We build companies instead of funding them. Six months in, here is what the studio model actually costs you
I run Founder Ventures with Brian Flynn, who has built 26 companies and exited 10 of them. I do product and engineering. He does strategy.
The model is simple to describe. We pick a problem that somebody else has already proven people pay to solve. We find a founder who wants to own that company. They hold the majority of it. The studio holds a minority and runs the machinery underneath: outbound, discovery, competitive intelligence, infrastructure, hiring.
Three things I did not expect.
The idea is the cheapest part. I used to think picking was the hard bit. Picking takes a rubric and a week. Getting a founder from "I am interested" to "I am building this full time" takes months, and no rubric helps.
Shared infrastructure only pays off after company three. For the first two companies I was building pipelines for a sample size of one. Every generalisation I made was wrong. The outbound system only started earning its keep when a second founder plugged into it without me touching anything.
I was the bottleneck on everything. At one point I counted the roles I was holding: builder on two products, recruiter, infra migrator, legal sourcer, content writer, ops admin. We had a network database full of people and nobody onboarded, because onboarding went through me. That one is on me and it took an embarrassingly long time to see.
What I would keep: writing the kill criteria on day one, before anyone is emotionally invested. Ours is a revenue threshold on a fixed clock. If a company does not clear it, we stop and re-evaluate. I have watched people walk a dead idea around for years because nobody ever wrote down what dead looks like.
What I would change: I would have hired someone to own onboarding in month two.
Happy to answer anything about the model, the picking, or the parts that are still broken.