David Geffroy’s Post

🚀 Venture Studios: The Agile Innovators of the Startup World 📏 Building on Matt's insights, want to highlight a key advantage of venture studios: their unparalleled flexibility in resource allocation. Venture studios are uniquely positioned to: 👷♂️ Reallocate Talent: move skilled professionals between projects as needed, maximizing impact and learning. 💵 Redeploy Capital: quickly shift funds to the most promising opportunities within the portfolio. 🧠 Cross-Pollinate Ideas: foster innovation by applying insights from one venture to another. This flexibility allows venture studios to adapt swiftly to market changes and capitalize on emerging opportunities. It's a stark contrast to the accelerator model, which typically offers: 1️⃣ Fixed-term programs 2️⃣ Standardized resources to a diverse group of founders 3️⃣ Limited ongoing involvement post-program While accelerators cast a wide net, venture studios take a more hands-on, adaptive approach. This agility in managing talent, capital, and ideas enables venture studios to pursue the most promising opportunities with focused intensity. It's not about quantity, but about quality and strategic alignment. #VentureStudio #StartupInnovation #EntrepreneurialEcosystem #FlexibleInnovation

If you’re a first-time founder and wondering about assembling a team that can weather the challenging early years of your startup, consider watching this informative video. Additionally, I recommend engaging with other founders to gain insights into their equity structure decisions and learn from their experiences. Learning from their mistakes can help you avoid reinventing the wheel

Startups created in venture studios achieve seed funding twice as fast and exit 33% faster than conventional startups, with higher returns for investors and a 44% better financial outcome for the founders. A few months ago I had a few different options of gigs to choose from between accelerators, incubators, VCs and starting new companies, and decided to join up with the best venture studio creating significant impact in deep technology Deep Science Ventures. Stop by to learn a bit about our companies, our process and get involved for Climate Week. https://lu.ma/47xpv2u5

Early stage founders -- next week's a fun one! On Monday's session of The Feedback Loop, 10 early stage founders will get up on stage to give the 1 minute pitch for their startup. Then, they'll get unfiltered feedback to help them better construct their narrative. Next week, joining me to deliver that feedback will be ff Venture Capital's John Frankel! If you made it to last year's fireside chat with John, then you know he has a sharp lens + POV crafted from 21 years in financial services and the transition into venture with his founding of ffVC in 2008. John has heard many thousands of pitches and ideas across eras of tech, and I'm excited to hear his wisdom and pattern-recognition at play for The Feedback Loop. He's served on >60 company boards over the years, partnering closely with founders who have successfully transformed the world around us. Monday, 6:30pm ET in NYC, and livestreamed on YouTube. Want to pitch? Want to attend in-person? Want to watch online? Check out the link in the comments below.

Startup lesson: If you aren't testing your biggest assumptions, you may be wasting your time. These lessons are from Venture Weekend at Venture Mechanics Startup Incubator / Accelerator (part 2) Jacob White gave a great talk on customer discovery in the second session of the day. Some highlights, that also answer the question "why should you bother with customer discovery?" (my students sometimws asked this at Duke): 1. When you and your team disagree on your hypotheses, refer to the data. 2. Blockbuster didn't do customer discovery when they ignored new technology when Netflix came out, they just assumed it wasn't what people wanted. 3. Customer discovery creates alignment, informs market sizing, and strengthens your pitch deck.

Did you know that a venture studio can lead to a billion-dollar valuation? Venture studios are a relatively new type of investor in the startup world, and it's remarkable how quickly they've become integral to the ecosystem. There are hundreds of companies that were born within venture studios, and some have become well-known giants worth billions of dollars. Take a look at a few examples: 📌Twilio, a leader in cloud communications valued at $10.69 billion. 📌Snowflake, co-founded by Sutter Hill Ventures' Mike Speiser in 2012, went public in 2020 as the largest software IPO ever, valued at $60 billion on its first trading day. Speiser was its first CEO. 📌Aircall, a developer of a cloud-based phone system for call centers valued at $1 billion, boasting 70% year-over-year revenue growth. 📌Moderna, perhaps the most famous venture studio graduate, is a biotech giant that played a pivotal role in developing a COVID-19 vaccine and now has a market capitalization of $39.61 billion.

Mesa Startup Labs is our incubator that supports student-led businesses with ideation, marketing, go-to-market strategy, and funding. Five weeks ago, as the Cohort of 2025 kicked off their Mesa journey, Lucky Soni from the cohort pitched his business Everaw Nutrition to a panel of venture capitalists and secured funding on the spot. In this video, he breaks down his approach to pitching, and how he grabbed the panel's attention with his deck!

"Overnight success" means 10 years in the venture world. No shortcuts 😅 If you have been in the startup world long enough, you know this. All the media hype drives new and impatient capital into venture. Founders, please save this chart. When investors on your cap table start getting impatient, just show them this.

More and more founders are asking this question as they look to build their startups and new ventures... Do I find a venture studios or do I apply to an incubator/accelerator? Here are key differences: - 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁: Venture studios offer tailor-made resources, from funding to expert mentorship, significantly de-risking the entrepreneur's journey. - 𝗜𝗱𝗲𝗮 𝘁𝗼 𝗘𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Unlike incubators that support early-stage concepts (but don't generally roll up their sleeves), venture studios actively participate in building businesses from scratch. - 𝗦𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗥𝗶𝘀𝗸 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝗲𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱: With venture studios, there’s skin in the game. They invest resources upfront in exchange for equity, aligning long-term success goals. This collective approach underlines the essence of venture-driven growth: leveraging shared expertise to turn bold ideas into reality. As we move forward, understanding these nuances becomes crucial for founders navigating their entrepreneurial path. Venture studios represent a paradigm shift—where success is not just envisioned but engineered.

More and more founders are asking this question as they look to build their startups and new ventures... Do I find a venture studios or do I apply to an incubator/accelerator? Here are key differences: - 𝗖𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁: Venture studios offer tailor-made resources, from funding to expert mentorship, significantly de-risking the entrepreneur's journey. - 𝗜𝗱𝗲𝗮 𝘁𝗼 𝗘𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Unlike incubators that support early-stage concepts (but don't generally roll up their sleeves), venture studios actively participate in building businesses from scratch. - 𝗦𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗥𝗶𝘀𝗸 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝗲𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱: With venture studios, there’s skin in the game. They invest resources upfront in exchange for equity, aligning long-term success goals. This collective approach underlines the essence of venture-driven growth: leveraging shared expertise to turn bold ideas into reality. As we move forward, understanding these nuances becomes crucial for founders navigating their entrepreneurial path. Venture studios represent a paradigm shift—where success is not just envisioned but engineered.