The Next Iteration of the INVANTI Studio
If you or someone you know is passionate about working on important problems and has a track record of initiating things, reach out — we would love to see you apply to the Initiators Guild. Our next cohort starts October 19, 2020 with applications due September 27, 2020.
Entrepreneurs
A thriving startup community requires a sufficient number of entrepreneurs. These include experienced or serial entrepreneurs, novice or inexperienced entrepreneurs, and aspiring, nascent, or even dormant entrepreneurs. Also involved are social entrepreneurs, who are individuals applying scalable business models to solve social problems.
Entrepreneurs can be homegrown, can come from within the region or host country, or can come from another place. A startup community should be inclusive of any entrepreneur who wants to participate, regardless of their background, race, ethnicity, gender, where they are from, or their prior experience.
- Brad Feld and Ian Hathaway, The Startup Community Way
Brad Feld, along with Ian Hathaway, just released a second book on building startup communities. The timing of the book is particularly interesting for us, as we are about 3 months into a new project/experiment, The Initiators Guild. Spurred by both the onset of the COVID pandemic, as well as an itch for us to think about expanding the reach of our work, the Guild is a test to see what a distributed, founder-centric startup studio would look like. As we wrote in the blog announcing the Guild, “For as much as it’s common to hear, ‘Early on, the idea doesn’t matter — it’s all about the people’, current entrepreneurial infrastructure does a poor job of supporting those without ideas yet. Most incubators, accelerators, etc. are off limits until they have an idea and traction — leaving these initiators to turn to the internet and fend for themselves.” The rise of startup studios offers an interesting new view on the question of where startups come from. However, many still operate much like an accelerator, i.e., a founder needs to approach with a specific idea (albeit much earlier) or the studio relies on an internal team to do the work of finding new opportunities. This still seems to clash with something core to INVANTI: activating the aspiring, nascent, dormant, and social entrepreneurs that Brad and Ian mention.
The last seven months have come with many changes for us. We’ve had high points, such as launching the Initiators Guild and doing a first close on our first fund (more below!), and also low points, wondering if we had enough cash to survive the next month and seeing our full-time, in-person model completely halted by a global pandemic. But as all things entrepreneurial go, it has opened up new opportunities and directions, and we are excited to share where we’ve landed and where we are going.
The Past 7 Months
When we started INVANTI, we wanted to test the hypothesis that we could create more companies solving the problems that affect the daily lives of the majority of Americans by concentrating on finding entrepreneurial people and giving them support pre-idea. We worked off a model of People, Problems, and Place — enabling great people, connecting them with networks that understood problems well, and using place (specifically South Bend) as a differentiator for learning and iterating quickly. There were elements of this model that worked really well, and elements that did not. We looked to others like Entrepreneur First, one of the first “talent investors”, for ideas, and were marching toward a similar model, with some caveats for the type of companies we wanted to build.
And then COVID happened. And while it directly affected our ability to execute our full-time, in-person cohort model, it also provided us a chance to reflect. We decided that it was time to try something we had always thought about, but had never had time to pursue — a part-time, remote version of our model. We knew this would look a bit different, but we were still of a mindset that if we were able to support pre-idea people, we could create some interesting concepts, and eventually companies. We called it the Initiators Guild and launched it at the end of May.
Three months later, we’ve learned a lot about the nuances of running a remote program. We’ve been forced to digitize our entire process, from the opportunity development elements to the community and cohort components. But all that aside, we’ve also realized that we might have been missing something all along; that maybe the whole entrepreneurial ecosystem was missing something. For as much as we considered ourselves a “founder-first” model (we were literally investing in people, pre-team and pre-idea), we realized that we were still focused on founders only in the context of specific opportunities at a specific time. As we engaged with the Initiators Guild, we quickly started to see a need that could become the basis for a different type of studio.
Layers for Success
When you look at entrepreneurship from the founder perspective, you can break down what’s needed to be successful when starting a specific company, but also what’s needed across multiple opportunities. There are some foundational layers that are important over time, regardless of idea, which underlie resources that are needed to pursue a specific opportunity at any given time. Founders find a way to build some of these layers on their own and also plug into outside support and resources for the rest.
But most external resources still fall into the layer supporting specific opportunities. The foundational layers are pushed to universities (increasingly through undergraduate programs, but mostly business school), existing startups (where employees learn what it looks like from the inside), or to the founders directly, forced to figure it out on their own and hoping that they have networks of family/friends around them that have done it before.
This is where we see the opportunity — we think there is a way to build a startup studio which supports the founder independent of any single opportunity, and has the ability to pour resources into specific opportunities when they arise. For an “aspiring, nascent, or dormant entrepreneur”, the other options don’t always work. Universities and business school programs are great (if you can get there in the first place), but offer this kind of support for a very short and limited period of time and at a great cost. Learning within a startup is great if you are interested in that professional path and can get in, but even then, your ability to learn and develop are tied to your continued employment. And relying on friends/family networks severely limits the number of people who have access to even get started. We are missing out on a whole population of potential founders, especially those who already come with experiences and insights into important problems facing Americans today.
We see an opportunity to build a studio that commits to supporting founders across their entrepreneurial lifetime, independent of any idea, but is also there to support specific ideas when they are ready and aligned with the resources the studio has available. We think this concentrated effort to build a place to hone the craft of entrepreneurship, in community with others, will eventually lead to the types of companies that we have set out to create in the first place.
INVANTI Studio
Our model going forward will consist of elements that support both the foundational layers and the layers used to pursue specific opportunities. The first iteration of the studio will have three key components:
Initiators Guild: Think of this as home base, where no matter what you are working on (or even if you’re between working on things), you are in a community of peers with support to explore and make progress on starting something new.
- Supporting people independent of a particular idea; helping people understand themselves as a potential founder, the type of company they want to start, and where there may be an opportunity to solve problems they deeply care about. The Guild is there for the first opportunity, between opportunities, and the next opportunity.
- Part-Time, Remote
- Application-based
- Cohorts of 40–50 people, on-boarded a few times per year
- Ongoing monthly membership fee
Studio Sprints: When specific opportunities arise that fit the thesis of the Beta City Fund, founders will be invited or can apply to participate in a sprint. Over a two-month period, we help them intensely focus on the development and validation of a particular concept.
- Supporting people to dig deeper and understand how to translate overlooked insights into entrepreneurial opportunities. Focus on moving quickly, getting stakeholder feedback, and doing the due diligence on an opportunity to prove it’s worth pursuing as a founder.
- Part-Time, Remote (with potential for in-person components in the future)
- Application-based
- Two-month program, offered three times per year
- Small cohorts of 8–10 founders/teams
- No cost, no equity, no obligation to the Beta City Fund
Beta City Fund: When concepts from Studio Sprints or from the Initiators Guild advance to where the founder is ready to go full-time, ready to build a first version of their concept and pilot it, and it fits the thesis of the fund, they are eligible for the Beta City Fund.
- Supporting the transition to a full-time founder; building and piloting a first version of the concept by bringing the advantages of South Bend to the founder (access to partners + networks of trust); focus on pilots, experimentation, and iteration.
- Focused on concepts that improve the daily lives of Americans
- Full-Time, Remote and In-Person Components
- Application-based
- Up to $100k, plus support, to go full-time, build a first version of the concept, and run a pilot in South Bend
- Flexible investment structures to match the opportunity (i.e., not limited to equity financing)
We expect this to be just the first iteration of this structure and in the future we hope to add more resources in all layers, specifically tailored to the types of opportunities that we see emerge. Our goal is to engage founders over a lifetime of innovation and entrepreneurship.
You may notice that we are also testing some new ideas around the business model for this conception of the studio: a membership model for the Guild layer and a fund model for the other layers. We will be writing more on this in the coming months, but we are thinking hard about the incentive structures of each layer of the studio and trying to make sure that they align with the stated outcome of each. As we learn more about what works about this model and what doesn’t, we will be sharing that openly.
A lot has been said and written over the past seven months about what this particular point in time demands of all of us. While we feel that our mission has not changed, it has deepened. We don’t know what the solutions to all the problems facing us are going to be, nor even where they will come from. We need more people enabled and emboldened to look at problems in new ways and to try new things. And when we ask people to play their role, we need to make sure we have provided an infrastructure for them to do so to the best of their ability. We need to demand, more than ever, that resources be poured into people — resources that are accessible, resources that see the value in building people up over time, resources that aren’t afraid to be both ambitious and human.
We hope we are able to play our role in building these layers, and play to the strength that solutions to the problems of our time can come from anywhere.
If you or someone you know is passionate about working on important problems and has a track record of initiating things, reach out — we would love to see you apply to the Initiators Guild. Our next cohort starts October 19, 2020 with applications due September 27, 2020.
INVANTI is a startup studio in the Midwest that believes impactful companies are created by bringing together people, problems, and place.
