Permission to Take the Leap
By: Sabeena Ladha
Tags: Startup, Consumer, Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, Career Change

Raise your hand if you’ve ever daydreamed about quitting your job and starting your own company. You’ve come up with product ideas with friends over drinks, even whiteboarded what a prototype would look like. Pitched your idea — to only those friends that wouldn’t judge you, or god forbid, steal it — even though both you and I know that stealing cannot possibly be a true concern because you have no real intention of starting this business and instead you’ll wake up, and continue to be an employee daydreaming about becoming a founder someday. OK, a little harsh.

I’ve always been “entrepreneurial” in nature. I use that word broadly, as a way to describe a character trait versus a person who has actually founded a successful company. I was raised by immigrant-entrepreneur parents, who of course guided me toward the most risk-managed professional paths — medicine, law, engineering…perhaps business if I was feeling frisky. As a result, I became a product of branded corporations — PepsiCo, McKinsey — yet I always found a way to finagle my way into entrepreneurial projects. That included managing a tiny, scrappy “fighter” brand at PepsiCo that no one wanted to touch, foraying into novel McKinsey digital engagements, and most recently joining M13 Company as the GM of our Launchpad, my first venture into the startup space.

When we set out to build the Launchpad at M13, we didn’t want to replicate accelerators and incubators that existed, because we weren’t building a program for the typical founder. We weren’t building a program for the founder who may max out their credit cards, go bankrupt, and eat ramen for a year to pursue their business passion. We were building for the founder who daydreamed about stepping out on their own but struggled to take the leap. Or worked at a startup before and knows what it takes to operate with limited structure. Or, like me, may have worked in corporate settings but sought out teams with a more entrepreneurial vibe.

Jane Lee, a thought partner and co-founder of Launch Pop, emphasized the difficulty of the leap and the entrepreneurial journey. “We work with founders to launch their D2C business. It’s a long, tough, yet incredibly rewarding experience, so before we work with them we take our time to understand their motivation and if they have the perseverance it takes to launch and grow a business. We see our founders sacrifice a ton. But having a support system and access to resources makes the journey so much more manageable and efficient.”

At M13, we’ve created a career-changing opportunity. It is, in a way, a cliché founder story. I had a problem of how to start a company in a risk-managed way, and our M13 Launchpad is the solution. The Venture Studio model we’ve built creates a win-win-win for M13, founders, and acquirers. We create partnerships with strategic corporations, in growth spaces we are jointly bullish on, and bring on founders to form teams and build scalable solutions in the identified growth spaces.

Steve Gotz, Partner at Silicon Foundry, published an article a few weeks ago on the Rise of the Venture Studio that explains the benefits of this model. “Venture Studios have an additional key quality, the ability to intentionally create exceptionally talented teams of entrepreneurial operators and point them, with a laser-like focus, at the most pressing challenges and largest growth opportunities. The best venture studios I’ve seen are focused and intentional about validating an opportunity and then methodically finding the best team of entrepreneurial athletes to maturely and methodically pursue the opportunity.”

Now, I invite you to apply to our M13 Launchpad summer program. We are assembling a team of entrepreneurial minds to spend the summer with us in Los Angeles, and build consumer and consumer-tech businesses that align with our mission. We are excited to partner this summer with Procter & Gamble to further our mission towards removing the stigma of underserved wellness conditions. Throughout the program, M13 will offer our founding teams unique access to our network of successful founders and resources, people development guidance, curated hands-on problem solving sessions with world class advisors, and so much more. We are fostering a culture of true collaborative entrepreneurship, utilizing the resources of both M13 and P&G along with the talent of our cohort founders to create the most viable and scalable businesses and teams.

We hope our model allows you to take the leap for the career opportunity you’ve been waiting for.