What “Big Corporate Me” can learn from “Scrappy Startup Me”
Humble beginnings, a small number of founders, employees who together defied the odds, and significant (financial) constraints lies at the root of every large organization. Yours too.
But founders exit, budgets grow and complexity increases.
So how do you teach your now enormous corporation to think like a scrappy startup? Christopher "CB" Brenchley has seen both sides of the coin, and shares his deep experience of doing just that.
The time to start is now. Enjoy.
By Elke Boogert, Mach49 Managing Editor
What “Big Corporate Me” can learn from “Scrappy Startup Me”
Over half my 30-year career was dedicated to working for large multinationals, in corporate innovation and execution. Then I spent my next decade as a repeat, bootstrapped and funded founder. If I had a time machine, I’d teach “big corporate me” from the 2000’s the startup mindset and methods to better build and launch new products or services – and drive even greater business and societal impact.
Famed Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen claimed that 95% of the 30,000 new products introduced each year, fail to hit the mark. The Product Development and Management Association pegs the new product failure rate between 40% and 50%, depending on the industry the company is in.
Whichever metric above aligns most with your business, the financial and opportunity costs of new product and service failures are staggering—but avoidable. Beginning in the mid-90’s, at the advent of the commercial Internet, I spent the first 18 years of my career driving corporate innovation and execution for large multinational companies. As a B2B product leader and then business leader, I harnessed a novel and rapidly-growing technology system called the World Wide Web to unlock organic growth and create enterprise value.
Most recently as an entrepreneur-in-residence advising startup teams. Up to the brink of the next major, and even more disruptive, technological shift we’re experiencing today: Generative AI. Looking back almost 30 years on my own hybrid journey, as I shifted from corporate roles to founding and leading startups, I learned that speed, focus, and customer obsession are game-changers.
There is a lot that the early, “big corporate me” could learn and benefit from my later experience as “scrappy startup me.”
And especially so, when I think about how today’s large corporations might improve their chances of success in building and launching new products or services within their core business—by finding and reviving their inner startup.
Here are five startup insights to consider when embarking on the new product or service building journey inside a large corporation. All resonate with my own, personal experiences.
Impact is everything. Define. Align. Execute.
In the startup world, impact isn’t just a goal; it’s the fuel that drives the mission. And the more bold, ambitious, and world-changing it is, the better. At every stage, startups focus on defining clear outcomes to drive a new venture forward—whether tied to customer discovery, product, user engagement, customer acquisition and retention, first revenue, early hires, or product-market fit.
Startups prioritize execution at speed, making sure each team member’s actions ladder up to the given objective while granting everyone a high degree of trust and autonomy. For large corporations, ensuring senior executive and cross-functional alignment on desired impact while eliminating unnecessary micromanagement is key and can accelerate corporate teams’ ability to bring impactful solutions to market faster, better, and more cost-effectively.
At Mach49, we believe that defining and aligning all stakeholders involved in any significant business initiative—building new ventures in adjacent markets, launching new products or services within the core for current customers, standing up new business units, opening up new distribution channels, to name just a few—is paramount for winning execution.
By working collaboratively with client leadership and executive stakeholders to define what the desired ambition and material outcomes are across these dimensions and how they will be measured, we drive alignment on what success looks like from the very beginning.
This north star helps new product and service teams stay aligned with leadership and sponsors as they execute toward that shared vision—guided by an actionable, measurable, and ever-evolving impact roadmap that works in tandem with their business and operating plans.
"Customer insight is the currency of credibility." - Drew Harmon, Mach49
Startups know that without deep, continuous customer insight, empathy is difficult to achieve and credibility is impossible to sustain. For large organizations, leveraging customer insights to refine products is crucial to relevancy and survival.
The challenge is to harness these unfair advantages to uncover specific, validated insights that guide new product initiatives by regularly “getting out of the building” and into the worlds of those customers whose problems you’re trying to better understand and ultimately, solve.
By embedding customer development rigor into each phase of building new products and services, large organizations can achieve the customer-centricity that startup teams live by—and that today’s competitive landscape demands.
From pain point discovery; through validation of value propositions to solve that pain; to the minimally-viable solution to build first and for which segment; a continuous focus on gaining and synthesizing first-hand customer insight and experiences helps minimize internal biases and validate assumptions across all aspects of a new offering. Moreover, the customer stakeholders you’re engaging with early on in the journey are likely first pilot adopters and paid customers down the line—building up your CRM starts now.
Work your new product or service vision from the future backwards
One of the most powerful tools in a startup’s kit is “future-back” thinking—envisioning the successful outcome, then working backward to map out high-level hypotheses for the learning and outcomes needed to reach that end state. For corporates, this approach offers a way to clarify the vision amidst complex processes, legacy structures, and the politics, inertia, and antibodies often found in large organizations.
By defining a clear future state and working backward, teams can align on a progression and stage gates that keep focus on what truly drives growth rather than overreacting to immediate pressures, near-term challenges, or turf-driven organizational tensions.
As new product and service teams develop their longer term vision—aligned with the impact framing roadmap above—they can then work back from that desired end state to identify the product or service with the smallest number of features or attributes that address the customer pain and deliver the value proposition validated by customer insight.
A recent venture I advised at inception is attacking the growing epidemic of human loneliness. Their vision centers on building a global marketplace to help commercial real estate owners reinvigorate un- or underutilized spaces through offering on- and offline communities exceptional and affordable in-space experiences. Working backwards from the future, their journey began with finding a partner with a single space, manually managed by the team, with little to no technology platform investment and modest marketing spend.
They are now currently on pace to be among the top decile of startups with revenue generated within the first 18 months of launch. Starting with this sharp, highly-focused product wedge helps teams to get in market faster, acquire early customers and end users, determine what’s working and what’s not working, and start providing value that can accelerate the path to learning, first revenue, and product-market fit.
Place small bets. Test. Learn. Iterate. Repeat
Startups thrive on agility—constantly testing, learning, and iterating. Large organizations can apply the same principle by placing small, calculated bets that provide key learnings and validate assumptions. Each test offers data, and each iteration builds upon that knowledge. This approach reduces the stakes of failure while setting a strong foundation for scaling successful concepts.
A relentless commitment to iteration ensures that you are removing the most amount of risk on new product or service success on the least amount of investment—in both time and capital. All too often, large corporations give new product or service teams a significant amount of investment and a relatively long time horizon to succeed or fail.
While patient capital can certainly be an unfair advantage, holding teams to milestone- or outcome-based funding drives multiple opportunities for go/no-go decisions and more rigor on killing off weaker concepts sooner, maximizing the benefit of such discipline.
Contemplating the odds of new products or services hitting the mark over time, it makes more sense to work through more concepts in a shorter period of time, unemotionally evaluating which ones merit continued focus and investment. The more shots on goal you can take on the same amount of time and money, the greater the odds you will score and score big.
Every day demands the founder’s mindset
Founders live and breathe their ventures to life with resilience, adaptability, and a relentless focus on beating back the next in what seems a never ending series of potentially venture-killing risks—hiring the right team, finding the right investors, shipping the first product, acquiring first pilots, first paying customers, and ultimately, nailing product-market fit. In many ways, they fight to live another day, taking on seemingly existential risks to advance their business.
This dynamic can have a chilling effect on even the most intrapreneurial spirits, resigning them to live to fight another day. (And for your top performers, they may end up taking that fight somewhere else.)
Adopting a founder’s mindset means taking ownership, driving value proactively, and navigating obstacles as though the stakes are personal. When teams feel empowered and are incentivized to think and act like founders, they’re more willing to take calculated risks and drive innovation with the passion and persistence needed to succeed in today’s fast-paced and rapidly evolving market.
One person who leaps to mind as an exemplar of the founder’s mindset is Andrew Riesen , co-founder and CEO of Heard Mental Health. His journey from serving as an intrapreneur with PwC to becoming a two-time founder and CEO is remarkable and inspiring. Follow him on LinkedIn to stay tuned to his progress with the team at Heard and for candid takes on what it really means to build and grow a startup. You can also hear from Andrew directly by streaming the conversation he had recently with my colleague, Chris Tacy, on his Talking Startup Stories podcast.
Whatever your company’s size, by whatever measure, it more than likely started out as a small, early-stage endeavor. A business venture built up from humble beginnings by a small cadre of dedicated founders and first employees who together defied the odds, significant constraints, and unknowable unknowns to lay the foundation for your business as it stands today.
Over our first decade, the venture building professionals at Mach49 have helped Global 1000 businesses unlock new growth—launching over 100 new ventures in new markets serving new segments adjacent to their core business, with over a remarkably high success rate in launching to market and acquiring customers.
As we head into our next decade, we’re also helping large companies apply our proven startup principles and ways of working to more reliably execute on building new products, services, and business lines closer to their core—expanding their current markets, increasing success rates when taking new shots on goal, and minimizing the cost of those they will surely miss if they’re playing to win.
It’s time to revive the startup spirit within your corporation. Together, we can unleash your inner startup, fire up your unfair advantages as an incumbent, and ignite new growth together. Let’s talk.
CHRISTOPHER "CB" BRENCHLEY'S career spans two worlds: the corporate landscape and the startup scene. As Managing Partner, Venture Building at Mach49, he draws on over 25 years of corporate innovation and entrepreneurial know-how to support and strengthen new venture teams.
Early in his career, Chris immediately saw the potential for the web to completely transform how businesses interact with and serve their customers, and drafted a business plan — a fervent manifesto — to present to his bosses. His initiative got the green light and he was tasked with spearheading it, indelibly shaping how he approaches risk-taking and tackling daunting challenges. Building on the Wayne Gretzky quote, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take," above all else Chris learned to just take the damn shot — early, and often.
In 2018, Chris led a successful Mach49 Incubate for Stanley Black and Decker. As Co-founder, CEO, and Board Chairman of the resulting startup, Surehand, Inc., he continued to break new ground. Underscoring his value of being fearless and taking on seemingly impossible challenges, his visionary creation, the ROCK THE TRADES™ workforce development ecosystem, earned a spot in Fast Company's 2022 World-Changing Ideas Awards.
At Mach49, CB leans into his experience navigating the worlds of corporate disruptive growth and startups to drive the best outcomes, with and for each client. When not neck-deep in venture building, CB is a seasoned traveler who enjoys immersing himself in new places and cultures. Chris holds a BA in English literature with a minor in political science from the University of Delaware.