Startup studios are companies that act as founding partners for their startups. They invest their expertise and resources in product development from the early stage onwards. They are also looking to involve more human capital in the process. A growing amount of software companies, accelerators and VC firms are turning into startup studios because of the increased efficiency, especially in early-stage venture building.
The main advantage with startup studios is that they provide massive amounts of human capital. What it means is that accelerators usually provide seed capital, couple hours of mentoring and a great network. On the contrast, startup studios invest 1000s of work hours. They build only couple new companies every year, so they can provide intensive human efforts and dedicated teams for each company.
The studio model comes with a lot of synergies. By re-using infrastructure, software and best practices across startups and choosing projects in overlapping customer segments startups go to market much faster. Plus startup studios can swap employees from one startup to another thus helping them to learn new skills.
“Startup studios are the next step in this evolution. They are all about collaborative entrepreneurship. Starting a company is not the result of one or two individuals anymore, but the work of an entire team,” says Sebastian Haapahovi, CEO of Turku-based startup studio Klopal.
Startup studios also make it easier to deal with failures. 8 out of 10 startups fail. If a startup studio startup fails, the team will simply drop the ideas that didn’t work, learn from them, and redeploy them in a new business idea. The knowledge, talent, skills, experience, intelligence, training, and wisdom will stay in the studio and in the team.
What do you think about startup studio model? Would try to implement it in your organisation? Let us know in the comments!
