(2018-08-12) The Founder Of A Beloved Productivity App Thinks The Startup Model Is Broken

The founder of a beloved productivity app thinks the startup model is broken — here's how he's trying to keep the tech industry from 'making the same 10,000 mistakes over and over again'. Phil Libin's new startup, called All Turtles, is hoping to disrupt that model by funding the development of ideas and turning them into products before their developers teams have to worry about building companies around them.

The way Libin sees things, the tech industry has two basic models for promoting innovation — and each has its own shortcomings.

The first, he says, is through the research efforts of the giant tech companies, including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Apple (GAFA). The problem with that model is those companies tend to be very conservative, focusing on small-bore innovations that won't disrupt their core businesses.

The second model, by his reckoning, is built around startups

that model self-selects for founders who are good at fundraising and managing, rather than those skilled at solving important problems, Libin said. By contrast, technologists with good ideas or product development skills can fail simply because they have no talent for building companies.

everyone makes the same 10,000 mistakes over and over again

because it's so focused around companies, it tends to exclude innovative people and ideas from areas of the world outside of Silicon Valley that don't have the kind of ecosystem found there for funding and supporting startups.

With All Turtles, which he launched last year, he aims to bring together talented technologists working in AI and help direct them to solve particular real-world problems with the technology.

It's already a global effort. In addition to its San Francisco headquarters, All Turtles has offices in Tokyo and Paris to fund projects in those cities. It plans to open a Mexico City office next year. Within five years, Libin would like to have outposts in eight cities, including ones in Eastern Europe and Africa and potentially in India and China

Libin plans to have each All Turtles office oversee 10 local projects at a time. Each year, the offices would each graduate about three projects and replace them with three new ones

All Turtles establishes all the projects as separate companies within its corporate structure so it can easily spin them off (SpinOff) as standalone startups with their own sources of external funding, as circumstances allow. But All Turtles is intentionally designed to accommodate other possible outcomes for ideas that make it past the development stage.

a product called Spot, is a chatbot designed to make it easier for victims of workplace sexual harassment to document and report their experiences. The system relies on natural language processing and an interaction model that's intended to encourage victims to recount their experiences as accurately as possible

Although All Turtles is designed to fund innovative tech ideas, it's set up as an operating company, not as a venture fund. Ironically, while Libin is trying to pioneer a different model for innovation, All Turtles is itself a venture-funded startup. It's raised $20 million in financing in a series A round.