Next Chapter:Pioneer Square Labs

I’m happy to tell that I’ve joined a band of exceptional players to build what’s going to be one of the biggest bets from Seattle, creating a new way to build startups. Pioneer Square Labs (a.k.a. PSL) is a few weeks old and in a short few weeks, we closed a $12.5M round, built a tremendous team and are already executing on the vision.

tl;dr: I’ll be building a new startup every 3–4 months at PSL. Many of those won’t see the light of day, so it’s likely you will never hear about them, but some (30%? 20%?) will. The overall goal is for us to build, validate and spin off three to four startups a year over a four or five year period. We'll build many startups. Spin off the few that work, or shut them down as they fail or we can’t prove the necessary traction for the next stage of our strategy. We’ll have a team of a dozen or so people, mostly makers & builders, who will be pursuing several parallel opportunities (see below how to join our team).

The tl version…

In the process of leaving EveryMove, I wrote the following:

“One of the things I learned about myself over the last few years is that I’m good at going from 0 to 1 … Take an idea in the back of a napkin and bring it to fruition by putting all the pieces together (UX, software, design, marketing, biz, ops, team, etc.) and many of those I can do it by myself, which makes it incredibly efficient and fast to build a software startup (MVP-ish). If I could use that superpower to create value, that would be ideal.”

That’s the perfect match for a startup founder, or… for a member of the Pioneer Square Labs team! Who would have thought this perfect match would even exist? I didn’t. I reached out to a few friends when I decided to leave EveryMove and someone mentioned that I should reach out to Greg Gottesman, a former managing director at Madrona Venture Group. Greg told me about PSL, and we saw an overlap between my skills, expertise and desires, and what PSL needed, and here I am.

The people at PSL are exceptional. So good at what they do, I feel like I’m the impostor among them and have the most learning to do, which is also exciting. Basically, I found a “job” I could do for the rest of my life.

What PSL does

Pioneer Square Labs is a Startup Studio — we create and launch technology startups.

Your first reaction will be to try to fit us to a pattern, but you shouldn’t, because it’s not like anything else you've seen before (this is what they all say, isn't it?).

We don’t take ideas from others, we don’t have an egocentric genius/guru behind the scene, we are not running a bunch of subsidiaries, we are not investing in other companies.

What we do is generate internal ideas — sometimes with input from domain experts — and we vet them to make sure they fit into our model, we do the necessary customer research, and, if all goes well (which most ideas won’t), we go a build something to test in the market. And once we find traction, we’ll do the hard work of finding investors and a team to take it from an Alpha version into a possible billion-dollar success.

You can divide what we do into two parts: we build & recruit (teams and investors) and we are betting in a few beliefs:

• Ideas are cheap and this team can generate enough of them to keep us busy building and trying new things.
• There are exceptional leaders (future CEOs) out there who haven’t found the right idea to execute on, and they could get excited and behind one of ours.
• It can take 12–18 months for a founding team to go from napkin to product-market fit (and many times it doesn't happen), and enormous amount of energy is spent in fund-raising and team building to get to a point they can raise a decent seed round. We can completely eliminate this step by giving a founding team a validated idea and the introduction to our 13 VCs & 50 angel backers.

Startup Pods

I’m a pod. Well, I’m part of a pod. A pod is an “independent” unit inside of PSL who’ll spend 3–4 months building a startup, validating it, and searching for traction. Once the 3–4 months are over, either we found something and it’s time to transition the work and spin off a startup, or, it’s time to kill it and build something else. We are going to have three or four pods, so at any given time, three or four startups are being built and validated. Once we get to a rhythm, we are likely to spin off a new startup every few months.

A pod will have all the necessary components to build an Alpha version of a product and seek validation from the market, which includes developers, designers, product managers, business analyst, marketing, sale, etc. But since each pod will only have two or three people working on it, it means these folks will wear multiple hats — no different then a founding team at an early-stage startup.

Does the world needs another…

By now, you might be skeptical and thinking: You won’t have enough runway to validate ideas in just a few months. You won’t be able to recruit top talent to run these startups. You won’t be able to fund-raise deals without a team in place. You won’t be able to come up with many big ideas. You can’t build something meaningful in just a few months. Quality early-stage CEOs & CTOs won’t feel it’s their idea.

These are real problems. We have an even bigger list of concerns. No one said this is going to be easy. We have 13 VCs and 50+ Angel Investors who funded us, which definitely makes the path easier to fund the startups. Our network and our investors' network also will help us find and recruit talent. Our team is great, but not perfect. We’ll make many mistakes, and that’s what happens at startups.

3x FTW

I couldn't pass this opportunity to remark it's the third time I'm at a startup funded by Geoff Entress. Geoff was the lead investor at my first startup, Sampa. He was an angel investor at my last startup, EveryMove. And now, not only he's funding PSL he's also working side-by-side with me here. In case you don't know who Geoff is, he's the most active super-angel in Seattle, and I feel privileged to work with him.

Want to join the party?

First, we are looking for a few developers and designers to join the core PSL team. We are also building a database of talent to join the startups we spin off. On that later, we are looking for CEOs, CTOs, and makers. If your peers think you are one of the best they ever worked with and will feel sad if you leave your current work, yeah, we want to talk to you.

If you’re more of a cowboy and love the idea of working on a new project every few months, you are comfortable with a very high-level of ambiguity, wearing many hats and being under a constant deadline, working at PSL core team might be a good fit. If you like to dive deep, immerse yourself, become an expert, scale and optimize things, building a long-lasting value for humankind, working at one of our spun-off startups is likely a better match.

Now that I told you what I'm doing, and I'm settling into this new thing, I'll get out of my cave, socialize more, and host Open Office Hours again — schedule time to meet with me for 30 minutes. Stay in touch on Twitter or email.