Inside Human Ventures with Heather Hartnett
We’re kicking off the Venture Studio Insider with a series of interviews with leaders from venture studios around the world. What’s their unique approach to quickly identifying successful venture ideas and scaling them? Who are the people behind them? What kind of culture do they have?
First up is Human Ventures, a business creation platform comprising of a venture fund, studio, and enterprise agency based in New York. Their portfolio includes Paloma Health, an online medical practice focused on hyperthyroidism, Lupii, a plant-based protein snack company, and The Muse, a purpose-driven job board.
We spoke to CEO and founding partner Heather Hartnett for an inside look on the ‘human’ approach:
What led you to start Human Ventures?
A large part of what makes a successful startup ecosystem is the concentration of founders building together and helping one another. It truly takes a village. San Francisco has had multiple generations of founders building together in one industry — technology. When we started Human Ventures, we saw the opportunity to make New York an even bigger hub of founders building together. There are so many industries in New York and they are now all becoming tech enabled. That is why we launched our studio. Our core thesis is that if you bring exceptional founders who are also good humans together, they will be motivated to help one another. There is a multiplier effect that happens as a strong community forms and compounds one another’s success.
How do you generate concepts at Human Ventures and what process do you go through to pick ‘winning’ concepts?
We pick categories and themes that we have identified as big opportunity zones for the next 5–10 years. Then we partner with founders who we think are best suited to build within a category and have unique insights around those themes. We fundamentally believe that the founder has to be the key vision driver for businesses to get off the ground and begin to scale. We never start a business without the founder in place. We pick winning founders and then the businesses start to emerge.
The themes we are currently focused on are health and wellness, the future of work, and building digital communities.
How would you segment the Venture Studio space? What makes Human Ventures different?
There are many versions of startup studios now, but there are two models that seem to have emerged. One is more of a think tank model, where the studio team comes up with ideas, starts to build internally and then looks to hire a founder to lead the company. The second is built more around the founders, who have their own compelling ideas but want to have their concepts tested and validated through a structured process and support system. Our studio falls under the latter category.
We have primary investment focus areas, but we believe that designing businesses alongside experienced entrepreneurs will produce the greatest outcomes. We have a very strong flywheel to engage with founders who are “In the Wild.” We use this terminology to describe a pivotal point in a founder’s career when they are about to embark upon their next entrepreneurial journey — and we’ve created an environment and community to help them gain conviction and speed up traction. You can think of our model as an entrepreneur-in-residence cohort program.
What has been your proudest ‘Human’ moment?
During COVID-19, our community banded together stronger than ever. This new normal supported our belief that a values-driven culture is not just a nice to have, it is a need to have. I was so proud of our team’s resilience and our founder’s strength during these past few months.
Another big validator of our business strategy is when a portfolio company exits and the founder decides to come back and build with Human again. These cycles typically take a long time, but in a relatively short time period, we’ve already had it happen. That makes me very proud of the work our team has done and the value we’ve created.
What differences do you see between companies and teams that come out of venture studios and those that are supported through other models (bootcamps, accelerators, self-started)?
It’s easier than ever to start a company, but it is harder than ever to win. There are a lot of incredible resources for founders to start building, but it’s difficult to determine the demand for your business. It’s hard to differentiate above all the noise. Starting your company from some sort of platform or connected network is becoming more critical to de-risk the earliest stages of building and increase your chance of standing out to customers and sources of capital.
As a founder, you need to ask yourself: what parts of your business do you need to de-risk and does that align with the support you will receive from the organization you choose to partner with in the early days.
One of our key focus areas is speeding up the feedback loop for founders through testing and validating their businesses. It is important to build something that your customers actually need.
What kind of roles do you have in your in-house team and how do you recruit for them?
From a skills perspective, we built out Human’s team by following the life stages of a company and understanding which roles are critical to help leverage experienced founders. Our business design team plays a key part in that process. They work to validate early concepts and to achieve customer-fit as quickly as possible. They help founders think through “is there a there, there?”
We have a lot of roles you would expect around finance, product, design, but we also have a “founder-coach-in-residence” which has been a game changer for helping founders identify their strengths and weaknesses and how to round out their early team. Starting a company can be extremely lonely. Having a team of operators to support you in the beginning can make all the difference.
How do you build the right culture within your in-house team to keep innovating?
One of the first exercises we went through as a team was solidifying our values, thereby creating Our Guide to Being Human. Our values help inform everything that we do. I have been proud to see our team living our values as we have transitioned to working remotely for the foreseeable future. One value of ours is collaboration — and it doesn’t happen by accident, especially remotely. The Human team has worked intentionally to create cross collaboration throughout the team, founders, and community, staying in constant communication with one another. One of the highlights has been our daily standups, which are led by a different member of our team each morning. I shared more about the standups in How 15 Minutes a Day Made Us All a Little More Human.
What do you look for in founders and startup teams?
Our proprietary assessment methodology focuses on three main areas: personality traits, skills, and lived experience. We look beyond the resume and traditional venture pattern matching. We believe that the founders of the future do not look like the founders of the past. As the world paradigms shift, so will the demographics of the founders building the future.
What would you tell someone who wants to start a company with Human Ventures?
I would advise founders to ask themselves — who do you want in your camp in the early days? How does the Human community overlap with your values? How can the Human team get you from “In the Wild” to understanding the value of your business and customer-fit?
If you’re a founder “In the Wild” in the early stages of building your next business in the future of work, please apply here: Human.vc/apply
What’s next for Human Ventures?
As Human Ventures continues to invest and build in the ‘human needs economy’, we are now accepting applications for our next founder cohort of Humans in the Wild, focused on the Future of Work. This program is fully remote and kicking off in October. Additional details and the application can be reviewed here. We’ve shared Human’s thesis on the Future of Work in this TechCrunch article: The Future of Work is Human.
