Inside Outside

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tom Daly, founder of Relevant Ventures. Tom and I talk about the challenges big companies have when trying to navigate technology and market changes. And what you can do to avoid some of the common obstacles and barriers to innovation and transformation. Let's get started. 
Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive In today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty, join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcript  with Tom Daly, Founder of Relevant Ventures

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Tom Daly. He is the founder of Relevant Ventures. Welcome Tom. 
Tom Daly: Thank you very much, Brian. Pleasure to be here, speaking with you. 
Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. You have had a lot of experience in this innovation space. You worked with companies like UPS and ING and I think most recently, Coca-Cola and a lot of the innovation efforts around that world. So I am excited to have you on the show to talk about some of the new things you're doing and I think more importantly, some of the things you've learned over the years.
Tom Daly: I started doing this work before people called it digital transformation or innovation. The Earth cooled, at about the same time I began getting my head around this. I'm an advertising guy to begin with, and I can't prove it, but I think I created the world's first dedicated 30 sec TV commercial to a website. UPS. 
In that process, I picked up some vocabulary and I learned some things about how websites, quote unquote work, so that when people started calling, you know, back in the mid-nineties wanting to talk to somebody about the web or the internet, the calls came to me. And it was during that process where I started to build new networks within UPS, learn about new things going on at UPS and discover some of the opportunities. It's been a while. 
Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about this ability to turn big ships in small spaces. Talk a little bit about what that means to you and, and what the challenges really are for corporations in, in this whole innovation space. 
Tom Daly: The idea of turning big ships in small spaces actually goes back to my boss's boss at UPS who noticed I was toiling. UPS has a reputation as a conservative company. A little bit unfair, there's some truth to that, but not quite what people think.
It's actually a very, very innovative company and has been for its entire history, but it is collaborative. There's a lot of debate and a lot of discussion. So getting new things done, driving new ideas that my boss to encourage me, you'll get there, Tom, but it's like turning a battleship in the Chattahoochee.
So, I don't know where listeners are, but imagine a pretty darn small body of water and a really big ship that you're trying to turn. So, a lot of back and forth, a lot of kissing babies, shaking hands, and just getting, you know politics, but in a good positive way to kind of really understand interests and concerns and build a better program, a better idea.
So that's the idea, and it was encouraging to me. So, this notion of turning big ships in small spaces, it seems to be, to the degree I have any superpowers, that's the one I'm able to kind of figure out how to help larger organizations figure out how to extract value from, you know, kind of what's coming up around the corner.
Brian Ardinger: Obviously you've seen a lot of changes, whether they're technology changes or business model changes that have happened over the years. Where do companies typically run into the problems when they see something on the emerging horizon and they're saying, we've gotta do something about this. What goes through their mind and what can they do to better prepare for some of these drastic changes?
Tom Daly: The thing companies can do to help themselves most be prepared for big ships in the world that we all live and compete in, is, you know, the twin keys of openness and acceptance. Being open to an idea is really important, but it is only half the battle. 
Being accepting of the implications of those ideas is really key and the classic example would be Kodak. You know, Kodak early in, open to the idea of digital photography. But equally unaccepting of its implications. So they didn't jump in, they didn't do the things they needed to do, and as a result, very different company Blockbuster would fit in that category.
Certainly, they understood the implications of streaming technologies and the web and the ability to distribute content. Given the retail heavy business, the land heavy business, they just weren't accepting, or at least not accepting fast enough to be able to secure position in the next evolution of how people consumed content. So those two ideas, being open and accepting both in equal measures is critical to getting yourself in a good spot. 
Brian Ardinger: Well, you touched on an interesting point. You read about the stories of companies failing or being disrupted, and from the outside it looks like, well, they didn't pay attention, or they didn't know what was going on.
But it seems like, from the stories and the people that I've talked to, it's not that they weren't aware of what was going on. Or the fact that it was going to have a major impact or that they should do something about it. It was more to that line of it, like you said, acceptance of, well, how do we actually do this knowing that we're going to have to change our business models, change the way we make money, change everything about what we currently do to make this radical shift. And it's that classic innovator's dilemma. 
Are you seeing that changing nowadays, now that people are kind of more familiar with the concept of this and, and as more and more changes hit corporations, so you're getting faster at having to adapt to this. Are you seeing the world changing or are you still seeing the same problems exist?
Tom Daly: You know, anybody in this space, Brian, doing what I've been doing for as long as I've been doing it, you need to be an optimist. You need to believe that, you know it's all going to happen. That said, the conversations I'm having today in 2023 are pretty darn close to the conversations I was having in the middle, you know, of the nineties, right?
So, whether it was the dawn of, you know, this graphical overlay on the internet, the web, and when browsers enabled, or the introduction of now advertising and marketing opportunities on the web, which didn't really happen at the beginning of the browser era, that followed a little bit later. Or the introduction of mobile phones and then smartphones and all the, it's the same conversations. And they all come from a place of gaps.
I won't say a lack because in some places there is confidence and acceptance and alignment with what's going on. But it's not uniform within organizations. Right. Then there are pockets of people within departments, IT people, marketing people, s...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with the legendary Tendayi Viki. Tendayi is co-author of the book, The Corporate Startup. He's an Associate Partner at Strategizer and one of the major influencers in the world of lean startup and corporate innovation. On this episode, we explore the evolution of the lean startup movement, how corporations are developing the skills to compete and become more innovative, and we talk about Tendayi's brand new book called Pirates in the Navy.  Let's get started.
Find the Interview transcript and more at insideoutside.io.
Interview Transcript
Brian Ardinger:  Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, and collaborative innovation. Let's get started. 
Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, all the way from across the pond in London, England, we have Tendayi Viki. Tendayi, welcome to the show. 
Tendayi Viki: Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here. 
Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. We had you out in Lincoln at the last IO Summit. For those folks out in the audience, that have not heard of you. He's an author, innovation consultant, Associate Partner at Strategizer. You're the coauthor of the book, The Corporate Startup, which took a lot of the Lean Startup stuff and applied it to big organizations. You've got a new book coming out called Pirates in the Navy, so I could go on and on, but welcome to the show. 
Tendayi Viki: Thank you, man. Thank you. no, it’s an honor to be here.  And I had a lot of fun when I was in LIncoln. It was a fun conference and good people all in. 
Brian Ardinger: Yeah.  I think I want to jump in. You've been in this space, this lean startup movement for a long time, and you really did open the door to a lot of this lean startup stuff that started in the startup world. I think applied it to bigger corporations, this whole innovation process, whether you're doing it in a startup or you're doing it in a bigger company, a lot of the same principles apply. What are the biggest challenges or changes that you've seen over the last decade of how this movement is evolved and what's gotten better? What's gotten worse in the whole process? 
Tendayi Viki: Yeah, so it was a really interesting movement because it came out with an interesting philosophy, which is that one of the reasons why any innovation, either from a startup or from a large company, any innovation fails when people that are working on the innovations starts scaling their idea prematurely. Which means they start building the full product and launching it and investing a lot of resources and taking it to market before they really understand who the customer is. What the customer wants. How to reach that customer. How to earn from that customer repeatedly.  How to retain that customer. How to create value basically in a sustainable way. And also, how to deliver profits and whether customers are willing to pay. And how much they will have to pay. So that was the philosophy meeting, which was test your ideas before you scale them.
The big challenge then became, well, we understand, we agree. How do we do that? And that's where the movement has been sort of incrementally building all the tools and resources you need to be able to do that work over the last year. 
Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about now where you're at. A lot of the times at the early stages when I started consulting or you started consulting, you had to explain the process. You had to get into the weeds of why this was even important. What's changed from that perspective? It seems like people have at least heard of the movement and heard of some of the processes, but maybe they're doing it wrong or there's different assumptions that they've made about the process in the first place. What are some of the things that you're seeing that are challenging in today's world? 
Tendayi Viki: Yeah, so I mean, it's not, it's not as hard as it used to be to convince leaders inside established, successful companies that they need to innovate. I think what's harder is getting them to change how they run their companies day-to-day because some of those processes are so calcified. It's so hard to break into those and have them change. I mean, one of the habits that companies have, for example, it's an annual budget cycle. Things that are on road maps that I executed against. You need to complete a five-year projection with a business case in order to get investments. Those are things that have been harder to break down.
How do you have a conversation with the head of finance that they should invest in an idea, but that idea is not promising them any return. What is the sense of comfort that you can give them with that? You have to sort of take into them like a newer tool that was created to say, think about your investments as a portfolio of investments and think about your returns as returns from a portfolio rather than retrench from one idea. That's the way you allow these to fail, but these are concepts that are just emerging. That we're going to have the conversation with leaders around inside the company. 
Brian Ardinger: I'm curious to get your insight into whether you think this problem should be tackled across the entire organization. Should it be siloed? We've heard experts in different areas tackle this from different sides with different areas of effectiveness. What's your thought on how innovation should be attacked from an organization perspective? 
Tendayi Viki: So that's interesting, especially when you're talking about the Lean Startup Movement, right.  One of the problems we had at the beginning of our movement was being allowed to do the work.  How do we even get the space to be allowed to test ideas, run experiments, do Agile, Design Thinking? And so what we did was we fought really hard to get these spaces created for us because we needed to show that you can actually work this way. And now I think we have a different problem. I think the problem we have now is what we call the problem of success.
If you are in a discussion of whether innovation should happen inside or outside your organization, you have to ask yourself a question. What happens when you find something that works? What happens when you find a business model that works? What happens when you find that idea that works and now you need light resources to scale. And you know what? I've heard people flippantly say, well, the company will just spin me out. Creating a spinout, it's actually more difficult. And requires much more leadership, attention, and legal and procurement than actually just scaling a product. And so even getting spun out requires some integration back into the company so that these decisions can be made.
This decision of whether or not you should do it inside or outside the organization is whether or not if did you do it outside the ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Chris Shipley, co-author of the new book, The Empathy Advantage. Chris and I talk about the changing forces driving the great resignation to the great reset, and how empathetic leadership will be the key to navigating change in creating value today and in the future. Let's get started. 
Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Transcript of Podcast with Chris Shipley, Co-author of The Empathy Advantage.

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. In fact, this guest has been on the show before. It is Chris Shipley. She's the co-author of the new book, The Empathy Advantage: Leading The Empowered Workforce. Welcome back Chris.
Chris Shipley: Hey, I'm glad to be talking to you again.
Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on as always. You've been so gracious to be part of the Inside Outside community for so many years, whether it's speaking in our events or the last time we spoke, you had your first book out, the Adaptation Advantage. And that came out right during the middle of Covid.
And so, I wanted to have you back on with this new book, to talk about what's changed and and where we're going. You've got a new book out called The Empathy Advantage. Tell us a little bit about why you had to write a book coming out of Covid? 
Chris Shipley: As you said, The Adaptation Advantage, our first book with Heather and I, it launched in April of 2020. So, we had all of these plans having finished the book at the end of 2019 to do all the things you do to launch a book. And the world came to a stop. 
We had to adapt ourselves to really get that book out into the world. But what we recognized or what happened is it kind of became this accidental guide to leading through the pandemic, because everybody was without.
We continued to read and write and work on understanding what was happening and changing in the workplace. During the pandemic, what became really, really clear is that the pandemic didn't cause this disruption. It felt very disrupting, but it was, it amplified, it put a lens on what had been happening for a long time.
So, for example, the idea of the great resignation that really took hold about a year ago, people started talking about it. Well, that's been going on since about 2009. The pandemic created; we had a lens to see it maybe more clearly. It wasn't a new idea. 
And so what we realized is that the amplifying effect of the pandemic combined with a workforce that was sent home, given a lot of autonomy, a lot of agency, in how they would do their jobs, they're not gonna come back into an office place and say, oh, you know, all of that stuff that trust you had in me, nevermind micromanagement again, I'll be fine with that. 
A new kind of leadership is required to move people sort of back into a mainstream new frame of work that really embraces the way in which these workers are more empowered, they have more autonomy and agency. And we think that the bottom line is it's a change in leadership that centers on empathy.
Brian Ardinger: I wrote a book. I started writing it right before the pandemic, and this idea of disruption and changes are coming and how do you start preparing for it? And then Covid hits, and it made it real. Obviously, for everybody in a way that talking about it and seeing it hitting in different industries might not have.
But nowadays we're coming back into the place where, so we've had a couple of years of practice, so to speak to how do we become adaptive in that. But it still seems like there's a lot of folks getting it wrong or trying to go back to the old way and that. So, what are you seeing when it comes to this natural pull to try to go back to quote unquote normal. 
Chris Shipley: We're never gonna go back to normal. And I don't think really we ever do go back to a normal, right? We, there's a new normal and it's, it exists for now and then tomorrow it'll be another normal. And that really speaks to being adaptive. 
And so I think one of our challenges is that there's kind of a new mold for leadership, but we're still trying to shove the old ways into it. Right, that being a leader meant I needed to know how everyone worked. I needed to be the absolute decision maker. I needed to be the one who could see everything and guide everyone and manage people to some greater profitability and, and productivity. 
That just doesn't fit in the mold now. So, we need to recognize it if, and everything has, so much, has changed through the pandemic.
That what worked, that got us to where we are as leaders is not going to work to take us forward with this newly empowered workforce. And so, being able to, as a leader say, you know what? I don't know. But let's find out. Let's learn together. Let's work together to find this new way. You know, that's really hard for a lot of folks who have been ingrained with this idea that I'm the boss I should be all knowing.
Well, you know what? You can't know everything. Things are moving way too quickly. There's too much. No one holds all the knowledge to, to get some, you know, to get work done today. And so, creating an environment of, of collaboration rather than a, an environment of competition means that people can come together, and problem find and problem solve in a way that you as a leader become more of a conductor or a coach, or a, of a mentor. that empowers and enables workers rather than commands and controls them. 
Brian Ardinger: And that's a great point. I was working with a company early in the pandemic and they were talking about, well, how do we adapt to this new hybrid approach? And one of the leaders was like, it's not really our core people that are having to adapt much, it's, it's us as managers that have to learn how to manage differently. And look at how do we create productivity and guidance and everything around that communication with our people because they seem to be adapting fine as far as getting the work done. It's us as managers that are having the challenge or trying to adapt on how do we manage differently. 
Chris Shipley: Yeah. I was reading recently in a piece that a large percentage of managers think that they need to closely manage their hybrid workers. That that will make their workers more productive, increase performance, increase profitability, and the data doesn't support that.
Data supports giving people clear direction. Pushing decision making through the organization to cross your team. Being, you know, very clear on desired outcomes, actually produces the kind of performance that, that you're looking for. And in fact, the more there is a sense of oversight, and you know, keyboard tracking and all of the, you must be sitting at a desk in this work space, between these hours that actually tempers performance. It becomes a, you know, a bone of contention frankly, with workers who, like you trusted me a couple of years ago when, when we all got s...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Maisha Leek, Managing Director of Forum Venture Studios. Maisha has had an amazing career in corporate innovation, company building and venture capital, and we talk about the new Venture studio model and some of the things that she's seeing in the world of venture. Let's get started.
Inside Outside Innovation is podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcription with Maisha Leek, Managing Director of Forum Venture Studios

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Maisha Leek. She's the managing director of Forum Venture Studios. Welcome to the show, Maisha. 
Maisha Leek: Thank you Brian. I'm excited to be here.
Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you because you've spent a lot of time in all the different cross sections of innovation. So corporate innovation, company building, venture capital. Can you tell us about your path and journey in this innovation space? 
Maisha Leek: Sure. I'd love to say it was all brilliantly planned. There's a lot of trial error, error, error, error, and then trial again. I actually got into this world in the interesting route. I was for a long time in Washington DC. I was a policymaker and a fundraiser. And in DC we had oversight of most of the science and innovation agencies. So, everything from NASA to Noah to National Science Foundation, which is about the $54 billion proposition, which is a lot of responsibility. 
And we work with your tax dollars, placing the best bets we could to jumpstart the economy or to just position the United States to be competitive. And so that turned in everything from investing in commercial space flight. You see that now with SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and other companies. Those aren't the only ones. And investing in the advancement of batteries, which leads to all of the electric vehicles that we have now and, and sort of their ability to compete with their combustible counter parts.
I knew I was far from all the action that everybody was in, in Silicon Valley and wanted to get closer to it, but by happenstance, met the founder of United Masters. Which was a music and tech company. And did not know what I was doing, except that I was an operator. I knew how to build out teams and build out a company and spent my time doing that. 
And we had the right as Silicon Valley goes investors. So had Ben Horowitz on our board. And David Drummond on our board. And was really active in managing those relationships. And when I was thinking about what to do next after spent some time at that startup, I had an executive coach and friends, they were like, you got to get into venture.
And I'm like, that sounds really boring. And their suggestion I think is really apt for folks who are thinking about it. They suggested I would be good in the space because I had experience to do this on Capitol Hill, operating across a range of subject matters. And knowing to be sort of a generalist that can go deep in certain areas and analyze information and make quick judgements.
My first experience was at Adventure Studio at Human Ventures. And that really influenced what I decided to do after that. And most of my time in the venture space, outside of being an angel investor or participating SPVs has really been in the venture studio space. 
I love it because of the close connection you can have with the founder and the founding team. It's not sort of like write a check. I'll call you once a month kind of thing. We're in it with them. But it also leans into the place where I'm strong. Which is I'm a really great operator and being able to do that with founders and helping them not make the same mistakes I've made in other companies that I've built or independent of that, also gives me great joy.
So, I've done four Venture Studios - Nike Valiant Labs, Human Ventures, New Lab, which are across the series of categories. New Lab is Frontier Technology. Nike is really best to describe with CPG. Human Ventures, which is in large part direct to consumer. And Forum, which is B2B SaaS. And they all have their challenges. But again, I love the model. I'm an evangelist for the model. 
Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about that model. You know, people who've followed the show and that have heard more and more about Venture Studios, and if you've been in the space, you're hearing different flavors of what Venture Studios are. 
So can you talk about what is a venture studio from your definition and what were the differences between the different ones that you've started and where you're at currently with Forum. 
Maisha Leek: The term studio, when it's combined with venture, actually originates from Hollywood, which I did not know. Essentially, like the idea that the studio from ideation to putting it into theaters would be responsible for the build. 
Like they collaborate with some folks, but they wanted to sort of own the vertical of the product that went out to market. And Venture Studios do just that in a venture context. We are building small businesses as fast as possible.
You do different things depending on the category, and there are few ways the model sort of shows up. On one extreme, they're starting with just the idea and there's no founder. On the other extreme, you've built out a business and you're hiring in a CEO. Most of the venture studios I've worked with sort of lean to the front end where we really are interested in and get really excited about the founder. And really help them determine what to build.
And that's really a question of what the problem is that they want to solve. It's not really starting with a solution. And then we take them through a process to de-risk it, diligence it, figure out who the real customers are. What needs to be true for the MVP, and then bring it out to market. Most venture studios do that.
I think that where we get variation is the degree to which the idea is evolved before the team that's going to live with the problem goes out into the world. I think that's where folks tend to have differing points of view about what's most important. And a lot of it's logical. Venture Studios exist because we have a better risk profile than a founder doing it on their own.
I can get into why that is, but you can imagine it's just our expertise. And depending on the Venture Studio and their point of view about what they have to offer in terms of the early ideation, you have some organizations or groups who really want to use every insight that they have and stand up a company. And others who believe that the founder who's taking the risk should do most of that work. That's how folks are making those choices from what I've seen. 
Brian Ardinger: Yeah, that seems to be some of the key differentiation. It's how much additional resources perhaps are put towards it. So, some venture studios are very much hands-on. They have a team of developers that the founder can work with to build out, you know, early-stage prototypes an...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Barry O'Reilly, author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise and co-founder of the new Venture Studio, Nobody Studios. Barry and I talk about the ins and outs of a new model of creating and investing in startups called Venture Studios, and we discuss the power of collaborative innovation. Let's get started.
Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us, as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcript with Barry O'Reilly, Author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise & Co-founder of the Venture Studio, Nobody Studios
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. You may have heard of Barry O'Reilly. He has been part of the Inside Outside Innovation community for a while. He's the author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise. And co-founder of Nobody Studios, which we're going to have him talk a little bit more about that. Welcome, Barry. 
Barry O'Reilly: Thanks very much for having me. Yeah, it's great to be here. 
Brian Ardinger: It's great to have you back. You've followed Inside Outside the community. You've been a huge proponent of what we've done, and quite frankly, a huge mentor to me to understand this whole world of innovation and how do we get through it.
I'm excited to talk about your new venture, which is Nobody's Studios. You've spent a lot of time as an author, as a consultant, working with big companies. Helping really develop the whole lean startup movement. And now you've decided to jump into the investment space and create a a studio where you're gonna hopefully incubate some amazing new startups in the world.
Barry O'Reilly: Yeah. Well, first of all, one thing I want to congratulate you on is your new book. Literally it sits outside in my reading area. There are people that walk past it and see it all the time and pick it up. So, I just want to congratulate you on getting that done, and I really enjoyed reading through it. So, congratulations to yourself on that and highly recommend folks check it out.
So in terms of Startup Studio, the real inspiration for me was, as you said, I've had the chance to work with some phenomenal people over the last number of years. Helping them either identify products that they wanted to build in enterprises or work with scaling startups that were sort of building their business and taking them as far as they could.
And I was enjoying a lot of the sort of advisory side, but I've been sort of doing a lot of that now for, you know, close to a decade. And I was just getting itchy fingers, if you will. You know, I was like helping all these people, like I do a little bit of an angel investing. I, you know, would take sweat equity or be an advisor for these startups.
Help enterprises build products, but I miss a daily grind of sort of being like right in there, building day in, day out. So, I knew I was just sort of looking for the right opportunity for me to bring a lot of my skills to bear and rather than put time in for money, put energy in for equity in these businesses and build something that would fire outlast me if you will.
You know, started to share that with a few people and one of my good friends, Lee Dee, who was actually under advisory board of AgileCraft with me, which we sold to Atlassian and has now become JiraAlign. He introduced me to a guy called Mark McNally. And Mark was based down in Orange County. He was sort of interested or starting this idea of a company called Nobody Studios.
And instantly I was just attracted to the name. Anything that's sort of contrarian and odd. I was like, why did you call this thing Nobody? And you know, part of the mission was we were going to build these companies. We really need to try and like put our egos at the door, if you will, and like be humble, challenge ourselves, work together to build these great businesses.
And really the studio, it in itself is a sort of mix of all the best parts that I believe of the startup ecosystem that I can help with. We're not a VC. We do raise our own capital, but we raise our own capital so we can incubate our companies and ideas that we believe in. But we're not just an incubator.
We have the capital to keep building, and we're not an accelerator where we just sort of put people through a program and give them the Y Combinator stamp and, and they go out the door. So, it's actually bringing all of these components together. We raise our own capital. We have our own ideas that we incubate these companies.
We find founders and teams to help us bring these companies to life. And then the goal is to create really a repeatable, scalable business model and a fundable company where we've incubated something to the point that it's the high-quality business, it's maybe found product market fit, and they're ready to sort of go and get external capital.
And that for us is sort of us doing our job well. But what we're actually optimizing from a business model point of view is to try a aim for early to mid-size exits. So, for those businesses to be actually, purchased, merged into, acquired, maybe even an early I P O, who knows? But that's necessarily our business model.
So, by incubating and building these companies, we're actually looking to exit them for early to mid-stage exits. And that's how we will essentially generate more capital to go back into the studio to build more businesses. 
Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit more about the tactics around this. So nobody's studios you're looking to, I think, incubate a hundred companies over the next five years. That takes a lot of people, a lot of founders, a lot of great ideas. How do you tactically go about starting the studios. 
Barry O'Reilly: To be honest, and we share that with people. Half of the people run away from us, and half of the people run towards us when they hear that. For me, like that's actually the good sign of a big harry audacious goal, if you will.
It's the calling card for some people. It helps sort of people who aren't thinking like that choose a a different option. With having a big audacious goal like that, you know, it forces you to start recalculating how you build businesses. So, when people hear a hundred companies in five years, they instantly think, oh, that's 20 companies a year.
Like, how are you going to do that amount? But actually, it's a sort of exponential scale that we work on. So, on a first year, which was sort of 2021, our goal was actually to create three companies and learn and build both the systems to create companies as well as the actual businesses themselves. And then last year our goal was to try and create five companies, which was almost, if you will, like a 50% increase in company creation.
And, if you sort of start to work those numbers out over the next five years, we basically go from three to five to 11 to 17 to 32, to 43, and then suddenly you're at a hundred, right? So, it's us also building the infrastructure capabilities and the systems to suppor...