Startup studio

Startup studio, also known as a startup factory, or a startup foundry, or a venture builder, is a studio-like company that aims at building several companies in succession. This style of business building is referred to as "parallel entrepreneurship".

Idealab, founded by Bill Gross in 1996, was one of the first to introduce the 'incubator industry', and has started over 75 companies. Idealab was founded to test many ideas at once and turn the best of them into companies while also attracting the human and financial capital necessary to bring them to the market.

The startup studio trend had really begun to gain momentum around 2008. Today, there are over 65 startup studios across the world, of which 17 have been built since 2013.

There are several types of startup studio models.

A builder startup studio focuses on creating and developing a company, mostly from internal ideas.

Examples of this model are Rocket Internet, eFounders,The Combine, TechnoFounders and Makeshift in Europe, Interplay Ventures and Giant Pixel in the US, Stanley Park Ventures in Canada, 25Fifteen in Australia and RE.A.PRA in Southeast Asia. This is the true startup studio model, offering balance between investing funds and resources to turn ideas into companies.

Unlike business incubators and accelerators, venture builders generally don't accept applications concerning their portfolio of companies, and the companies instead "pull business ideas from within their own network of resources and assign internal teams to develop them."

According to VentureBeat, Nova Spivack was "part of the early technologists who pioneered the venture production studio model. He wrote about the model in 2011 at a time when most of its production elements were still in gestation. Nova actually invented the Venture Production Studio term, calling it a 'new approach to building startups.'"

Investor startup studios bring in early-stage external startups and help them grow by providing them both funds and expertise. US-based studios Expa, Betaworks and Science, Inc. fall in this category.

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