Start Up, Spin Out

In the last few weeks, a new take on the incubator called The Start Project has been getting buzz around the interwebs. Whereas the incubators I often write about are indepedent institutions that bring in outside groups, inject some mentorship and/or money, and connect them with new people, this model is all about a core group prototyping a small handful of ideas and then hopefully spinning one or two per year out as their own companies.

The new group is being founded by a bunch of web tech industry veterans who have millions in successful exits (including early photosharing site Webshots) in partnership with Polaris Ventures, a venture firm who run the Dogpatch Labs coworking spaces in San Francisco, Cambridge, and New York City, who will have first dibs to invest in the new companies.

So far as I can tell, the money that Polaris is contributing annually to the project will be used to hire the engineers to build the prototypes of new products, and when the team at the Start Project decides something is actually worth spinning out, one of them may - or may not - leave to function as CEO. In this way, it's clearly a big investment in the ability of the founders to churn out great ideas at a regular clip, rather than their ability to attract good ideas from outside.

It's an interesting entrant into this ecosystem. Whether it will work will be largely based on the quality of the founders. Whether there is an equivalent for the social sector is hard to say. The model is sort of predicated on the low-cost of starting web companies, which doesn't necessarily hold true in the social change space.

That said, I feel like something like this could work in the design for good space. What if Catapult Design, Project H Design, and some folks from places like IDEO and frog had the freedom to incubate and test 12 projects a year and spin out the ones with the greatest potential into either full companies. What if there were patient capital in place both to support the operating cost - effectively research (although hopefully much of this would come out of real life experience) salary and prototyping - and help grow the products that did spin off?

Could be awesome.