What is a venture studio?

boisei labs is a venture studio, meaning that we serially create companies. At any given time, our active ventures are spread across various stages of the ideation, development, launch, and growth phases.

Our defining scope is ‘tech for good’ - particularly social good and green tech. We are presently one of only a few venture studios worldwide with a tech for good focus, and we are a registered Pennsylvania Benefit Company.

Our ultimate goal is to help achieve scaled, positive impact. We’re doing it by building for-profit startups with market-driven economics. While we don’t believe that such a model is sufficient for addressing all complex societal and environmental problems (and we do also make room for some public goods efforts), we see it as boisei’s strongest opportunity for scaling impacts with the resources we have in hand.

Why work for boisei labs?

Most employees of boisei labs will develop expertise across many different business sectors at a given time, with a steady cadence of new and exciting ventures. We will also have Venture Fellows; these employees will be primarily focused on developing a single venture while simultaneously benefitting from the broader environment and support from our core venture studio team.

The world is moving fast; so are we. As such, our working environment is dynamic and startup mentality is a must (see the section below for what we mean by this, specifically). All employees participate in creative processes and are empowered to help our ventures be impactful.

boisei labs’ major advantages include that we have the capital in hand to pursue our best ideas aggressively. We do not need to raise early-stage funding for our venture companies, and boisei labs has no outside investors who may otherwise expect timely returns. This permits us to focus solely on execution and affords us flexibility with respect to the ambitiousness of the projects we take on and how expansively we pursue them.

Willingness to make mistakes

boisei labs is hyper-protective of its transformative capacity and thus must be willing to make big mistakes in its process.

The world is overflowing with wicked environmental and societal problems. Those problems will likely be worse in 5 and then 10 years from now. Yet there are also still amazing + inspiring things, places, people, and opportunities all around us. Included among them is the opportunity that we (and others) still have to make positive differences in the face of those challenges via building tech ventures.

With intentionality, boisei labs is operating, growing, and evolving to take big chunks out of some of those problems. We would rather fail hard than not take this chance. While our venture studio setup is designed to help us ultimately succeed, we embrace the risk of failure and recognize that at the very least, some things in the interim will be ugly.

Fostering creativity and excellence

We believe that to address our world’s current (and anticipated future!) wicked problems, builders will need to develop transformative technologies. To prime boisei labs for transformative building, we must simultaneously foster creativity, fight against conformity, and confidently execute at the highest level.

To be able to achieve our highest potential level of success, we need a system where the most creative, skilled, driven, and mission-aligned people (who we explicitly look to hire!) are empowered to do their best work, and through which all team members can collectively achieve more than the sum of what they individually would have.

We think that this requires - to the greatest possible extent - avoiding the slogs of process and procedure. The concern here is not only about time. That’s definitely part of it. But the deeper concern is about creativity and autonomy.

Prior to implementing processes that could chip away at empowering creativity and excellence, we think deeply about the mechanisms underlying  that outcome, and act with care. We have found and we will continue to find situations where the absence of process is hurting more than helping. And in such cases we’ll bring it in, but still using the lightest touch possible.

Relatedly, we aim to provide each boisei employee with a fair opportunity to find and implement their own distinctive ways (while still working effectively with others) to achieve top results and add strong value to our operations. We provide informal and formal feedback when expectations for work quality and/or productivity are not being met. In the course of that process we may suggest specific approaches that the employee could consider taking to help address the concern; yet we still want everyone to be empowered to do things differently than others on the team would, to ultimately achieve something better and/or different in a good way.

We have very high expectations and results do ultimately need to arrive. But we fundamentally support different ways to achieve this and we will demonstrate at least moderate patience for promising developments of such.

Our version of ‘startup mentality’

As a venture studio, boisei labs is effectively a startup of startups. There are certain, otherwise relatively common, aspects of culture in startups that we strongly reject. Specifically: those that promote toxicity, demand overwork leading to burnout, and sacrificing ethics and quality for speed and growth.

Simultaneously, we regularly reference the need to embrace other aspects of startup culture or to be in startup mode. This section addresses the apparent juxtaposition and expands on our expectations.

There are three main aspects of ‘startup culture’ that we like. First, flexibility and willingness among employees to dynamically contribute across a wide spectrum of venture building needs. This need is compounded for boisei since we are working on multiple venture companies simultaneously. Second, proactive ambitiousness from each employee in terms of what they complete individually. Third, all of us working in sync so that our collective whole is greater than the sum of its parts, altogether leading to rapid inward and customer-facing launch cycles.

In general, we expect each boisei employee to exhibit a strong hunger for rapid, agile ideation, research, design, and development. We expect this to be a natural state of being, i.e. where these company-level expectations are matched or exceeded by the intrinsic approach of each individual employee, not something requiring pushing and reminders and/or micromanaged timeline tracking/ structure to achieve.

Career development and advancement

For boisei labs employees who thrive in our startup culture environment and consistently make strong contributions across our ventures, we have two internal paths for career advancement:

• First, we will aggressively increase pay to maintain highly-competitive salary compensation, alongside increasing autonomy in how to continue contributing to our fast-moving, challenging, and impact-motivated work. Employees who contribute to building and scaling new ventures will also receive stock options incentives in those companies.

• Second, a skill-matched employee could opt to matriculate into a full-time executive role in one of boisei labs’ fledgling (i.e. spin-out stage) venture companies - with compensation then partly based on larger equity incentives in that company. If so, then the venture executive would likely continue on with that company if and when boisei labs’ majority equity position is sold.

Though we aim to make working for boisei labs as attractive and fulfilling as possible, we also recognize that specific career-related aspirations and/or other factors may sometimes lead our employees to consider different opportunities. We support this reality. We encourage ongoing discussions regarding career goals and we pledge to facilitate connections in those directions and to serve as positive references for strong-performing employees.

State College, Pennsylvania

State College is a lovely, wonderful small city that is highly regarded for its livability. The region has a healthy and expanding startup culture, with multiple highly-active incubators and other facilitating organizations. We also benefit from connections in nearby Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York City, and more.

boisei labs aims to contribute positively to this ecosystem, including via a showcase event and meeting space in the downtown State College office that we are presently developing. We will ourselves host regular events in addition to making this space available for periodic use by other tech for good startups and organizations. 

Our status as a venture studio with physical adjacency to Penn State University is a big potential advantage. We are not dependent on Penn State in any way, but we do see major win-win benefits in having a strong relationship with such a research powerhouse. We are working to develop an IP licensing pipeline with Penn State’s Office of Technology Transfer and the University’s faculty and student inventors to enhance our venture company portfolio.