With Sam Dix, my colleague and co-lead at the Cornell Tech Startup Studio, I help companies turn their expertise into businesses they can own. You may have a service that AI could make practical to deliver, or an idea that needs a founding team. We join you in developing the product and finding the customer who will pay for it.
We run each venture skunkworks-style, with a small team working on the opportunity apart from the day-to-day business. The team involves a prospective customer early, while their feedback can still change what we build. We can build it as a product line inside your company or as a separate venture.
You can start with an AI strategy workshop, where your team sees working prototypes built on its own business and picks the ideas worth testing. Most recently, a global advisory firm valued at $2.3 billion started this way, and we now work with its business units to build and test the ideas from its offsite.
If you already see the opportunity, we can start there.
See the workshopsWe both co-lead the Startup Studio at Cornell Tech, where we've helped incubate hundreds of startups. Every team tests its assumptions with users and keeps a shared record of its research and decisions. With that record, coaches can follow each team's thinking and pass what one team learns to the others.
We are now turning our coaching into instructions agents can use, so more teams get the questions a coach would ask in office hours. Inside your company, we use the same approach so small teams can work in parallel and reuse what the others learn.
We expect an idea to change once customers get involved, and we help the team work through those changes.
We can begin with an opportunity you already see or develop one from a workshop.
We help the team specify who would buy the service and what they would use it for. We examine the alternatives that customer has today and what your company could do better. When there are several opportunities, we recommend starting with three to five and comparing what we learn.
We work on the prototype with your team, choosing the technology around the job the customer needs done. Prototypes range from teams of AI agents to small models trained on your company's approved knowledge. Your experts review the result as we build, and we keep the scope narrow enough to learn whether the service is useful before committing to a full product.
As the business takes shape, we help decide who needs to lead it and what capabilities the team needs. We can bring in founders from the Cornell Tech network where appropriate, including when an opportunity should become a company of its own.
We work in one of four ways.
We coach a CEO, COO, CMO or practice leader while their team builds and tests an idea. Leaders can learn through the work or hand more of the execution to us.
We work with a small team inside one unit as it builds prototypes and tests them with clients, using approved knowledge and tools.
We coach several executives or teams at once while each works on its own opportunity, and they share what they learn.
We start with the operating team, run a focused experiment in one portfolio company, and take what works across the portfolio.
We agree on the evidence for continuing before spending the next round of money. Most of the investment comes after a customer pays for a pilot.
The team needs a sponsor with authority to fund the work, and enough time from the people who understand the customer. We agree on those commitments at the start. Your engineering team or production partner takes responsibility for the finished product.
One customer works closely with each team as a design partner. We learn from their existing workflow what the service has to fit into and where it needs to improve the experience.
Teams share useful knowledge and software, with your experts deciding what others can reuse. We maintain a record of experiments and decisions so leadership can follow the work. Customer permissions control who sees what. We run the first tests on public or synthetic data, or on data approved for that purpose.
We can work for a fee or for a lower fee plus equity in each venture. We can also take a fee with an option to co-invest, and we settle the scope and terms before the first investment review.
When we want to build the venture together, we can co-fund it and agree early on how each party will contribute and participate in the business.
Send the opportunity you're considering to alberto@escarlate.com, along with what you've learned from customers so far. We can discuss who would join the team and whether it makes sense to build together.