It’s week 6 out of 12 so I figured I’d write a bit about how this 3 month startup program works, and what I’m learning from it.
The “#1” in the title is entirely aspirational. I'm writing this with my thumb on the tube between Moorgate and London Bridge on my way to a morning meeting. I used to write and look at email on my commute, but in 2018 I've been either reading books or running. The first due to a successful new years resolution, the second a thinly veiled response to turning 40. So let's see how much time I actually get to write these reflections.
In case you missed it, I’m Managing Director of the R/GA IoT Venture Studio which is a three month program here in London, aimed at startups in the general area of the Internet of Things, and it includes investment and hands-on support. This is the second time the program has been run in London, though there have been many more programs along the same lines in the US.
R/GA is a global digital agency.
Mostly, the startups we work with sit with us in the office.
The London program works like this:
The first three weeks are dedicated to meeting mentors and people from the sponsors and around R/GA. The goals are to get feedback on how the founders are building their businesses, and to build personal relationships between the founders and the "mentors." (I dislike the term mentors because it sets up a power imbalance with respect to "wisdom" and this is often inaccurate and usually unhelpful. Instead I prefer to call people what they are, which is experts, advisors, investors, and potential customers. But that's cumbersome so mentors it is.)
The next five weeks, the second phase, is called Services, and it's what we're in the middle of now. A team from the agency side of R/GA, which is much larger than the newer Ventures side, works with each company to refine and professionalise its offer via brand, visual identity, and copy work. Often but not always there are sub-projects focused on areas like the user experience of particular dashboard, or the design of communications at the point of sale.
The idea, which I buy, is that by presenting in a more professional way, you can close more customers, get more traction, and therefore build the value of the company. Professionalising means making decisions and nailing down brand, etc, to deepen appeal to particular customer segments by highlighting particular benefits of the product or service. So the trick is to only nail things down where there is already positive customer traction. You have to avoid carving in stone anything speculative. Untested ideas do not—or at least, should not—survive contact with real customers. Putting work into untested ideas reduces your ability to iterate them. This is toxic for a startup, because a startup is a machine for learning. All of which means there is a knack to Services.
We also lend a hand with more future-facing or operational tasks. Examples of topics hit in the Office Hours sessions (I meet with each company for an hour each week) and in meetings with our program team:
These meetings happen throughout the 12 weeks, alongside the odd workshop and fireside chat with guests.
The third phase is called Presentations and it’s about refining the pitch, the story, and the deck. R/GA New York has a dedicated presentations team, and they visit to work directly with the cohort.
There’s a demo event at the end which is a kind of finish line for the formal programming, at which point we move into a continuous phase which is internally called Engagement. This simply means that we make sure people in the R/GA agency know of all the startups, and we look for opportunities to make connections that could lead to work.
Other programs—there have been a dozen or so—have a more active strand of building collaborations between corporate partners and the startups in the cohort.
We’re working with nine companies in the 2018 cohort. R/GA Ventures investments to date number in the mid 80s. Here we have our first circular economy startup. We have our first applied biochemistry startup.
I spoke with Fast Company and they did a great write-up of all nine.
We invest £75,000 in each company, in addition to the in-kind investment of the three program phases, in return for equity.
Here’s what W6 involves, for me:
What I’m not saying is that most of the time I’m not with startups or in a meeting, I’m working with Lisa Ritchie. Lisa is the Program Director here, which means she runs operations, the budget, and the program team. Lisa has been my single hire (for this program she has hired or selected everyone else), from back before the first London program, and we run this thing together. She is even more excellent than I had hoped.
When I say “we” I mean any of R/GA, R/GA Ventures, the Ventures team in New London, this program, and the program team. The program team is me, Lisa, Soala, and Amanda. Each "we" is great, but considering this program team in particular, I couldn’t be happier to work with them.
My intention is to write more words like this.