What is corporate venture building?
Corporate venture building means creating a new company inside or alongside an existing organisation, using its resources, customers and credibility as a starting point instead of raising external capital first.
It sits between an internal innovation project and an independent startup, and it fails for reasons neither of those two prepare you for. The venture has to survive the market and the organisation at the same time, and the second one is usually what kills it.
What does an Entrepreneur in Residence actually do?
An Entrepreneur in Residence is given a mandate to find and build a venture, usually with a corporate sponsor and a deadline. In practice the first months go to defining a problem worth solving, getting into the field to test whether it is real, and building enough credibility inside the organisation to keep the mandate.
The title comes with resources, but rarely with authority. Most of the job is spent convincing people who do not report to you and do not have to say yes.
The Venture Game puts the reader in that seat for seven chapters.
How is a venture studio different from an accelerator or an incubator?
An accelerator takes existing startups through a fixed programme, usually in exchange for a small equity stake. An incubator gives early teams space, support and time, with less structure and less urgency. A venture studio creates the companies itself: it supplies the idea, the first team and the initial capital, and keeps a significant share.
A corporate venture studio does the same inside a larger company, which adds gatekeepers, budget cycles and internal politics to the equation. The three models are often described as if they were interchangeable. They are not, and choosing between them is the first real decision a founder makes.
Where does corporate venture capital fit in?
Corporate venture capital invests the company's money in startups it does not own or run. Corporate venture building creates ventures from scratch. They are often run by the same part of the organisation and are routinely confused for each other.
The work is different, though. One is an investment decision made from the outside, judged on portfolio returns and strategic access. The other is an operating job done from the inside, judged on whether something gets built and used.
What is pretotyping, and why does it come before an MVP?
Pretotyping tests whether anyone wants something before it is built: a fake door, a sign-up page, a QR code that leads nowhere yet. The term comes from Alberto Savoia, who framed it as making sure you are building the right it before you worry about building it right.
A minimum viable product still costs months of building. A pretotype costs an afternoon and answers the only question that matters this early, which is whether anyone would use it at all.
Chapter 3 of the book is built around this, and the learning design sets out the research behind it.
Where can I find a venture builder if I want this journey myself?
Judge them by what they offer rather than by what they call themselves. A venture builder worth joining brings a real problem to work on, access to customers who have it, and a term sheet you can live with. Ask what happens when a venture gets killed, and ask to speak to a founder who left. Those answers tell you more than the pitch deck does.
Two in Berlin are worth knowing. Beam builds logistics startups and recruits founders directly — I am responsible for venture building at Beam, and applications through our recruiting pages are very welcome. Bridgemaker spent years building ventures for established companies and now applies the same build-it-yourself approach to AI transformation.
Beyond those two, venture builders are mostly found through the people already working in the field rather than through directories. The EUVC network is a good place to ask.
Is The Venture Game a textbook or a novel?
Neither. It is a gamebook. You read a scene, make a decision, and turn to the section that decision leads to. There are 79 sections and three possible endings, one of which is walking away.
The underlying material is real venture building practice, but you learn it by making the calls rather than by reading about them — under pressure, with incomplete information, and without the luxury of hindsight.
