Experiments in Innovation

Incubation and whitespace ideation @ MSFT Scale. Early-stage concept iteration with founders leaving FAANGs. Adventures in Seed-stage startup Boards. Open-building an Angel Fund.

Welcome, pour a brew, and settle in.

2022 is an exciting year for running innovation experiments in a handful of different creative startup ecosystems I’m involved in and the best way to learn is to build in the open.

Here are the broad sets of experiments I’ll be writing about and thinking through in this Substack:

1. Microsoft OCTO Incubation: (website link to come, we’re not external facing yet)

   1. Building an internal corporate incubator to scale.

   2. Streamlining the operational model, driving toward near-external startup building speeds and capabilities.

2. Intract NFT Mint and GTM Strategy

3. Venture Out Cohort Pipeline and Sourcing for Forum Ventures B2B SaaS

4. Setting up Fizzy Ventures, an Angel investment vehicle, and its investment strategy.

5. Writing a Startup Operations book for Holloway.

Part of working through these experiments will be writing up summaries of all the books I’m reading in the space and applying the lessons in those books to our experiments here.

This will start out as a weekly publication on Friday mornings. Let me know what you’d like to see in this space!

In the meantime, tell your friends!