Building an independent digital sales organization for East European tech startups

Some corporations, including Google, Cisco or Axa have successfully developed their own “venture studios”, launching numerous new businesses over the course of several years. However, most of these ventures once validated are spun-out and not developed internally. Netflix spun out its “Netflix Box” division, which became Roku -- a company that now has a $4 billion-plus market cap. Fog Creek Software (now Glitch) spun out Trello and Stack Overflow. Cisco spun out -- and subsequently acquired -- three different startups from the same group of founders. However many more had tried but failed to deliver the expected results and had their units closed.

In this article, we’ll explore the first phase of the venture building process - a 2-3 months venture validation sprint covering the building blocks of start-up creation: idea generation, validation and pre-launch execution. This process is designed to quickly identify, validate and test new concepts and de-risk the chances of failure when scaling the business further.

Venture builders are getting a lot of attention these days. Some even refer to venture building as “the new model for entrepreneurship”. So what is a startup studio? How does a venture building studio compare to accelerators and product development agencies? What are the different types of startup studios?