The role of a startup studio is to increase the speed and probability of success when building businesses. They do this by developing vertical-specific operating blueprints that foster a structured approach to company creation. These blueprints get put to use in multiple build-cases concurrently, being constantly recycled. This uniquely entails that the studio becomes more capital efficient with time, because the one-time cost of developing such blueprints is spread over more build cases.
Think for instance of startup Founders who have built multiple unicorns. The probability of building a billion dollar company is well below 1%, so naturally the odds of doing it more than once are extremely low. You can think about these Founders as a startup studio in themselves. They have a tried and tested blueprint for all the operational processes of building a company, and they use these processes and frameworks in vastly different contexts.
That’s not to say that every company should aim to become a unicorn, in fact, we lean towards the opposite, but it says that processes and frameworks have explanatory power over company creation success.
In our view, you need a lot of foundational pillars to establish a repeatable company creation process.
This is a non-exhaustive list, so you can imagine how time consuming and costly it is to document and implement all these processes in the studio. During this time, focus is diverted from what’s actually important: building great companies. It also results in a bloated team with many functional specialists who are not entirely focused on building.
Bifrost Studios is a startup studio platform that provides the core operating blueprints to establish and run a startup studio. We do not provide the ‘best process’ for any type of studio, but we provide ‘a process’ that can be adapted and upgraded with time. By doing so, we accelerate the timeline of starting a startup studio from +1 year to three months or less.
We break these blueprints into two buckets: company creation and functional processes.
Category
Portfolio Company Services
The objective of our company creation process is to provide a tested, sequential model that our studios can follow from day one. With time, our studios upgrade this process in the context of their vertical focus. You can read more about our purple ocean and other frameworks here. (LINK TO SERVICE LIBRARY ARTICLE)
bifrost solve
We are solving for the functional processes of startup studios and their portfolio companies with multiple solutions. There are basically three layers of complexity here, and each warrants its own type of offering.
Firstly, there is a lot of grunt work in any new business, so we develop and compile the most important basic templates. This is stuff like employment contracts, company web pages, and setting up the basic systems tool stack.
Secondly, we take on specialist tasks so the studio doesn’t have to hire FTEs or use external agencies. We are particularly advanced when it comes to recruitment, where we take on the end-to-end hiring process of our studios, including headhunting, interviewing, running the process, and overall hiring strategy. We are also advanced in the financial domain, where we do financial modelling and investment advisory. Thirdly, we have an expert product-minded entrepreneur on our team who can guide ideation, validation, and all-things product.
Finally, we are strategic and emotional partners to the studio Founders. We run workshops, provide sparring, and engage directly in the studio operations when we can add value.
All of these offerings are compiled in an ever-expanding service library, that consists of over 20 basic and bespoke services today. We believe that these services are an essential part of our model, so studios do not pay to access them. In fact we are happy to see them use them all the time, because that confirms we are creating value for our partners.
We are creating a public community of company builders and also run a tight-knit group of studio partners who meet each quarter. We have found this to be an excellent source of learning about processes and tactics that can be repurposed in the context of other studios. With time, we expect this learning effect to compound, as our services are being put to use, upgraded, and documented continuously.