Once we partner with a founder, we focus intensely on identifying and validating an opportunity worth pursuing. This begins with our Anti-Bias Customer Discovery (ABCD) process designed to gather meaningful qualitative data from customers and build a meaningful product-market fit. As data is collected our Venture Design Tool is used to validate the market opportunity quantitatively and the strategy laid out for the company's creation makes sense. Once an opportunity has been validated, we leverage proven methodologies to quickly build the company and begin generating revenue.

It all starts with the right person. Not everyone is a good fit for the founder role in high-growth entrepreneurship. Founders must have the determination to push through obstacles, the flexibility to modify strategy on the fly, the imagination to come up with new ways of solving problems, coachability, and the ability to work well with others and still lead them. We use a data-backed entrepreneurial leadership assessment that has been used to evaluate and coach high-performing entrepreneurial teams for over 15 years. Our goal is to understand the unique abilities and gaps of potential EIRs, how our team can fill those gaps, and how good a fit there is to partner with us as an EIR and build a company together.

Want to find out how well you fit the founder role? Reach out to us today.
Opportunity evaluation results are shared with every applicant.

Customer discovery is one of the most powerful tools for identifying a problem worth solving and designing a solution that fits the buyer and market. But there is a problem with customer discovery. One that we can’t escape but can moderate. The fact that people and our cognitive biases are at the center of customer discovery. Cognitive biases are mental shortcuts we all take that can lead to misjudgments, especially when something is new or novel. With these fundamental problems, it should come as no surprise that 75% of the CB Insights Top 20 reasons startups fail can be strongly influenced by cognitive biases, the customers, founders, and investors. Cognitive errors such as:

• Our memory is often unreliable. Eyewitness testimony is often unreliable at best. Which is the customer’s story.
• We are poor predictors of our own behavior.
• We look for proof we are right and ignore everything that does not fit our own narrative.
• We read situations wrong. Which become our facts creating unreliable foundations.

Our Anti-Bias Customer Discovery process improves qualitative insights generated and interpreted from customer conversations so we can build businesses based on a solid foundation. We directly counter many cognitive biases through the use of a rigorous process, principles of operation, and tools designed to identify and control the impact of cognitive bias. At times this means minimizing how strongly biases are triggered, which biases may be triggered, and applying targeted biases with intention. This allows us to see the complex reality for what it is and design a solution for the real world.

Every early-stage investment has a myriad of considerations, risks, and dynamics to keep straight—but only a small number of them matter. We apply a Venture Design Tool to simplify the complex problem of early-stage opportunity evaluation, focusing attention on what matters most and allowing founding teams to ignore immaterial factors with confidence. We accomplish this by leveraging decision analysis as a design framework (principles, processes, and tools) for making high-quality decisions that marries the art and science of decision-making through a disciplined process that drives high-quality conversations leading to clarity of action.

• What factors impact the value of a venture and by what magnitude
• What are the major risks that should be moderated
• What set of factors do we need to improve to maximize potential value and success

Our framework follows anti-bias principles but does not ignore intuition, pattern matching, or judgment: these are the foundations upon which strategic new venture decisions are made and how our intuition can be validated through data. Our Venture Design Tool naturally improves over time, building on a knowledge base that grows each time we evaluate a company and add to our set of benchmark data. Decision analysis can and does provide a structure that guides our venture design intuition, guides decision, and focuses Anti-Bias Customer Discovery to further improve the model.