling down on this notion of vertical venture studio, which is really about, going very narrow and we can talk about what that means, but very narrow into a specific.

industry or vertical, so much deeper than, let's say just insurance or health. Those are not actually verticals, they're just too broad, so that you can get leverage. venture by venture, so every company you build. Target's the same customer, the same go-to market, the same business [00:02:00] model, eliminating variables, making the playbooks that you're running even more effective as you build more, businesses.

And, to me, if a Venture Studio's job is repeatedly building and funding successful companies faster, let's say, than they could do on their own, then focusing on a vertical is a great way to do it.

Tommy Knoll: That's great. Thanks. Thanks, Ben. Appreciate that. Stefan, I'm gonna hand it over to you. a little bit about yourself and your organization, your role, and, what is vertical venture building look like, in your world?

Stefan Peintner: Yeah. happy To, to start a discussion here, but first, so what a venture. we are a consultancy, mainly focusing on new business. the thing that drives me personally is the question, about how to systematically generate new business as a corporate. our core belief is that corporates need to, [00:03:00] generate new revenue streams, over time, to stay relevant, to protect from disruption.

And the thing that we strive to do is to, we call it, to crack serial entrepreneurship. and we say we strive to because it's something, that we probably never achieve, but we want to get as close to it as possible. And I think it has a couple of components to it. It is having the right team, it's having the right mindset.

But then also having some methodologies and tools to it to systematically being able to do. And our North Star KPI is to build investible new business. And so far with the corporate partners that we have built new businesses with, we have managed to achieve more than 700 million of investments into those projects that we have launched together with them.

And, yeah, and continue to do Now when I was confronted with the topic of vertical venture building, I had to also [00:04:00] think of what does it actually mean? Yeah. And then I made my own, definition, of it, and I'm happy then to discuss it. but the role to getting there is that currently, venture building units at corporates typically, have quite a broad spectrum of topics that they work on.

and, many, especially in the central European area over the last years have struggled to. continue to get top management buy-in and so on, because they realize that some of the ventures that they have been building and then require investments on, are maybe too far from the core. they're not strategically relevant and now in the uncertain times, the budgets are not there to just finance any idea.

So it is more about having funding, strategic relevant ideas. And, therefore I start to differentiate between kind of what is venture [00:05:00] building in a corporate. So building up new business units, building things that are relevant, also for the future p and l for a company. so really strategic, relevant topics that you need to take high risk, but also high investments.

And then all those topics that are important for you and for your industry that you. Want to, have an eye on and want to develop, and I think Simon said it before quite well, is that his role is to generate options. And, there I see this more studio approach, becoming more relevant over the next years, where potentially also share, the risk between multiple corporates.

But you focus on getting one specific vertical that is not just. Insurance, as a broad topic, but very specifically, saying how is the energy transition for multifamily homes going to happen? And then we will build up a team and be very [00:06:00] vertical on that specific topic, generating know-hows generating network over time to be really, yeah, on point, on topic and in the network for this very specific investment hypothesis.

Tommy Knoll: That's good. Thanks fo focus, strategic relevance, and good themes. Elliot, I wanna hand it over to you as well. So a little bit about yourself and Alloy and, what does vertical venture building look like in your world?

Elliott Parker: Great. good to be here. Thanks for having me on. I'm Elliot Parker. I'm the CEO of Alloy Partners till recently known as High Off Innovation.

We rebranded a couple of months ago. we are a venture builder. Our thesis is that we can build really compelling and amazing startups by doing that in partnership with corporations. And when we do that with corporations, it helps corporations see around corners, and unlock the future. it changes the story that the market tells about those corporations, and it [00:07:00] helps innovation teams achieve tangible innovation, build lasting legacies very quickly and relatively inexpensively.

we've been doing this for. Five years exclusively with corporations. we've been doing it for 10 years, in our original venture studio. Over the last 10 years, we've launched about 80 companies. We've invested, somewhere around $600 million into a hundred plus startups. In the last five years, we've built about three dozen companies with corporations.

a half dozen venture studios as well in partnership with others. And so for us, vertical, venture building is not a new topic. I, think that the, twist, what's new is you're seeing venture builders, venture studios launch, portfolios of venture studios. Now it's getting very meta. So we've, as I mentioned, we've launched half a dozen venture studios in the past.

Focused on topics like, CPG and retail and Ag Tech and digital healthcare. We'll [00:08:00] launch another two or three studios this year, on specific industry topics like that. The benefit is that it enables you to go really deep, to build really strong networks among prospective entrepreneurs you wanna bring in to run these businesses, strong networks among the, investors who care about that space.

And among the, for us, among the corporations that are interested. An example of this is we built a studio a few years ago with Purdue University and a consortium of companies in the Ag Tech space. Before that I, I didn't really know anything about Ag Tech. We, went and, with this consortium, companies in the university, launched a dozen companies in the ag tech space in, within a, few years, and built what I think is probably the most valuable pre-seed ag tech portfolio in the country from scratch.

Now we know all the early stage investors in that space, at least most of them, and have a, [00:09:00] pretty good sense of where the opportunity exists. So you can, it kind of knowledge compounds, right? And if you can, go deep in a space like that, that the knowledge compounds, you get smarter and better.

your networks and connections get better and the ability to create and capture value gets stronger as well.

Tommy Knoll: So Elliot, it sounds like you're, you've been, you've been in this vertical space for, for a little while. What was, and I think we touched on it, but I wanna highlight and double click and go a little bit deeper into the why of, the vertical.

So what were some of the signals that you saw when making this transition into a, whether we call it, a vertical or a more focused. studio effort, into an, a specific area. And I have some follow up questions, but what were the, signals you were seeing with, either in just the general, a studio ecosystem or specifically with your partners that, brought on or was the impetus

Elliott Parker: for this [00:10:00] pivot?

The impetus is probably, more experiments faster and cheaper. if you think about, if you're a company and you're facing an unknown future, the best strategy for revealing what that future is to go run as many experiments as you can at the lowest possible cost per experiment. Launching a single venture is hard.

and your assumed value of that single venture is zero. Most startups, most new ventures fail. The way you win is by pursuing a portfolio of new ventures. you do enough of these mathematically, you're bound to trip into some, power law asset class. You're gonna find some that pay off for the whole thing.

And so you need to do a lot and you wanna do that each one as inexpensively and quickly as possible. a studio focused on that, on a specific topic is a good, efficient way to do that. And what we've learned over time too is that. By having a kind of a bunch of [00:11:00] satellite studios, we can run these studios really, efficiently.

If you're gonna launch a single venture studio from scratch as a corporation, for example, you're, I'll, tell you the story. When we, when High Alpha first started 10 years ago, we thought we could build companies. Maybe it's gonna take a dozen people. a certain amount of assumptions around funding, very quickly realized, oh, wow, it takes more people than we thought.

And the team ramped up and scaled, and it became very expensive to build these companies. So building a venture studio from scratch is really hard. In our model with satellite studios, we've got a core team that does all the support stuff for our new companies. product design lawyers, finance team recruiters, sales lead gen help, fundraising, help, whatever they need.

and then in these core studios, we can operate them extremely leanly, where you've got just a maybe three or four people at most full-time who can go really deep, understand that space. Again, own the network, own the ideas. [00:12:00] Be generating those things, those ideas for new ventures, launching those new ventures, and then pulling in from the central team when needed.

And as a result, you don't have to have all that capacity sitting around in the studio. You can run and launch more experience, more experiments at a lower cost. And we found that to be a good effective approach at, launching a lot of companies. a high cadence, at relatively low cost per company launch, which is the way you win when you're doing this.

Tommy Knoll: Yeah. Thanks for

Elliott Parker: that,

Tommy Knoll: Ben. Any thoughts on that? the, it seems like your focus, this change is perhaps a bit more recent, and correct me if I'm wrong, but what were, what were some of the, things, the signals, inside your organization, across your entrepreneur network with your corporates that kinda led you to, to become a little bit more focused and, go deeper into a specific space?

Like what were you seeing there that made you make the change?

Ben Yoskovitz: I think it's, an, evolution of sorts and I [00:13:00] think we're, structured, somewhat similarly to what, Elliot's describing, right? So there's a, we think of it like a platform or a HoldCo of sorts. and then we're building, these vertical venture studios.

Again, different partners for us. Sometimes it's corporate, sometimes it's family offices, it can be other, there can be other partners for us, again, they're bringing in many cases, or all cases, the domain expertise. and we're bringing the systems and the ways of working, and there's a platform team that delivers most of the work.

So each of those vertical studios, again, similar structure, a lean operation of, folks that are. Are there that unlock the domain expertise and the access again, to, to me it's about just getting better and better and more efficient at building companies. And, if you're gonna build companies in a narrow space, you're gonna get better at building companies in that narrow space.

So it's just a logical [00:14:00] extension of how do we just get better and better at doing this kind of work, and delivering more value. So can we do it? more cheaply. Can we do it faster? Can we get these things to scale? Can we invalidate more quickly? Also, so that the, all the mistakes, they're not mistakes 'cause you're learning from them, but you do them faster.

So to me it's just, I. Fine tuning the machinery of building businesses and having a vertical focus, of some kind helps. Now, you can define that in a lot of ways, and that's what makes a vertical interesting. It can, how narrow do you go? How broad do you go? But ultimately it should make the whole process of building a portfolio better.

Tommy Knoll: And Stefan, any in insights from your side on the signals you were seeing from, either inside your organization or across your network that kind of had you focus, a little bit more specifically on, on certain areas? [00:15:00]

Stefan Peintner: Yeah, go deeper. On example that I shared before, that's, when corporates build their own venture building team, and they have a quite typically, quite a broad set of topics they would work on.

They have several investment hypothesis. It's either their whole industry as a topic or digital opportunities within energy. And it's, super broad. And then they start working on, individual, problem fields and, look for solutions. And what, typically happens is that, they start and working on a solution.

They, fall in love with a solution, take it forward, might invalidate some or then start investing into building up a team on it, and that's it. So then they have this one solution in an opportunity area that would enable. 10 solutions at least, or 20 or more. And they have built up a lot of [00:16:00] knowledge on this one solution.

And then typically, especially if something fails and a lot of things fail. Then it's oh, okay, now we already touched this topic. It didn't work. And, so then instead of going back and saying, Hey, what are the other 10 opportunities within this, vertical, they just stop and take on different, investment assumption, or take on a different, vertical.

So this were, I, see the problem with a lot of. Knowledge and network that is being built up is actually just not used. And, for us in some settings as a service provider, it's a pity because we don't, convince them, saying, Hey, those are other five opportunities that you should, work on in this field.

and then they just, don't, because, the s topic is burned or we don't see the opportunity anymore. And, I do believe that, this, shift towards this more vertical model, is gonna be a big [00:17:00] help, for many corporates to generate not just one option, but to generate multiple options.

I. And if you do this in a studio approach and potentially do that in a approach where you include many, play multiple players from your, value chain into it, you come out with a set of options that you can or ar invested in with, initial share, but then, or have opportunity to continue investing in or buy back and, have suddenly a lot of options, on the table for effective.

Ineffective, deployment of capital. So it's it might be in general, it costs money, but it's cheap compared to the many options that you get.

Tommy Knoll: Sure. So you've set the table a little bit. Are we warmed up? Am I getting warmed up a little bit here? so thanks for that. great insights across, your, different, [00:18:00] studios and your different efforts.

clearly there's an interest in going deep and focusing on a single area. So let's double click into the studio, right? Let's go into the studio. how it's structured, what does that look like, Elliot, I know you touched on it, briefly in terms of the relation as well as you've been between the studio and let's say the HoldCo or the, or the primary, primary, studio.

and I also wanna talk a little bit about the dynamic. Between the studio and the corporate as well, and that relationship. And, Simon, I see your, question here. So I'm definitely gonna, go into that a little bit more. Elliot, you spoke briefly about this, this, these small teams, right?

Lots of experiments. The small team, a support system of some sort, organized around them maybe with some complimentary or overlapping functions. Can you talk a [00:19:00] little bit more, about what that looks like? And, I'm also curious at the same time to, to hear from you all as we go into this.

About the expertise that's gonna be needed in a specific area. So let's, let's do that as well. But, Elliot, I'm gonna just turn it over to you, give us a little insight into the, team that you set up. What does that look like? What's the relationship between, that's small studio team and your own structure and, then also the relationship with the corporate.

So that's the space I want to focus on now.

Elliott Parker: Yeah. Okay. So each of the studios is, a little bit different depending on the, nature of the focus. there's some things that they all have in common, but there's some variance. for example, our studio focused on launching CPG brands looks very different than our studio focused on launching digital technologies and banking.

you don't need, you don't need an [00:20:00] engineer in the CPG brand studio, and you probably do in the digital and the banking. So the teams can differ, but at the core, you, need one person who's overseeing the whole thing and who's incentivized, around the success of the studio and the ventures that come out of it.

Usually that person's a, an entrepreneur with a lot of experience who can speak with credibility to the entrepreneurs who are coming into running the businesses, coming out of the studio. that's a person who is creative and curious by nature, who's generating ideas, but who also has that business sense to be able to know when an idea's good, when an idea's bad, and that kind of operational execution ability to pounce on kind of the random ideas that occasionally pop in through a studio too, that would be able to see those opportunities and run with them, and then surrounding that person.

Generally you need somebody who's in the, doing the research, evaluating ideas, doing the market validation as you're, going through the process [00:21:00] of, testing ideas, and then you need some type of person, who's cultivating maybe, the network, the events, the marketing, the, pulling together the community that you need around a studio for that to succeed.

And then for us, everything else, can be done centrally. those are the core. Again, you might have some specific, you might have a CTO on staff in the studio, or you might have someone who's good at managing a portfolio brands, or you might on and on. It's specific. But within our core venture building team at Alloy, we then have lawyers, finance people, recruiting, sales, lead gen support, CEO coaches, outside mentors, board members that we recruit.

fundraising support our network of tier one VCs who come in and co-invest alongside corporations. In this, the whole thing, everything that we've learned over the last decade, these, young businesses need to succeed and to succeed and to scale [00:22:00] quickly, at least have the best chance possible doing.

the role of the corporation in all of this, again, it depends. If it's a studio that's built with a consortium of companies, that relationship is different than if it's a studio that's built exclusively with a corporation as a partner. And some corporations, want this to be, it's, more hands off.

they're busy running the core business. they're building internal things. This is viewed as a, a call option on the future. a lottery ticket. Let's go launch a bunch of businesses in, in, a couple years. See what happens. go do it for us. And we're gonna be involved, we're gonna be on the boards of the companies, of the corporation.

We're gonna have a say in what gets built and what doesn't. But beyond that, no day-to-day kind of involvement in the studio. On the other extreme, there are corporations that say we wanna learn the process because a lot of what you're doing in the studio, we can apply at our internal innovation team and maybe even across the business.

And we'd like to plan a couple of people on [00:23:00] that team. and that's great too. have those people involved full time? I. Our studio model. Our goal again, the way you win is you wanna launch as many new ventures as you can, the lowest possible launch cost per venture. And we've skied it down to a model where we can launch 10 companies in two years for a total investment of about $13 million, 3 million funds.

That studio team for two and a half years. And beyond, frankly, as you continue to support the companies. And then 10 million or so goes, it goes on the balance sheet of, of 10 companies. There's some assumptions embedded in that, that's where you're, building software companies, for example.

But, again, instant portfolio, instant and two years anyway, the biggest. A challenge, we've gotten to that with corporations is 10 companies in two years is a lot. Can we do fewer companies be able to manage that? And that's of course we can launch fewer companies. our preference is always to do more because again, you need to [00:24:00] run a lot of experiments to see, you don't know ahead of time which ones are gonna work.

Tommy Knoll: Sure. Yeah. And just to, develop a bit of a visual. Some of the folks may or may know, but you have the studio that's focused on, a certain vertical, right? A certain area. It's called, maybe a thesis studio. what do you call? just, what do you call the team around?

That studio or all your studios, I think we've heard it as a whole company or like those support functions that you talk about, the CTO, maybe the sales and marketing, like just how do you refer to that support team that's maybe supports a single studio or all the studios that you're, managing?

Elliott Parker: Yeah, we use exactly that language. We call it our, support team or our central team.

Tommy Knoll: Okay. Central team. Okay. Just so people know where we're talking about it, there's a, distinction between the two. Stefano, I want to go over to you now on this one and then get to you, Ben. we'd just love to hear a little bit more about how, your studio is [00:25:00] structured in comparison to that support organization.

And then also that dynamic between, either your corporate partner or partners.

Stefan Peintner: So most of the projects that we, do today are, project specific. so we, are the venture builder, the studio that the corporate works with, and, typically our clients come to us with a specific, topic saying, Hey, this came out of our funnel, or our strategic decisions, or whatever other, yeah. Exploration, funnel that they have and, hey, let's build this together. and then it's typically a quite a vague solution, in a problem field. And, how we are set up is that we have those, support functions or platform team, in our organization. Then deploy a specific team that then runs the [00:26:00] validation and experiments for a specific topic at hand.

we, then typically, so we believe in, so our little specific, this way, what you get is a team that, is. That knows each other very well. There is a functional team that can, work from day one. so there's no friction in terms of how you work, how do you cause certain things? but they work from day one.

There's a clear framework on how they collaborate that a specific language that everybody uses. Everybody knows and understands what's meant in this innovation jungle, with the different, terms that are running around. So they're very effective and efficient from day one. And then we support those teams typically, as close to product, market fit, or at least close to gaining traction, as possible.

and then search for the [00:27:00] co-founders, at the moment where it becomes very clear which type of profile is really needed, to make this business model, actually work. So we have made some bad experiences in the past with going to early for a external co-founder Yeah. Realizing that then you might not get the top profiles, but when you don't have enough traction to show yet.

Then the topic is not that interested for the really good profiles that are out there. and so we typically, support the validation and the first building phase, up to a point where you have a very clear understanding of what is the profile that you really need and then really go and, higher on a profile that has scaled before, on the specific topic that knows the market, that knows the potential clients, and so on.

Then at the later stage. I'm very curious to, to have that discussion because, [00:28:00] a lot of studios hire very early, entrepreneurs and co-founders. so I'm very curious, Elliot and Benjamin, what your thoughts on this topic are.

Tommy Knoll: Yeah. Ben, what does that look like on, on your end? The structure of the relationship to the whole co how you build these teams, relationship with the corporates.

I want to, I wanna, we'll come back around and actually talk a little bit about more of the dynamic with the corporates, but just love to hear your perspective on this as well.

Ben Yoskovitz: Yeah, I, would say that we build venture studios with corporates or family offices in, two ways. One is we're going to, launch those venture studios as subsidiaries of Highline Beta Inc.

so Highline Beta Inc. Is the. Plat, we call it a platform business or platform team. and we say, okay, we're gonna launch. for example, we just launched a venture studio in the dental tech space. so it's a subsidiary of Highline Beta, Inc. With a partner. And then we're gonna go build [00:29:00] businesses, probably a couple of businesses a year in dental tech for a few years, portfolio.

So a little bit slower, speed, but that's the model. That's one model where it's a subsidiary of Highline Beta, Inc. partner comes in and we're co building those ventures together. The other. Is where, the partner is taking maybe a more active role. So it's not like a, like if you look at our vertical studios, sometimes they're called Highline, beta Dental Tech or Highline Beta Ethereum.

And that's very clearly us leading the studio, bringing partners to the table with us to go build ventures. in other cases where the corporate is taking a more active role in it, maybe it's their brand or they want to create a new brand around it. For themselves. and so there's, similar to what Elliot's describing around, some folks wanna be really in the weeds co building with us.

They want us to help level up their people on how to do this kind of work. Sometimes it's more of a, [00:30:00] call it a side bet, a couple of companies a year. So different structures. the work is always the same, in terms of. What kind of people are we putting into those studios? It is, I like, I'm a founder myself of software companies.

That's what we do. So I'm always thinking design dev product, go to market is like the. The four things you need. It doesn't have to be four people, but it's the four sort of things that you need. we'll usually put a managing director into each of the vertical studios. They're the operator of the studio.

And then the bulk of the team, again, becomes the platform team on our side, which, covers those bases along with, call it operational support, be it, finance, accounting, recruiting, the sort of. The basic stuff that you need. And then, I would say we would also second people from the platform team into the vertical studios to go deep.

Elliot mentioned user research, so Okay, great. let's take the [00:31:00] user research person, for example, put them into the dental tech or the, because we have to go deep for months, not just do that on a, project basis.

Tommy Knoll: Yeah. That's great. The great segue into kind of where I wanna go next, which is like this, Like a specific area of expertise, right? We're getting a much more, you're all getting narrow into a specific, a domain, right? Either an industry or vertical, however we want to talk about it. But, there's a lot there. There's a lot there to learn, right? There's a lot there to learn in terms of network industry, expect, industry expertise, what are the dynamics in that space, how are the customer's behavior, et cetera, et cetera.

So I'm just curious how. What does that look like? Going deep into a space where, you're fundamentally, let's say you get, you're all great at building ventures and structuring them and like the fundamentals of going from zero to one and scaling. you're great at that, but you're stepping into a new space [00:32:00] where you might not have that depth of experience, right?

There might be opportunities where you have to start from scratch. and Elliot, I'll hand it over to you like, I imagine there's some, expertise, you're just gonna hire, there's some research you're gonna, you're gonna have to do. But can you talk a little bit more about that journey from going from, Hey, here's a new partner, they want us to go develop, ventures and these, this new very specific space, this, niche.

what does it look like to scale up your knowledge? And your network, relatively quickly, I would imagine it's gonna have to happen between what, 3, 6, 9 months? what does that journey look like going from zero knowledge, zero network, like that to, being able to actually launch a venture and having some, confidence that it's gonna, that it's gonna go somewhere.

What, does that look like that learning journey go look like?

Elliott Parker: Yeah, such a good [00:33:00] question. It's hard. That's not easy. you need really smart, capable people who can do that. I'll give you an example of this. We're looking at launching a studio sometime this year with a family office focused on care for the aging.

I don't know anything about the business of care for the aging. we will, a year from now, we'll know a whole lot, but right now I don't. and so we rely a lot on our partners in that space and their expertise, initially. so you think about the different types of knowledge that you need to succeed in a space like this.

Building ventures, you need an understanding of the problems or opportunities in the space, the trends and where things are going. That's where our corporate partners or other partners play a big role initially in helping us understand the space and the opportunities and challenges as they see them.

I will tell you though, because we are building ventures across industries, we see unique opportunities too. When we come in and ask lots of dumb questions about [00:34:00] an industry. this looks like a thing we saw over in. Sports tech and what if we did this thing in this industry? Would that work? And we can ask, the kind of those unusual questions that spark, unlock anomalies and surprises and new ways of thinking about things.

The next kind of piece of knowledge you need is the knowledge of the, it is networks, experts for validation, customers for these new ventures for validation that you can reach out to. And, we found that it is, it's amazing how many people will pick up a call or pick up a phone if you reach out to them and say, Hey, we're building a startup.

In your space and, what are you doing? what opportunity are you seeing that I'm not missing? And they wanna lean in and know and help. And, it's amazing how, easy it is to activate, experts that way. And then finally we think about the networks of investors and [00:35:00] helpers who jump into these companies once they get going.

And, that's where, our team is, pretty good at, understanding what motivates and incentivizes different people and how to get those networks built up. So it takes a bit, but as I mentioned, we did, one in Ag Tech. It's a great example for us to where, We're in deep relationships with every early stage ag investor in the country.

Now because of that effort, we've, people know what we've done. We can, pick up the phone and call people in the ag industry and they'll recognize the name of our studio and know some of the companies we've started and that helps us. enter that conversation with some credibility.

So it's hard work, it's difficult to do, but it's totally doable. And, within six to 12 months you can be up and running as absolute experts in this space, I believe.

Stefan Peintner: Okay, maybe just to comment, it is so often go right ahead. Comments from our corporate partners [00:36:00] after, I dunno, three months or six months in, it was like, Stefan, by now you're more expert than our experts.

Because you are them very deep in one vertical, in one topic, and you take it all apart and and, then you are able to not just look at it from a maybe very specific tech angle, but bringing in religious entrepreneurial view and looking at all those different effects that, impact new business model.

And, few months in, you are really an expert in the sector.

Tommy Knoll: Gotta imagine the growth mind, the, beginner's mindset in, these instances is a major asset, right? asking the silly questions as you said, Ben. Ben, what does that journey look like? for you guys going deep into a, in, into an area and building your network of knowledge.

Ben Yoskovitz: It's, very similar. I, think, I've, I started my first company in 1996, so it's been a while, [00:37:00] in a whole host of different, I've worked at a whole host of different industries, but never specialized in any one thing where I said, okay, the next 20 years of my life, I want to dedicate to banking, or whatever the case may be.

So I tend to think of us as being a little bit dangerous in a lot of things. and I think the Elliot's. Point around le leveraging experience and knowledge from other things is valuable. And then you get up to speed with fresh perspective without the baggage that comes from being in a space for a very long time, which is just inevitable.

or the PTSD, I started a company in the recruitment space in 2010. no, 2007. then there was like a, mortgage crisis, in 2008. It was a terrible time to start a company in recruitment. I still have, stress when people come to me and pitch me HR tech stuff. But a little bit dangerous.

And so I think of corporates often that way as well. Like they're the [00:38:00] domain experts, they understand it, but they're stuck a little bit in the way that their company operates. And that's understandable. and so sometimes we can break them out of that through the structure of a studio, which I think is an interesting way to get to.

Knowledge. So it's, build the network, it's build the knowledge up, come with fresh perspective, and new ideas. And I think tho that combination of things becomes really interesting. And then the third, element is if you're spinning these companies out, it's the founder. And the founders that you recruit into this, are they domain experts?

Are they not domain experts? And you can argue both are valuable. but that's like the third dimension of, knowledge and experience that comes to the table when you're doing a corporate venture and spinning it out. and again, there's pros and cons. Sometimes you go with a domain expert and again, they have that kind of, you just can't do it this way 'cause it's always been done a certain way.

And you're like, I think we can do it a different way. [00:39:00] Respecting how things operate, or you bring somebody in fresh who doesn't understand the space, who also then has to be caught up and brought up to speed. But now you have the infrastructure in that vertical studio to support it. So you can go both ways on that.

but they're the third person that has to also understand what the heck's going on.

Tommy Knoll: I think Peter's describing us as super learners. You guys are super learners. You do it fast, a lot there. I know we're a little tight on time, but I do wanna just open it up to, To some questions. If anybody wants to, to chime in and, and come on Mike, or come on camera or drop a, question in the chat, I'd love to take it.

but really quickly, as we see if there's any traffic on that front. So just, quick, I'll just throw this out to anybody. Simon, was chiming in about this relationship between, yourself and the corporate, right? there's this relationship you have and it's unique. what does, the [00:40:00] evolution of that relationship look like?

over time. how does the dynamic change? What does that look like? what's the time horizon for that? is it like short term you guys are co-investing? What's the time horizon on that relationship too? Just real quick, what's the, dynamic on, on those relationships And anybody, just open question for either one of you.

Ben Yoskovitz: Yeah, it for on our side, it varies to be honest with you, because we've, helped some companies build, I'm gonna say their own venture studios, where you're in there for a period of time helping them get it up and running, helping them design the studio, helping them bring the right people in, put the systems in place, and then taking more of a coaching.

Board sort of role, where you're less, you're very active at the beginning and then less active a year or two later. that's one model. the other one is where you're, leading it the whole time, and so that could be multiple corporates [00:41:00] involved or corporates that are involved, but not involved in the day-to-day operations.

And then it's your. It's your thing, And again, I think most vertical, most studios have, a shelf life of sorts where, they have capital for a period of time and then you're gonna have to either re-up or not re-up. And so it might be a couple of years, it might. It might keep going.

so I think it can vary quite a bit. And then certainly if you're only building a venture with a corporate, which we also do not always just a studio, that can be a relatively short engagement or it can be one after the other too. So it's really quite varied. and sometimes we like to start with, let's try to do one thing together.

And see if we can translate that into building a studio if they're not quite ready for that three year commit, the 10 startups or like that's a pretty significant commitment for a corporate, just psychologically. And so for us, sometimes it might be, let's just do [00:42:00] one venture, six months, let's build something, get it out the door, prove it's doable, then try to expand and see if a portfolio can be, built after that.

Tommy Knoll: That's good. Thanks for that. I see you, I have a question. you wanna come on camera?

Rainer: Sure. Hi everyone. Good to see you. what are the biggest advantages of a corporation running a venture studio compared to a standalone studio? If say, we'll talk about the, the unfair advantage of linking it to a company, but then we find it so difficult to get to that synergy.

So what's your perspective on that?

Elliott Parker: I've got a perspective on this. It goes along with the last question too actually. What's the relationship between the corporation and a studio? If you, think about, venture building for a corporation, if we all agree with the premise that it's a useful way to run experiments and unlock, new lessons about markets and, ultimately drive growth.

the thing that makes it hard is, a [00:43:00] scaled corporation. As it grows, develops governance systems, incentive systems, talent pools, processes that are designed to run that scaled corporation not to build new things. And, what a studio does is it, it provides a framework for an alternative structure of governance, incentives, access to talent processes that is expressly designed to do this fundamentally different activity, which is.

Learning, running these experiments to form a new ventures. It's capital inefficient, meaning it's not gonna drive return on invested capital in year one. All those things you need a new form, a new structure, governance, incentives, talent, processes. So when you think about the relationship between the corporation and the studio.

If it comes down to, that, that fundamental idea, you need a new system to do these things. And what do you want the relationship to be between the corporation and that, [00:44:00] alternate system? How closely do you want it to be linked and what are the pros and cons? What are the costs and benefits of doing that?

In a, in, I think the good news, Ryan, is they're not, they're not mutually exclusive. You can have a corporate run studio, in theory that has enough distance where you can set up a, an alternate form of governance and incentives and do all the things that you need to do to make this model work.

the temptation is always there that, however, that the corporation's gonna wanna inject its HR systems for the recruiting of the people in that studio, or why don't we have our, corporate attorneys review that agreement And you, get this kind of death by a thousand cuts where all of a sudden you find that the studio is, relying on the governance systems and the incentives and the people and everything that is designed to run the scaled corporation.

So from my experience, we find it helpful to have these studios done in [00:45:00] partnership, either with a firm like ours and or with other, even other corporations or other investors, family offices. I mentioned all I, all kinds of players can come into these things as a way to neuter that temptation to rely on the systems of the corporation that are not designed to do this fundamentally different activity.

And so in, in summary, the, big advantage. Of, of having that distance. And if, again, go back to Clay Christensen, the original idea behind solving the innovator's dilemma, you need to separate from the core. the way you do that is by bringing Gartners, creating these structural, these structural distances in the form of new entities.

and certainly with other players involved that forces that distance and enables you to unlock those new ways of doing things that you just, the corporation isn't going to do for structural reasons.

Rainer: I, get the point of creating the difference. what I'd like to [00:46:00] explore a bit is what's the advantage of being.

Linked to a corporation because, a standalone studio, you completely distant. Yeah. There's no connection. But you want to do this because you want to use some synergies. Like when I, in our case, in food, like the knowledge that the big company has on quality food safety, all of those things, which for a complete new startup, it's, it is a whole world to explore.

It's so much effort, so risky and so on. So we can shortcut that, with the knowledge that we have if the knowledge is available. If you have any experiences there, like how do you unlock that unfair advantage that a big company has in order to inject some of those capabilities into the venture studio?

So I'm completely in agreement with the separation of your HR and all of those things, but how can you unlock that advantage?

Elliott Parker: I'll, I'll answer this quickly and hand the, floor back over to Stefan and Ben, but in our language, our, thesis as venture builders is that we can build advantage to what we call advantaged companies through partnership with corporations.

We will not [00:47:00] launch a startup unless that corporation and us that we're combined providing some form of advantage to that company That might be. The corporation, providing, being a first customer or adding distribution capabilities or manufacturer. I'll give you a good example. We've got A-A-A-C-P-G product right now we're launching out of a studio.

it's a new, it's a new consumer product. I'll leave it at that. And we're talking to a large retailer that says, we think we'd like an order to put an order in, and the order's immediately, $17 million. Our little studio does not have the manufacturing capability, the distribution we're in trouble.

having a corporation in the mix that understands the manufacturing and the, distribution, how that works, and being able to team up and do that together is so much more effective. Corporation now unlocks this new opportunity and space. I. The little startup is able to succeed and win and move faster.

And that corporation as a result gets a, again, a call option [00:48:00] on this, this thing. If it works, it's a, it's an ability to pull this thing into the, portfolio. So for me it's, advantage. You gotta make sure there's advantage there. It can come in many forms and the corporation should benefit from that, from providing that advantage.