What’s a venture studio?
A venture studio, also known as a startup factory, or a startup foundry, or a startup studio, is a studio-like company that aims at building several companies in succession. This style of business building is referred to as "parallel entrepreneurship."
Our process
What's the difference between a venture studio and other similar models?
Accelerators
Take existing startups into their program and give them the tools and capital to grow quickly. Normally the Accelerator exits on the next round.
Incubators
Come up with a number of ideas and invest in a few. They support over a short period of time, with the view of exiting on the next round.
Venture capitalist
Invest large sums into existing companies with proven traction, or category killing ideas, in the hope of exiting with large multiples in the future. They do not support ideation or product build.
Venture studio
Co-found either with colleagues or an external person who they recruit. Venture studios are hands on in their investments. They are onboard from the first ideation until the exit.
Pollen Labs works with all sorts of professionals in the HR, Talent Acquisition and employee communications space. Often these are experienced senior level professaionals who have a burning desire to build a tech product but don’t necessarily want to leave the comfort of their full time job.
Experienced professionals can bring a wealth of knowledge to the table on how to design, build and market a successful product. Additionally, working with experienced professionals can save time as they already have a good understanding of the market and are able to provide valuable insights into trends and key customer needs. They have valuable contacts in their industry who can help with marketing, user acquisition and more.
Pollen Labs has both a fee and equity-based model, where some founders may be required to part pay (typically £10-£30k) of the product development cost, and the rest we take in equity (% depending on the risk). In other cases, we will foot the entire bill, but naturally, this leads to more dilution of the founders' equity.
With both models you'll have access to our services, these are designed to help founders achieve product market fit faster using Lean Startup methods like MVP development & Design Thinking techniques.
