Last week, those of us at Philo had the unique opportunity to head down to Southern Utah and raft the Colorado River in Moab. Luckily, three of our Philo members had served as river guides there before, and already knew every potentially dangerous rapid. Our Philo guys took great care of us, guiding us on exactly where and how to paddle to keep us safe.
We compare our rafting experience to our role as a venture studio. At Philo, we focus on that important but underserved 0 to 1 space, with the goal to remove as much risk as possible from the startup process.
In the business world, your raft would be the business idea. Before you EVER set foot in the water, you would make sure your raft is durable enough to handle the weight it carries, the speed and size of the river, and the impact upon the rocks.
For a new business, we at Philo do everything possible so that a business idea meets what’s needed for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and weathers the validation process. Our process takes a business idea and litmus tests it against the market, making sure there are customers who'd be interested in the idea, and that the business will maintain its competitive advantage.
As a studio, we have the capital resources to infuse a business with the finances needed to design, develop, scale, and market accordingly. Philo ensures that a business builds a raft large enough and durable enough to weather whatever unexpected rapids transpire.
Once you’ve built your raft, it’s time to take it out to float. The business has made it past ideation and development and is ready to go to market. This part of the business process is incredibly fun and rewarding – but can also be daunting. Here’s the good news when building with a venture studio like Philo: we’ve already taken the raft out to float during the concept phase, so we already know with some certainty how it will handle the rapids.
Just like rafting, when you launch a business, you know you’ll encounter unforeseen obstacles. Yet many businesses, shortly after launch, will run into an obstacle that tips them upside down and they’re unable to recover.
The silver lining to building a business with a venture studio is that those rigorous testing and validation processes – combined with the wealth of in-house resources available to startups – actually remove many of the common pitfalls (i.e. rapids) that a traditional startup will encounter. We not only back a company with the funding necessary to go to market and continue to innovate, we also provide a business with a wealth of additional resources to launch, scale, and grow appropriately. When a startup within a venture studio does encounter a rapid, the company has access to the resources necessary to fix the issue.
If you have a business idea you think is gold, but don’t want to absorb all of the risk of the startup yourself, reach out to us. We’d love to help move your business from idea to reality – safely and successfully.
