A robust model for entrepreneurship

Great! While we are focused on early-stage venture building, our approach to ideation is studio-led. This means that we only source and validate ideas internally. By keeping our ideation process in-house, we can sustain a non-biased mindset amongst our founding team and stay true to our studio thesis. Your idea may align with one of our future opportunities, but keep in mind that we always start from scratch.

Unfortunately, we do not participate in already established companies. Because we focus on building companies from scratch; our approach, resources, and support won't provide the same value to later-stage companies. Still, we are happy to hear from you and provide you with any advice that helps you along the journey.

Builders is independently financed by our studio partners.

All-year-round we are sourcing and validating inspiring ideas for market potential, customer demand, technical feasibility, and more. When sparks inside our idea database (known as our Spark Cellar) look promising, we take our ideas for a data-driven test drive to find the real challenges behind the solution we aim to deliver. We do so by gradually validating the opportunity through desk and field research.

The essence of our validation process is to incinerate assumptions early, move forward with each success and keep iterating fast. Our approach to validation is data-driven, meaning that the more promising data we find, the more of our efforts we will invest. We believe in validating through real, non-biased insights by conducting lean experiments, whether via landing pages, MVPs, interviews or other proven methods.

Finally, when all our validation efforts prove to be right, we get an Entrepreneur-in-Residence involved in retesting our findings and strengthening the business case with even more data.

We know equity is a precious and emotional subject. In the end, the numbers and added value all have to make sense. To ensure interests are aligned, and we become partners; we believe equity should be equally divided amongst founders. The outcome of this division results in an equal split between our studio and co-founders. We believe it is essential that our co-founders hold a majority stake in our company for follow-on investments in the future.

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The commitment to our ventures is related to the stages in our venture building framework. In the early days, our studio team is hands-on involved in building and launching the company. Later on, we gradually start adding people to the founding team, and the involvement of our studio team changes to a more strategic role.

We evaluate founder applications based on our studio thesis and founder requirements. Our evaluation process aims to establish a tentative match between our co-founders, opportunity, and studio.

Our most important evaluation criteria:

• Track-record as a founder or c-level leader in startups or scale-ups.
• Operating experience in B2B markets.
• Skills and knowledge in the field of tech and software.
• Leadership experience with medium-large teams.
• Based in Europe and willingness to relocate to the Netherlands.
• Operating or building experience in SaaS products.
• Long-term vision and commitment.