Why I’m becoming a VB
Venture Builders and Startups studios are on the rise. For me, it’s the next place to be, let me explain you why.
I’ve been lucky to work for entrepreneurs early in my career, who have helped me turn into an entrepreneur. After having been through all cycles of entrepreneurship (starting from scratch, building, developing, selling and integrating), I was searching for my next step to give back to future entrepreneurs.
The obvious path was to become a VC (Venture Capitalist). A Venture Capitalist is a capital allocator : you choose which companies to fund with others’ people money, and then you sit at their board and give some advice. Nothing wrong with VCs (I am myself a Limited Partner in 2 Ventures Capital funds: Newfund and ISAI), but that was not it.
I was then naturally thinking of a different space: VB
VB stands for Ventures Builders (aka startup studios). The word says it all. VBs are building startups from scratch, providing “sweat”, ie capabilities to start something which sounds more like a problem to solve than like a company. In a word, VBs are capital operators.
But how come “sweat” can be trendier than cash?
3 reasons can explain why “sweat” sounds glamorous:
- Co-founding startups (that’s what you do when you’re a VB) is more gratifying than financing companies, sitting on their board and providing a piece of advice from time to time ;
- If you want to test your creative skills, the VB Zero to One radical innovation is an unparalleled fulfillment. Provided you can stomach the high variance that goes with it ;
- On the financial front, the upside is potentially much higher as you start investing in companies whose value is close to 0. Any doubt about the model? See Efounders phenomenal success in Europe or Y Combinator in the USA.
Afer being a Senior Advisor for 18 months, I joined full time OSS Ventures, founded by Renan Devillieres, Charles Bouygues and Michael Valentin in 2018. Our mission is to create SaaS Startups for Manufacturing and bring Startupers with IT, Design, Data Science skills to the industry. We chose this vertical positioning because:
- Manufacturing is one the last frontier of Digital transformation, with a heavy technological debt.
- France needs to revive its Industry. We need smarter factories, more ecological and able to provide local jobs in territories where they are much needed.
- Manufacturing is underinvested. While manufacturing represents roughly 15% of France GDP, it collects only 8% of financement.
Bottom line: Manufacturing might be the XXIst century largest Blue Ocean!
We believe OSS Ventures strong assets and unique positioning will ensure us a great future. With incredible founders, we’ve already launched several companies such as Valomat, Fabriq, Mercateam, Kraaft, MyC, Oplit and many more to be launched. We,
We aim to be here for years to come.
To do so, we gathered a great team with an ever increasing community of founders, backed by individual investors being entrepreneurs and/or industrials. To cap it all, we partnered with partnered with OPEO, one of the most advanced consultancy in Lean Manufacturing.
Oh, and one more thing: if you want to become an entrepreneur, you know who to call.
Jean-François Marti, OSS Partner, and freshly minted Venture Builder
