Expanding Highline Beta’s Venture Studio
When Marcus, Lauren and I started Highline Beta, we always believed in the opportunity to help founders build their startups from scratch in close collaboration with corporate partners. With our experience building and supporting startups, assets and insights from large companies and our Fund, all the ingredients are there to build great companies. As we’ve grown, learned and iterated over four years, more and more of the pieces are now in place to build startups faster through our venture studio model.
We’ve expanded our senior lead/core venture studio team, who will work closely with founders to ideate and build their companies. They will work every single day, effectively as co-founders, to validate opportunities, build MVPs, get early traction and connect into our corporate partners. This puts us in a position to develop the right framework for building successful startups alongside great founders.
With that, we’ve published more information about our venture studio, specifically dedicated to introducing the concept more clearly to founders. You can check that out here: https://highlinebeta.com/venture-studio. We’re sharing a great deal more information about our model, the opportunity and the types of founders we’re looking to work with.
Over the course of my 25 years in tech, I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with some amazing founders, either as a mentor, investor, or as an employee. With Highline Beta’s venture studio model, I think we’ve put together a combination of great people, services, funding and network access (to corporate partners, talent and other investors), which is going to lead to some amazing companies getting built. If you’re a founder, looking to start your next company, I would encourage you to learn more about our venture studio.
Big companies are now, more than ever, realizing the potential of leveraging venture studios to innovate externally. While we at Highline Beta fundamentally believe that big companies must develop their own repeatable, scalable model for internal venture building (and we do a lot of work to support corporates in doing so), we also believe they need to partner with startups. Fundamentally this is about taking a portfolio approach to new venture and business development. Leveraging a venture studio to build external startups provides companies with an opportunity to test and learn faster, in areas that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to easily explore. It provides corporates with a shared risk model, because we’re investing alongside them, and bringing other investors in as well. Building external startups in close proximity and collaboration with corporates creates the winning conditions for moving fast, but leveraging the availability of scale at the same time.
We’re looking forward to sharing more about our venture studio in the coming months. As we bring in great founders and innovative corporates, we’ll be able to solve problems that matter, fund new opportunities and help everyone succeed.
— Benjamin Yoskovitz, Founding Partner