The PX Corporate Venture Studio helps large enterprises compete with startups by becoming a startup — outside your four walls. PX is a full-service entrepreneurship solution in a box, where an experienced venture team works at a sprint pace, while the core business functions as a VC. It is where your beta business gets traction.
How the Venture Studio model compares to other support services
Incubating in a studio reduces both the time and the cost associated with the creation of startups. In addition, it encourages the ideas that emerge to be truly disruptive and return greater value in terms of innovation. By exposing a venture to a full stack of support services and making it easier for other investors to enter, ideas get external validation and a multiplier on their odds of success. At the same time, studio ventures are close enough to the core to ensure a strategic return to the mother organization. Go deeper by watching the video to the left.
PX Venture Studio – By the Numbers
new products, services, and experiences validated
new multi-million dollar business created
days from insights to revenues is our record (and we are looking to beat it)
Portfolio
The Venture Studio Process
Framestorming
1 week
Problem-choosing, problem-framing
MVP Sprint (solution)
6-8 weeks
Testing for desirability of concepts and willingness to pay with live users (in 2D/3D)
Alpha Sprint (PoC)
10-16 weeks
Testing with target early adopters for willingness to reuse and refer; prioritizing go-to-market scenarios
Beta Sprint (traction)
12-20 weeks
Testing for resonance and network effects with early majority users; identifying path to profitability
FAQs
How does this work?
Over the last 15 years, we’ve learned a lot from helping corporations build new businesses. Here’s our approach and why our partnership model gets results.
How is PX different?
- Risk-sharing financial relationship: We deploy the venture team at cost, and earn upside dividends based on your market success milestones.
- Startup Plug-ins: PX has all the plug-in utilities in place, from digital prototyping to e-commerce, from web hosting to IP counsel. No waiting, and priced right.
- Off-brand, off-platform: Move startup-fast, and protect your brand and pivotability by having us form an independent entity (which you control as work-for-hire).
- Action, not Analysis: More than 95% of our joint investment goes toward in-market activities — not desk research, analytic models, or PowerPoint decks.
- Pivot, Stop, or Spin-in at any milestone: The funding for a venture phase only goes as far as the next milestone — just like a VC round. Beyond that milestone, there are no guarantees. When you want to halt, spin-in, whatever, just say the word.
How do I get started?
Our job is to reduce the uncertainty and risk as we move the venture to each milestone. Just like a VC, we approach it using a sprint cadence and well-defined investment phases.
1-3 weeks of Framestorming is the first step for any venture. That’s where we do our diligence on the venture opportunity, and you do your diligence on us. We only do Framestorming once, whether it’s before the Need Sprint, or before a Seed Sprint if you already have strong customer need signals. If the venture is a Go for both of us, the Framestorming sprint solidies the In-Market Learning Plan and the success milestones.
From there, we’re in full venture mode, one funded sprint at a time. At each milestone, you get to decide whether you wish to halt, pivot, spin-in, whatever.
Interested in swapping notes and seeing what we can do together? Set up a 15-minute call by clicking here.
Who’s the team?
Who have you worked with?
We have worked on 75+ growth projects with firms across a variety of industries in both the private sector and non-profit sector. Our clients come to us because they are facing dynamic challenges in their industries trying to both survive and thrive and want partnerships built on trust, built for speed and built to de-risk the path from disruptive idea to new revenues. Check out our case studies here.
Clay Maxwell
Managing Partner of
PX Venture Studio
Tim Ogilvie
Founding Partner of
PX Venture Studio
Natalie Foley
Managing Partner of
PX Venture Studio
