Why Do We Need a Guide to Venture Building?
Venture building is a complex field, and clarity about one's role is crucial for success. Imagine a venture builder as a board where established companies and independent entrepreneurs come together to create new businesses. Just like any game, understanding the rules is essential. This guide aims to demystify the process by defining the key vocabulary, optimizing the ergonomics of collaborative spaces, and establishing the principles of collaboration.
Our guide provides clear insights into the essential activities and decisions that should be the focus of venture building management. We address critical questions such as the extent of management's involvement in entrepreneurial activities and identifying the most relevant success indicators. These indicators are vital for evaluating both the performance of the venture builder and its team, ensuring a smooth and efficient venture building process.
Preface
The first notes that gave rise to this book seemed more like letters of help than the manuscript of a business book. In truth, it has been a process of several years of gestation and effort, as stimulating as it is tortuous, the culmination of which is this guide for the Venture Building that you are supporting.
The risk of doing something for the first time, especially when it is something innovative, is that there are no references to base it on or models to build on. In the absence of guides and diagrams, my main source of doubt resolution has been the dozens of emails with legal and tax advisors, calls with experts, reflection meetings with my partners and an endless process of trial and error.Luckily, the experience gave rise to a model, a methodology for the systematic creation of companies: Venture Building, which has proven to work both for me and for other institutions and companies around the world. It is a result for which I am enormously grateful to my co-founders, who in 2016 supported me in the idea of turning our company into a business creator, and to my wife, for putting up with my long work days and trips around the world. .In reality, creating several companies simultaneously is a dream that all successful entrepreneurs secretly harbor in our hearts. When a person has found the keys to success, it is logical that they want to apply these keys to new business opportunities to exponentially increase the impact of their work, innovate more successfully and accelerate their wealth creation process.
In my case, the first successful company I created was Gik Live. Before this company, I had a long series of failures or small successes. But in 2015 I established a company that after one year already had a turnover of more than one million euros and whose success elevated me to a new level of business activity.
Immediately, I felt an urgency to find new ways to exploit the resources I was accumulating and replicate the patterns that had led me to success. As a result of my activity, I met daily with clients, distributors and investors and these interactions presented new ideas, new opportunities that I wanted to pursue and that I felt qualified to undertake successfully.
However, I didn't have time to pursue these opportunities, because the day-to-day running of my company captured all my attention. On the other hand, I didn't know which was the fairest and smartest way to create these new companies: whether the capital to finance the new businesses should come from my assets or from the company's cash flow. Furthermore, it was not clear how to compartmentalize the fruits of the activity of each business unit.
The solution I found in 2016 was the creation of independent teams, dedicated exclusively to pursuing new business opportunities. These teams were not employees of the existing partnership, but rather co-founders who would become partners in the future partnership. In this way, I ensured that the focus of each team's attention was not distracted by the problems of my first partnership and that these people were as motivated as I was.
Following this scheme, while I was running Gik Live, I founded the Gastheiz team in 2016 with two entrepreneurs who had nothing to do with the first company. The following year, I founded the Hola Plate team, with people who also did not belong to the initial company. Subsequently, we launched Stoor.pro with an independent team. In all cases, ownership of shares was distributed between a parent company that held the majority of the shares and the entrepreneurial partners who drive the day-to-day running of the project.
In this way, my partners and I did much more than invest in companies. Both I and my partners were co-founders of these new companies, along with the new entrepreneurs. That is the essence, in my opinion, of venture building: the venture builder is a co-founder in the startup, not an investor or an accelerator. He is a partner like any other, who is involved in all areas of the business and who evolves with the company as it grows.
However, despite enjoying independence, these new companies draw on the legal and financial resources of the first company, as well as the clientele, technology and distribution channels gained over time. Thus, the company takes advantage of resources and delegates tasks such as the creation of the e-commerce web pages of each business, accounting and payroll writing, and supplier management, which we did centrally; while the promotion team focused on the creation of the new product or business development.
In the course of this process, I ran into all kinds of problems. On the one hand, I faced numerous legal headaches related to owning interests in many companies. Additionally, I had to resolve accounting confusion situations related to the flow of money between the different business units. Additionally, it was necessary to protect and compartmentalize the intellectual property generated by these businesses. And of course, I wanted to establish mechanisms to maximize synergies between the new companies and the parent company, so that the group could benefit from the efficiencies.
This book is, to a large extent, a compendium of all the knowledge extracted during this process that contains the solutions to all the dilemmas and challenges of venture building. However, I also want to thank the team of venture builders such as Antai (Barcelona, Spain), We Are Builders (Rotterdam, Netherlands), Byld (Madrid, Spain), Founders Factory (London, United Kingdom), Mamazen (Torino, Italy ), UNIQ (La Massana, Andorra) the experience they have shared with me to complement this guide. Each of these venture building cases has singularities of enormous interest that have allowed me to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each model.
Additionally, I want to thank the information provided by academic institutions such as Mondragon Unibertsitatea, with whom I have collaborated since 2015, or incubators such as Demium Startups, in whose activity I have participated since 2017. In both cases, work in the training and recruitment of entrepreneurs carried out by These organizations are worthy of applause and serve as a reference for the venture building model that I present below.