Why build a venture studio inside MIT?

Spoiler - it's about better tough tech translation

I was about three years in at MIT running the Innovation Initiative¹ when a startling realization dawned on us.

Here we were, amidst the buzzing hive of technological breakthroughs, yet a critical piece of the innovation puzzle was missing.

We were excelling at venture creation, true, but were we really architecting these ventures from the ground up? Were we meticulously crafting their DNA, or were we merely onlookers as they organically, sometimes aimlessly, sprouted around us?

This epiphany inspired us to scour the commercial world for venture-building models and led to the inception of Proto Ventures, a purpose-driven venture studio nestled in the heart of MIT.

So, what exactly sparked this realization? 🤔

We began understanding that venture building across R&D organizations and especially within academia has been based on serendipity. It depended on a perfect storm: a principal investigator with a commercial bent, a lab buzzing with entrepreneurial spirit, a roadmap to navigate the nebulous terrain from ideation to incorporation, and above all, the nerve to venture into the unknown, risking secure, fulfilling research careers.

However, more often than not, potential breakthroughs would gather dust on the shelves of missed opportunities, never quite finding their path to the real world.

Enter full-stack venture building: our mantra and our mission. It is the holistic crafting of ventures from the molecular level. 

Why full-stack?  Simply, because we realized the need for end-to-end ownership of the entire venture-building process. From the blank slate of a general problem space, to the discovery of viable new ideas, to the incorporation of a proto-venture to the raising of investment capital – there is an opportunity to create a systematic process that is a complete venture building engine.

Once we identified a gap inside MIT, we looked to the commercial world for inspiration on how to fill this void. We found it a few doors down in a venture studio called Flagship Pioneering, birthplace of Moderna and many other impactful ventures. Their approach? Proactive ideation, which was just what we were looking for. They didn't just await the knock of a company promising an mRNA platform, they sought to build it, turning over every stone their MIT roots had to offer, seeking resonance between groundbreaking tech and its market avatar.

That's precisely the alchemy we're seeking to achieve with Proto Ventures. And we plan on writing the book on tough tech translation.

There’s so much more to this journey, and we're chronicling every step. Stay tuned as we delve deeper into the DNA of venture building in our upcoming posts.

1. Now MIT’s Office of Innovation; https://innovation.mit.edu