Our process

Building
and investing

in companies

Through ongoing collaboration between our company-builders and the Village, Team8 articulates a thesis with the confidence that a critical mass of enterprises are behind it. Then, we either invest in an existing company through Team8 Capital, leveraging our research and go-to-market teams for due diligence, or we partner with entrepreneurs to build a new company from scratch through our foundry Domains – Enterprise Software, Fintech, and Digital Health.

Foundry Process

Co-founding
new companies

We partner with entrepreneurs to build together new technology companies, providing extensive expertise and capability to accelerate success. The process is driven by Entrepreneurs in Residence to identify a big problem to solve (or a major opportunity to leverage), then ideate a disruptive solution and extensively validate its market fit and go-to-market strategy, leading to the execution of the business plan and the formation of a new, ambitious company.

Our proven company-creation process consists of four stages:

Gate 0
Gate 1
Gate 2
Facilitating Growth
Exploration

This phase identifies and thoroughly researches a big problem for the enterprise, that once solved, will have a real impact. Team8 has a unique research group dedicated to understanding the problems and the technology limitations of today’s solutions.

Ideation

This phase challenges us to not be iterative in our efforts. It focuses us on developing a disruptive solution that has the potential to be the foundation of a category- leading company.

Validation

This phase tests the solutions and confirms marketability and scalability. It also consists of recruiting efforts to ensure the foundations of the team are in place that can drive the company forward.

Facilitating Growth

This phase is all about executing the business plan and go-to- market strategies that accelerate growth and market adoption. At launch, Team8 becomes a co-founder of the company and finances the company’s seed round (millions of dollars).

Who’s
in the room

Building and investing
in companies

Each stage of the company creation process is marked by a “gate.” Seated at the table are our company builders, potential buyers, investors, and industry experts. Their intense scrutiny helps to spot problems and gaps and mold the solution to be relevantly differentiated and fit to compete. We have done this over and over again and know it is an essential competitive advantage.

We invest millions of dollars as the seed round for the newly formed company, but provide much more than just capital throughout the process.

As Entrepreneurs in Residence, at your disposal is a wealth of company-building experience and real capability, including in-house teams of domain experts and ideators, a world-class technology research team and a go-to-market team, including business developers, marketers and market researchers.

Our entrepreneurs leverage our relationships with hundreds of enterprise executives and thought leaders from the world’s leading corporations, who we refer to as our “Village”. These are future prospect customers or business partners who participate in our collaborative process, to extensively validate the importance of the pain point we’re solving and the product-market fit we will ultimately achieve.

Throughout the process we apply our talent acquisition team to build a strong, core R&D team of triple-A talent and we support executive hiring.