5th Birthday Thoughts

It’s hard to believe but today is Platform’s 5th birthday.

I want to mark this anniversary with some thoughts on what we’ve learned over five years and to express my gratitude to those who have helped along the way.

In 2020, we started out with a vision to create a different way to build startups. We had, over decades, watched founders reinvent the same wheel, make the same unforced errors, and get swayed by confirmation bias.

We also felt strongly that we wanted to open up entrepreneurship to a broader universe of founders, including those who might be considered “out of network”.

Over the intervening five years, much has changed: both in the venture industry, and the world more broadly.

We started in the thick of the COVID pandemic. We started “pre-AI”, or at least “pre-LLM”. We started when venture valuations were peaking (they subsequently crashed, and are now peaking again).

Over this time, there are many ways in which we’ve iterated and adapted our approach to building startups. Notably:

• We began with a very purist idea of the venture studio model: we would come up with an idea, develop it to a certain point, and then find someone to run with it. We’ve learned that reality is messier, to be flexible in when to engage with founders, and how we structure deals. There are many ways to skin a cat.
• Initially, we built a substantial studio team of almost 20 full-time people, and then scaled back to focus on the essential “5Cs” - capital, coaching, coding, customers, and connections - leaning on our network of fractional help for everything else.
• We started building products using traditional coding, took a detour into low-code/no-code, and then became enthusiastic, early adopters of Cursor, CoPilot, Loveable, etc.
• We started out thinking that every startup we built would inevitably end up on the “hamster wheel” of multiple venture capital rounds. Instead, we’re also seeing success with seed-scaling and now have multiple startups that are growing well at breakeven, in full control of their own destiny.

However, there are also ways in which we have remained true to our original views:

• We’ve remained fully remote. Despite strong arguments that something is lost by not being in person, we see that the ability to access a much larger universe of talent, and the other efficiencies it creates, more than compensate. (Of course, each Platform portfolio company is making its own choice and some are hybrid or fully in-office.)
• We’ve retained a strong focus on marketplace businesses, today with a special focus on where AI has an opportunity for outsized impact. Although marketplaces remain hard to get started, AI is reducing the operational cost significantly, and the network effects and ability to effect pricing control are undeniable.
• We’ve continued to build and invest in a shared set of technology building blocks that, over time, are making it quicker and cheaper to build each successive startup. We can now stand up an AI-mediated marketplace in less than a day.
• We are still focused on partnering with solo-founders with deep domain expertise and “earned insight”, who want to build a startup to solve problems they’ve experienced themselves.
• Although there are many stakeholders needed to make a venture studio work, we remain convinced that the founder is the primary “customer” of a venture studio and the prime mover for entrepreneurship. This is ultimately a talent game - you can have the best studio process, expertise, investors, etc. - but founder talent is a bigger determinant of success than anything else.

The Venture Studio Debate

Five years on, my view is that venture studios remain poorly understood. I think a big part of this is simply because there is great variance in each studio’s approach, and every studio I speak to is continually iterating its model.

If anything, views of the model appear to have become more strongly bifurcated since we started in 2020.

On one side, traditional venture is consolidating into a smaller number of larger funds, all chasing a smaller number of deals at ever higher valuations, and stuffing them with cash (like foie gras geese, as Bill Gurley recently observed).

Meanwhile, most LPs don’t have access to these megafunds and remain frustrated with the ongoing lack of liquidity in venture, and the vast majority of funds have (in recent memory, at least) underperformed public markets.

The number of LPs interested in the venture studio model appears to be growing. They see the much lower cost-basis for meaningful ownership in each startup and the fact that we are creating our own dealflow, giving them the ability to double-down on the startups they like, as big advantages.

The traditional venture camp still raises the questions of adverse founder selection, “dead equity”, and “mercenary” behavior with the venture studio model but the hard data on these concerns still seems elusive.

I am an unashamed fence-sitter: I think both traditional venture and venture studio models will continue to have their place. It’s not one vs the other. They are two different disciplines: one is picking winners, the other is building winners.

A Personal Perspective

Turning to a more personal perspective, I can summarize five years in three simple bullet points:

• Wow, this is hard!
• Wow, this is fun!
• It’s hard to imagine doing anything else.

Wow, this is hard!

A big part of why I got into this game was because I had been a founder myself many times before. I wanted to create the kind of structure and support I wish I had when I started out, and I wanted to give back to the next generation of founders.

But, when you’re a founder yourself, you’re 100% focused on one startup at a time and, in a relatively short period of time, it either starts to work, in which case you move into another phase with increasingly more certainty, or it fails, and you move on.

When running a venture studio, you’re permanently living in the very early stages of startup development with all that entails. Despite all the work put in creating a clear process, with common metrics and clear gates, each startup is unique in many ways. There is so much ambiguity, so much reading of tea leaves.

A big part of the venture studio model is closely supporting and coaching founders. I meet with most founders twice a week, and I’m available to them 24/7 on Slack/text/WhatsApp/email.

My relationship with founders is complicated and changes over time. I am, to varying degrees and at various times, their coach, their investor, their co-founder, and their board member. Most of the time, there is no issue, but it can cause some cognitive dissonance.

I am only human. Inevitably, we have to kill startups that aren’t progressing. Working closely with founders over many months means I inevitably develop strong working relationships. Every “kill” has a personal impact.

In a blog post, I likened getting a new startup going to starting a rusty, old lawnmower. It takes many frustrating and tiring pulls on the cord, endless tinkering, and is a sweaty, messy, dirty, tiring business.

Wow, this is fun!

Despite the above thoughts, I’ve never had more fun or felt more fulfilled.

I end every week feeling exhausted but not in a negative way; I simply feel like I’ve left everything on the field.

Running a venture studio requires the ability to continually switch perspectives, both “vertically” and “horizontally”. From fund design and LP pitching to finding and fixing bugs in code. From one startup to another, switching between different industries. Between different development stages and different founder personalities.

I joke (ok, only partly) that I have “weaponized ADHD”. I think the need to work on many things in parallel and continually shift attention between them is what my brain thrives on. It feeds my need for constant novelty, and I’ve always had very wide-ranging interests.

It’s hard to imagine doing anything else.

It’s hard to imagine going back to working on one startup at a time.

It’s hard to imagine losing the privilege of working closely with incredible founders, working hard to solve important problems.

I feel blessed and grateful to have this opportunity.

Here’s to the next five years of building!

Gratitude

Many people have helped build and support Platform over the past five years. Their contributions have varied in duration and scope but they all count and I want to call out a few people specifically for my gratitude:

• Tim Connors: Tim has many roles - founding investor, mentor, fellow founder coach, sounding board, evangelist. I think Tim is best summarized as “first believer”.
• Carol Alexander: Carol came with me from Wonolo when I gave up my operational role and board seat. Carol is normally everyone’s first human contact with Platform. First impressions matter. “Bless her heart!” as she would say.
• Lissette Arias and Brett Wischow: Lissette took a leap of faith and was the first to join the studio team, and she always pushed for us to do our highest quality work. Brett followed on and built our go-to-market methodology. Although they are both no longer involved full-time, they are still supporting our portfolio companies.
• Josh Burkwist: Josh has worked with me in various capacities, across 15+ years and 6 different startups. Although we have the same initials and same haircut, he provides a very different perspective, wearing it all on his sleeve, in contrast to my British stiff upper lip.
• Patrick O’Shea and Luciano Giannini: Patrick and Luch both started as interns but are still here. I see both of them grow everyday in skills and professionalism.
• Jada McLean: Jada was our first Founder-in-Residence and took a bet on me and Platform, despite us having nothing to show at the time.
• AJ Brustein and Yong Kim: I think it's a testament to a great team that we three Wonolo co-founders still talk regularly and share ideas, thoughts and concerns, despite AJ and I having not been involved with Wonolo day-to-day for five years or more.
• Richard Hart: Richard has been a great supporter, friend, and mentor to both me and our founders.
• Preena Amin: Preena helps me sleep at night by remaining on top of our books and handling all the important paperwork that I would have no hope of staying on top of.
• All the LPs in Platform Fund I and Fund II who took a chance on an emerging manager with a non-standard model.
• All the founders who decided to work with Platform, even though Platform itself is a startup. For being guinea pigs and bearing with us as we have iterated and honed our model.

There are too many others from the broader network to thank individually - interns, team members, experts who have given advice, co-investors in portfolio companies - you have all played your part.

Thank you all.