Incubators are all the range these days and startups in general are even bigger. Everyone wants to create a business and be THE FOUNDER and be THE BIG GUY. The startup world is the silicon valley or alley is based on “all-stars”. The hype is enormous with numerous competitions: Tech Stars, Pitch Games, Fund Raising Numbers, and now a real life TV show. The idea of course is simple: small, lean and nimble – take no prisoners Jack Bauer style startups — can win big in these games.
AB Dev Labs goes the other direction from the hype. We want to build super teams rather than have 1 or 2 super star individuals. We have a cooperative incubator that accepts new projects in return for some exchange of money, equity, and your own time. Yes, your own time on our projects. That’s the crucial difference between us and other incubators. We don’t just want your ideas and your own project — we want you to join our teams. You get brought into our incubator by wining enough of our team members.
Another aspect of our coop model is a hybrid model for development. We work together with offshore developers and pair them with onshore development. We pair offshore marketing with onshore marketing. The idea is help optimize the lean startup process by building things faster. We also share knowledge between our onshore teams and offshore teams, so we teach what we learn. They get better, we get better.
The advantage of our model is it brings a larger set of resources to bear towards the goal of making products successful. Both the very big companies and the very small, highly successful Startups already have people there to help. The small startups use a huge network of friends, advisors, and just people to help on every problem. Big companies maintain a large cadre of internal specialists to worry about everything from interesting Computer-Science problems, to lawyers, and to great sales staff. We’re going to build a large collective of teams who want to build many great startups.
The next decade we predict will come from larger collectives that try to innovate. It’s going to be more difficult to be a lone wolf – Jack Bauer entrepreneur. We see how large companies have been very successful at running large projects (IPhone, Microsoft Windows, the Google Search). And we also see how innovation from elite co-founder/startups leads to great things. But the times are changing and the landscape is becoming more crowded and more difficult. Everyone and their friends are quitting large companies to hit it out on their own.
So we have developers who can build stuff. We have growth hackers ready to market it. And we have designers ready to finish a design. And we want to build great teams of people to work together on startups. If you are interested in joining us with your ideas or working with us, drop me an email.