hello world and happy birthday humble!
Greetings, friends! If you don’t know me, I’m Ajit Verghese, co-founder, and Partner at humble ventures. We’re celebrating our first birthday this month, and wanted to catch everyone up on where we’ve been and where we’re headed next.
How we got started:
Our genesis story starts like any other — at the end of a different chapter. Three years ago, I put my last startup to bed — which is a long, painful narrative for another day. On my walkabout to try and figure out what was next, I started my conversion experience by helping others fix problems across their organizations.
In this beta-testing of Ajit 2.0, I met some interesting founders, advisors, and startup shepherds — and reconnected with some old mentors. One, in particular, Kayode Owens, seemed to be cut from the same cloth. He fast became a friend and influencer who helped shape what happened next.
During this time period, both Kayode (through his innovation strategy work at kite) and I recognized a convergence of problems occurring between the startups we were advising and investing in, the agencies we were consulting for, and the brands they served:
1. Startups were looking to mitigate risk through activities that helped them prove out their model.
2. Brands were trying to figure out how to not get ‘Ubered’ and manage disruption to their operations from upstarts and new ways of working.
3. Agencies and consultancies were getting lots of calls from the brands they served to help them navigate this brave new world.
We realized that an opportunity existed at the intersection of these three pain points. Serving as translators between the corporate and startup worlds proved to be of tremendous value, as the startups were able to compress their growth cycle time through corporate partnerships, agencies were de-risking a company’s investment, and brands were able to quickly prove out the potential of the startups.
What we’ve been up to:
We launched humble ventures in August of 2015 with the core belief that driving pipeline in a way that led to pilots between the startups and established organizations would generate opportunities for a different investment model. By using our expertise, we could help established organizations accelerate their development, growth, and agility. Reciprocally, that would create opportunity for our startup pipeline, and in turn, help us identify high performers for potential investment. Thus, our micro venture capital fund was born.
To make the above model work, we knew we needed solid associations with reputable, forward thinking agencies. Naturally, we partnered with my good friend and erstwhile colleague Peter Fasano, Global Consulting Principal at OgilvyRED in digital transformation. humble has been incubated within OgilvyRED since the fall 0f 2015, and our work has been focused on digital transformation across a number of clients with a focus on health tech— with the occasional collaboration with Ritesh Patel, Chief Digital Officer at OgilvyCommonHealth.
We’ve developed a pipeline of interesting startups that are trying to address the many opportunities across the health ecosystem — from analytics, new models of care, apps to drive adherence or technologies that help improve the patient experience.
This interesting work across the enterprise innovation landscape started a new journey that I hope will be a 10-year epic. And on any journey worth its salt, you inevitably run into likeminded travelers…
Where we’re headed:
A few months ago I had the pleasure of sitting down with my friend Harry Alford, Managing Director at Bunker Labs DC. Harry and I shared similar educational arcs and startup paths, so we had a lot to catch up about — his new position at the Bunker, his pending graduation from Babson’s MBA program, and his new colleagues Ray Crowell and Mary Iafelice. We spent a week together at SXSW 2016, and found each other “very simpatico”. A mutual admiration quickly developed, and upon returning to DC, I started judging some of their startup competitions and advising their spring cohort.
The more we worked together, the more we discovered our shared vision and executed against it. humble has always focused on solving the problem, burying the ego and building for a long term approach. Just down the road, the BLDC crew of Ray, Mary and Harry had created a culturally similar, complimentary organization focused on applying Lean Startup and Design Thinking principals to scale startup efforts. Muy simpatico indeed!
A few weeks ago we discussed our futures and acknowledged that we all were trying to sail towards the same goal and that our collaboration over the last cohort showed that we could work well together. I’m proud to say that we’re partnering with the bunker labs dc crew and bringing them underneath the humble ventures umbrella effective immediately.
We will continue to look at health tech, consumer internet, Fintech, and have added expertise in a few additional areas such as food tech, SaaS platforms, and mobile. We are also launching a new innovation initiative called BOOST.
BOOST Provides Infrastructure to Realize Innovation and Deliver Outcomes Faster.
We’re looking for companies in two different areas of growth to work with us for several months using a mix of in-person & distance learning to maximize impact.
Start Humble companies are searching for product / market fit. These companies have found early traction with a set of features, and require support and refinement around their business model, product / market fit and are earlier in their growth & history.
Grow Humble companies are focused on maturing their business, after proving that they HAVE a business. They can be post accelerator-exit or post seed / Series A. Grow Humble companies come in all shapes and sizes.
Check out our beautiful, full-of-details flyer here: hmbl.vc/humbleBoost
We already have a set of committed companies for both sets of the program and are looking forward to kicking it off in two weks.
So, hello world and happy first birthday humble ventures. Remember the best gifts are new friends and partners — we’re happy to have fellow shipmates on this ad(venture)!
And If you want to come along for the ride, you can follow us on twitter @humbleventures, sign up for our email newsletter, or watch this space for more updates to come!
~ Ajit Verghese
