Reflecting on my startup journey — innovation, growth and exit
This story is about my experience joining a corporate innovation incubator, pitching a successful venture, raising corporate venture capital, and scaling an enterprise software company. The lessons in this story are my reflections from the orientation of a design executive navigating startup challenges—some unique to this corporate venture, and others universal. The clarity of hindsight masks the messy business of creating and running a startup, and calling out any individuals is not my intent—decisions are often the result of many points of influence. That said, here we go!
In 2014, I joined BCGDV, an acronym for Boston Consulting Group Digital Ventures—we’ll call the group DV hence forth. DV was born from an unlikely alliance between some renegade business strategists and design thinkers who successfully turned around Sports Authority (before it failed again). The DV founders could see that many corporations were failing to innovate in the face of existential threat and, even with all their access to capital, couldn’t successfully compete simultaneously with the tech giants moving into their space and the stream of VC-backed startups looking to disrupt them. They set out to prove a business thesis that corporate investment in external, independent startup teams, in which they own a meaningful stake, would be more effective than internal innovation efforts. The end goal being the startup disrupting their corporate owner on their own terms. Many at DV were so bullish about this thesis that they’d often refer to the opportunity as an “unfair advantage.”
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