Welcome to trive
trive is a startup studio building human-centred solutions to make life more liveable for all. Our team invests time, know-how and money in impactful & relevant ideas and enables movers & shakers around the world to pursue their passions.
We are creating a startup studio that builds great companies from idea to scale. At scale.
What is a Startup Studio?
A startup studio is basically a startup that builds startups from scratch. The trive team is a co-founding team that helps to validate, launch, and scale with speed and efficiency. Our offer is as valuable for investors as it is for our entrepreneurs, so let’s have a look at how it works.
The startup studio approach is all about finding relevant problems, developing solutions and building companies out of the ones that survive the validation process. Everything is happening in-house in our core team and we only scout external co-founders further down the building process. The studio model provides resource efficiency and allows for quick development iterations of several ideas in parallel. It creates a factory-like environment to build startups. In order to build a successful portfolio and leverage economies of scale, we will only build companies that empower the masses and are truly rethinking the industries housing, work and mobility.
It is important to understand that studios use a completely different approach to build startups. They are not operational VCs, incubators/accelerators, nor service providers or agencies: studios are co-founders, building startups from scratch and then scouting for further co-founders.
As mentioned earlier, studios build startups that fit their niche. What does that mean? It’s the equivalent of an investment hypothesis of a VC. To further elaborate, there are different kinds of studios and they differ on factors such as idea source, technology focus, industry or business model focus and funding structure. You might know some of them such as Rocket Internet (often getting inspired by Asian and US-based eCommerce startups) or eFounders (a super successful studio based in France and building B2B SaaS for the future of work). Currently, the number is growing rapidly to currently over 400 studios globally. In Austria, there is no startup studio internationally established yet. With trive we want to establish a studio in Austria, building European and international companies.
Why is it booming?
Currently, the studio model is on a global rise, as their portfolios showed great successes. Data from the GSSN (2019) comparing studio-born startups with “normal” VC-funded startups show incredible outperformance of the studio validated ones:
- They grow faster: it only takes them half the time from zero to exit (and correspondingly only ~2 years from zero to Series A). This makes sense as the studio core team is basically a serial founding team and the studio structure supports with financial power from day 1.
- They have an increased survival rate: 60% of studio-born startups make it to Series A. Both the idea as well as the co-founding team have to pass the thorough validation test from the studio. The “inventor’s bias” is heavily decreased which prevents from putting too many resources into unpromising ideas.
- The return on investment is higher: IRR of studio-born companies is on average 53% compared to “normal” VC funded startups which on average show an IRR of around 21%. This success is a logical consequence of the studio model. In the beginning, the studio owns 100% of a startup and only later get’s diluted, if further co-founders and eventually investors join. The studio model ensures very high equity at the earliest possible validation stage.
Great companies such as Giphy, Picasa, Snowflake or Hims & Hers came out of Studios.
Process
At trive, we use a proven approach to build our startups. Even though it is not a linear process, you can imagine it something like this:
Sourcing: The studio team immerses itself in problems and challenges, constantly observing the market. We also partner with our community, European startup founders & investors and make sure we miss no developments in our focus areas.
Ideating: Relevant solutions for the respective focus area(s) of the studio are being ideated. Or: Founders apply with their ideas.
Validating: The team tests every idea in detail for its market and disruption potential. Most ideas are discarded.
Building: The core team of the studio starts to build the business (MVP, business model…) and searches for an external team to take over the idea from trive.
Growing: After a co-development phase, the startup becomes independent of the studio. This step is important so the studio team can get involved in a new project. trive keeps a percentage of the shares and keeps on developing it’s portfolio.
Want to apply for our studio or reach out with an idea to access our built-in founding team? Reach out to lena.hoedl@trive.studio
Best,
your trive team
