Most startup advice still assumes a world that no longer exists.
Raise capital. Hire engineers. Build for scale. Chase a billion-dollar outcome.
But what if the next wave of entrepreneurship looks… smaller—and bigger at the same time?
That’s the paradox Henrik Werdelin is betting on.
The Quiet Shift: From Unicorns to “Donkeycorns”
For the last 15 years, startups have been shaped by venture capital. The goal was clear: build something massive, fast.
Henrik helped play that game. He co-founded Bark (the company behind BarkBox), built multiple startups through his venture studio Prehype, and worked with Fortune 500s trying to innovate from within.
And yet, after decades in the system, he’s now questioning its core assumption:
Not every great business should be a venture-backed company.
Instead, he’s focused on what he calls “donkeycorns”—small, profitable businesses that may never raise funding or exit, but generate real income and serve real customers.
Think:
A niche fitness program for new mothers
A service helping families navigate post-death logistics
A tool analyzing your golf swing
None of these are unicorns.
But each could be a $1–5M business.
And in aggregate? That’s a massive shift in how value is created.
The Insight That Changed Everything
Henrik didn’t arrive at this idea overnight.
His early career was a mix of storytelling and systems:
Breaking into an MTV studio at 2am to launch a show
Becoming Head of Product Development at MTV in his early 20s
Building startups—some successful, some not
Creating Prehype, one of the earliest venture studios
But the real unlock came from a simple observation:
Most people want to start something. Almost none actually do.
Why?
Because entrepreneurship has historically been:
Technically hard
Financially risky
Emotionally exhausting
So only a small subset of people—those with access, skills, or extreme risk tolerance—ever take the leap.
Henrik saw this gap and asked a dangerous question:
What if we could lower the barrier to near zero?
Enter Audos: A Platform for Everyday Founders
Audos is Henrik’s attempt to rebuild entrepreneurship from first principles.
Instead of requiring founders to:
Learn to code
Raise capital
Build everything from scratch
Audos provides:
AI tools to build products
Systems to identify customer problems
Distribution and go-to-market support
Financing via revenue share (not equity)
The goal isn’t to create a few breakout successes.
It’s to create hundreds of thousands of founders per year.
That’s a very different ambition.
The Real Moat: Relationship Capital
If AI can build products, write code, and automate workflows…
What’s left?
Henrik’s answer: relationship capital.
In a world where everything becomes easier to replicate, the advantage shifts to:
Who you understand
Who you serve
Who trusts you
The best founders won’t just build tools.
They’ll build relationships with specific communities.
That’s why his advice flips the traditional startup model:
Don’t start with an idea.
Start with a customer you deeply understand.
Bark didn’t win because it was a brilliant idea.
It won because it served dog owners obsessively well.
Why Big Companies Keep Failing at Innovation
Henrik also spent years helping large corporations build new ventures—and saw a pattern.
They almost always fail.
Not because of talent. Not because of ideas.
But because of structure.
Startups optimize for:
Long-term upside
Experimentation
Speed
Corporates optimize for:
Predictability
Cash flow
Internal alignment
So even when a new idea shows promise, it gets stuck:
Budget approvals take months
Internal teams resist change
Success looks “too risky”
Same people. Same ideas. Different outcomes.
AI Is About to Break Everything (In a Good Way)
If SaaS made it easier to build startups…
AI is about to make it inevitable.
Henrik compares this moment not to the internet—but to electricity.
We’re not just improving workflows.
We’re redefining what a company even is.
The implications:
Solo founders can build what teams used to
Niche markets become viable
Distribution becomes more fragmented
More people can participate in entrepreneurship
And perhaps most importantly:
The number of founders is about to explode.
A Different Kind of Ambition
There’s a subtle but important shift in Henrik’s worldview.
He’s not chasing the next $10B company.
He’s asking:
What if we created a million people earning $400K a year doing work they care about?
That’s not just a business model.
That’s a societal change.
Because small businesses:
Employ more people
Are more resilient
Are more connected to real customer needs
In other words, they might matter more than unicorns ever did.
The Playbook Going Forward
If you’re thinking about building something, Henrik’s approach is refreshingly simple:
Start with yourself
What do you care about? What frustrates you?
Pick a customer, not an idea
Define who you want to serve.
Find a real problem
Look for “it sucks that…” moments.
Build fast (AI helps)
Don’t overthink. Test quickly.
Follow what’s interesting
Not everything works—and that’s the point.
It’s less like executing a master plan…
And more like running a series of experiments.
Full Circle
Henrik’s career started with a rebellious act—breaking into a studio to make something no one asked for.
Today, he’s trying to make that kind of creativity accessible to everyone.
No gatekeepers.
No permission needed.
Just tools, curiosity, and a willingness to try.
Because in the end, entrepreneurship isn’t about chasing scale.
It’s about building something that matters—to someone.
And now, more than ever, that’s within reach.
👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL
🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcast
Chapters:
00:01 Introduction to Henrik Werdelin
00:30 Early Life and Entrepreneurial Roots
01:30 MTV, Internet Era, and Product Development
03:20 Storytelling and Entrepreneurial Traits
04:40 Moving to New York and Startup Mindset Shift
07:10 Prehype Origins and “In-Between Time”
10:00 Venture Studio Model Before It Was Trendy
14:20 The BarkBox Origin Story
17:50 Lessons from Building Bark
19:40 The Acorn Method Explained
21:30 Why Corporates Fail at Innovation
25:00 How Amazon and Big Tech Build New Products
27:10 Evolving Views on Venture Building
30:00 Enter Audos and AI-Powered Startups
33:00 Relationship Capital as the New Moat
35:00 Donkeycorns vs Unicorns
38:50 The Future of Entrepreneurship with AI
40:50 What Henrik Would Build Today
43:30 Rapid Fire: Tools, Books, and Ideas
47:00 Founder Health and Sustainable Work
49:00 Trends: Overhyped vs Underrated
50:50 Legacy and Closing Thoughts
Transcript
Brian Bell (00:01:14):
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Henrik Werderlin on the mic. He’s a serial founder, investor, and author known for building businesses that blend creativity, customer obsession, and systems thinking. Henrik co-founded Bark, the company behind BarkBox and BarkAir, PreHype, and now Autos, an AI-powered startup platform helping individuals build and scale the ventures. He’s also the author of The Acorn Method and the forthcoming meet my customer and AI. Thanks for coming on, Henrik. I appreciate you having me on. I’d love to start with your origin story. What’s your background? What do you think kind of drives all this crazy accomplishments that you’re doing?
Henrik Werdelin (00:01:49):
All the times I was made fun of in high school. Is this a therapy hour that we’re going to go through?
Brian Bell (00:01:53):
Ignite therapy episode. Yeah, exactly.
Henrik Werdelin (00:01:56):
I mean, like I started kind of being an entrepreneur before, at least where I grew up here in Denmark, Europe, that it was kind of like a thing that people did. But my mom is quite eccentric and crazy. And so she’s always kind of like instilled in this me that you just go out and do it. And so I think that you can just go out and do it. It was always like something that I kind of, I did.
Brian Bell (00:02:18):
Like I started the school magazine. I started the school paper. I started whatever you can think of.
Henrik Werdelin (00:02:23):
And so when I was, I thought I was wanting to be a journalist. And so I did my master’s in journalism in the UK and I got a job as an intern at MTV Networks, which is for people who are younger, it was this TV channel that was pretty hot at the moment. But I also knew a lot about computers. Back in the day, there was something called Fidonet and Veronica and all these kind of like very nerdy networks that I had kind of. So when I was an intern, my boss at one point asked me, hey, this internet is coming around. This is like late 90s. Do you know how to, you know, couldn’t we make a show about it? And I was like, oh, maybe that’s a good idea. And so the thought of this idea pitched it to him. He thought it was a stupid idea. Well, he thought it was like a weird idea. And so, but he let me ask a few people around and everybody’s like, nah, we shouldn’t do that. And so I was young at the time and slightly rebellious. So I took it upon myself to break into the studio at two in the morning and make this show. And good for me. A lot of people liked the show. And so we got a lot of phone calls the day after, like when did the show back on? And so I was early 20s and became the head of product development for MTV Viacom and spent a good eight years building products like computer games and mobile games and SMS to TV and all these different things in all the countries that MTV was operating in outside the U.S. And so my kind of original story was to be a storyteller journalist, but then really I became a product developer. Then I built a few startups and some of them that worked well and some of them that didn’t and landed in New York in 2000, I guess 2011, 10, 11. Yeah, kind of like we’re lucky enough that I was involved in a company that we sold to Facebook and then I didn’t really know what to do next. And so I created this halfway house that we called Prehype that became an incubator that ended up building a lot of good stuff. That’s kind of like the half long version.
Brian Bell (00:04:11):
Yeah, I love that. So you’ve worked across media design and tech. How did those disciplines sort of converge when you approach entrepreneurship?
Henrik Werdelin (00:04:19):
You know what? I think they converge a lot because I think in many ways, entrepreneurs are storytellers, right? Like they need to be able to tell a compelling narrative to convince investors like yourself or invest staff or invest themselves that they should do this stupid stuff. And so, you know, if I look at kind of like what I think is the pedigree of a good entrepreneur, for me, there’s like these three components. Definitely the ability to tell a story. I think of it as gravity. Like you have the ability to kind of attract stories and money. people and then you have agitation so you have something that really propels you forward make fun of in school is a good one but you have something that really just make sure you get a lot of stuff done and then resourcefulness so can you can you do a lot with a little can you are you up for like opening photoshop when you have to do something can you then whip up like a code editor without knowing really what you’re doing and all those different things so I think the storytelling component
Brian Bell (00:05:12):
is an important part of that what drew you initially from Denmark to New York and what was the impact of that move for you
Henrik Werdelin (00:05:18):
I mean, I was huge. I was 12 years in London before that, two years in Paris. And then I’ve always wanted to move to New York. I love, love, love, love the city. Like I still get goosebumps. I get goosebumps when I see it materialize and I still kind of like get like the giggles when I kind of drive in from New York or JFK. I think the reality is that people who didn’t grow up, people who grew up in the US are not really, I think, truly understand just how entrepreneurial space it is. I mean, the best example is if you walked into a VC’s office in Europe and said, okay, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to invent these rockets and they’re going to fly around the world and then they’re going to land on drone ships because eventually I’d like to go to Mars. Everybody would be why would you do that again? That makes no sense. And you know, what’s the business model? And in the U S people would look at you go like, that’s awesome.
Brian Bell (00:06:09):
That’s awesome. There’s just like this,
Henrik Werdelin (00:06:10):
there’s this kind of like a little bit of like very, I would almost like very respectfully call it like naivete. Like, just like we just, do stuff and it is a country that’s built of people who kind of went west and so it is really an incredible place to build companies and so for me the impact was not a day i had built a pretty known startup in europe that didn’t work out before and i think and another another element of like i think when i told people about the startup you know people would be a little bit like oh you should probably stay at
Brian Bell (00:06:40):
mtv where if you told people in the us about it they’re like oh
Henrik Werdelin (00:06:43):
oh yeah, remember that project? That was awesome. Like you guys did all these different things. There’s like this excitement about the attempt of trying. You know, I ended up building a bunch of big stuff and meeting a lot of very incredible people. So New York made a lot to me.
Brian Bell (00:06:57):
And now you’re back in Denmark or?
Henrik Werdelin (00:06:59):
Yeah. So after we took Barg Public in 21, my wife and I, we have two small kids and it was one of those things. I’d been gone for Denmark for 25 years and she’d been gone for 15 or 20 years. And so we were both like, if ever there was a time to try to make the plunge. And so we’ll be back for a few years now trying to figure out, we miss New York a lot. We’re trying to figure out kind of where do you want to live when we grow old?
Brian Bell (00:07:26):
Yeah, I love New York as well. I think we can, I live in Northern California and my wife and I, you know, have a very special place. We were basically newlyweds when we moved there. You know, we’re married for, I think, just a year. And we lived in New York, Manhattan, Upper East Side for a couple of years and at Jersey City for a year. And it was just a fantastic time of our lives. So like every time we go back at least once a year.
Henrik Werdelin (00:07:46):
Yeah, same with us. We’d also just been married for a year when we moved there. And so we were there without kids. And I mean, like,
Brian Bell (00:07:54):
It is like walking around and yeah, it’s a fantastic thing.
Henrik Werdelin (00:07:57):
Being in a movie set, right? You know, like you sit there, you know, like I don’t smoke, but I remember like sitting there on a fire escape and smoking a cigarette with my wife and just feeling that you are literally in a movie, right? It was just incredible.
Brian Bell (00:08:09):
Yeah, that’s so cool. And so let’s talk about Prehepti Bark and the Venture Studio. You called it a halfway house, which is pretty funny. Tell us more about the problem you’re trying to solve with that.
Henrik Werdelin (00:08:19):
Yeah, I mean, like I think what a lot of people... What we don't talk that much about is that when you choose to be an entrepreneur as a career path, we have these periods of time that I call in-between time, which is basically when you're done with your last thing and not begun. on the next one and it's a super vulnerable time because you're very defined as an entrepreneur what you do and so for a lot of us we are trying not to do what we last did and we want to kind of get away from it either because it was painful kind of like a project that didn't work out or just because like we're just done with it and so we don't have anything to put on linkedin everybody asks us what are you doing next and ask us these kind of very abstract questions do you want to go into venture
Henrik Werdelin (00:09:05):
do you want to be an entrepreneur again? Do you want to go into corporate? The reality is that we just don’t know. I was part of this company that we sold to Facebook and then people were asking me that question and I was like, I really just have no idea. And so Prehype became basically this pretty front end for me trying to figure it out myself. And it had like a fancy website and I rented a loft in in Chinatown, Manhattan. And then I basically went around to anybody I’d met who was a second-time founder and said, hey, do you want to come and hang? And so it looked like, I think, what now people call a venture studio. But I think from the inside, it was really just a place where a bunch of people that had no idea what to do that was in the middle of this in-between time needed a place to hang so that they were not constantly pressured. And also, I think, obviously, that they could share the vulnerability of not really knowing what to do. You know, like they wanted to either do something that was bigger than the last thing or they want to get away from this thing that’s failed. And they had all these different ideas, but they couldn’t tell a VC that they had like eight ideas. Because that sounded very not serious, right? And so we ended up building this business that had like a weird mix. We would go and sell incubation services to big companies. And so we would run the incubation program for Leco or British Airspace or Verizon or Mondelez or Danon. And then we would do these workshops and we would be very methodical on how we did it because we had to sell to somebody. And then after like getting NK to do a workshop, we would end up sitting the next three weeks and kind of figure it out ourselves. And so we ended up becoming almost this teaching hospital for entrepreneurs that wanted to do their own thing, but they also needed just to maintain their lifestyle. They need to make some money to pay rent while they were doing it. And so over 15 years, we both worked for a lot of big companies. And then we ended up building a lot of stuff ourselves. And we were fortunate enough that some of the things we built ourselves became pretty big. So out of pre-hype came, probably best known for BarkBox and Rowe, which is a big mental health company. And managed by Q, we sold to WeWork and Enco, we sold to Fiverr and a bunch of others. And we ended up having like a really nice track record of, I think from the inside, becoming a little bit more sophisticated and understanding the pedagogy of our flavor entrepreneurship. And then from the outside, we attracted talented people that were in the between time. And then we ended up being good partners with venture firms because we would come with pretty well thought through things that we then get financed.
Brian Bell (00:11:39):
Fascinating. So, I mean, it’s funny if you called it a halfway house, right? Because, you know, Venture studios have really come into their own, I’d say in the last like maybe five years. You were kind of before that. Was that term even floating around back then?
Henrik Werdelin (00:11:53):
No, not really. I think, I mean, a lot of people really purpooted at the time, right? Like there was this pretty condescending view that anybody who was talented wouldn’t be a place like that. So if you are a proper entrepreneur, there is no way for you to go and
Brian Bell (00:12:10):
have a community.
Henrik Werdelin (00:12:11):
You would just slug it through, slug it all the way through. But Betaworks in New York had really kind of like started, I think, at least for me, the thinking around that. And so, and there was a few others, I think science came a few years later out of LA, and then there’s this thing, Idea Lab, which had been there forever. But I think we were probably the three or four of us that was there. So no, it was not a thing that was considered very cool or trendy. But I think for us, we didn’t really care because what we really wanted was just to have some nice people to hang with. And so, I mean, it sounds very touchy-feely now, but I always saw it much more as kind of like an art collective. I was very inspired by these music studios. like these Motowns or Abbey Road Studios or these places where these incredible people had come to really find out what they should do, right? Like there are people that walked into these studios and there were these studio musicians there that helped like create these incredible albums. And there is a Motown sound, right? And there is like a Abbey Road studio sound, Max Martin out of Sweden that had like his sound. So I think what we all discovered as these studios was we all kind of came up with our own pedagogy of entrepreneurship that we then started to practice internally. And I think you can see the company that’s come out of science and the company that’s come out of Betaworks and the company of us all kind of like has a little bit of like their distinctiveness to it.
Brian Bell (00:13:40):
Tell us about Bark. You co-founded Bark, right?
Henrik Werdelin (00:13:43):
Bark was a funny story. So I was just building pre-hype. And then I met this guy. I was in a... It’s a fun story. I was at a cruise ship on this conference called the Summit Series, which I’m not sure you’re... But they had this idea of putting people on a boat. And if you took the cheapest ticket, you would basically get randomly paired with somebody in the cabin. And so I had picked the cheapest ticket and then had checked into my room and whoever I was, you were randomly based basically paired with somebody.
Brian Bell (00:14:14):
It’s like college roommate style.
Henrik Werdelin (00:14:16):
And then these were these like hardship beds, but obviously people didn’t know each other, so they pushed them apart and made them into two different beds. I checked in first and then was about to go out for a drink and suddenly thought it would be hilarious to put the bed So I’d done that and went for drinks. And then when I come back at the cabin at like midnight, Matt, my now co-founder, had already checked in, hadn’t really realized that some idiot had kind of pushed the bets together. So he had just gone to sleep. And so the first time I ever meet this guy, we’re waking up in a hard-shaped bed on a cruise ship, like in our boxers and awkwardly putting our arms over the duvet to shake hands. But I think as we were kind of talking the next morning and then the next few days, we realized that we shared a lot of the same philosophies on how to build companies. And so I was trying to just basically recruit him to come and hang a pre-hype.
Brian Bell (00:15:09):
The way that often worked was basically alert people to come down and brainstorm about ideas that we could build together.
Henrik Werdelin (00:15:14):
And so we sat there on a Friday and thought about it’d be cool to make like a birch box for dogs. He had at the time a great Dane and then a few days later i had to kind of build a little prototype in wordpress you know he was like let’s go down and see if we can get anybody to you know sign up for it i’m like what do you mean so we went down to the dog park and we kind of showed it to friends and people in the dog park and we ended up having like 70 um people who had signed up on this because people were like oh you should you should give me a you should give me a hollow when you uh when you are ready and we’re like well we have we have square on a phone so you can just take your credit card right now so i think we ended up having 70 paying customers of this thing that didn’t exist right it was literally just mock-ups on my phone and then carly our third co-founder she had started uber in new york and didn’t really want for whatever reason to do that and so We basically lured her to join and then she found a brown box and found the stuff to put it in and we were off to the races. And so it was a very organic kind of origination story.
Brian Bell (00:16:15):
It’s amazing. And I think we got a BarkBox subscription at some point and we still have a few items. So we are happy customers.
Henrik Werdelin (00:16:23):
Glad to hear that. I still get so excited. I think seeing your product in the wild is really the crack for any entrepreneur. You just get so excited when you hear about that.
Brian Bell (00:16:34):
Yeah, that’s very cool. What are some takeaways today? from from bark that you’d love to tell founders listening out there i mean like i
Henrik Werdelin (00:16:43):
think there’s a lot i mean like i think the biggest kind of like i guess counterintuitive thing for bark was it wasn’t really that big an idea it was just two treats two toys in a tube and put in a box and then obviously it became big business And I think for me, it was a little bit on like, hey, you can actually, if you focus on building cool shit with people you like, then good things can come out of it. So that was kind of like more on the emotional side. I think on a business and strategy side, I’m very big on not thinking of an idea, but more anchoring a business in a customer group that you’d like to serve. And so for us, it was people like ourselves that love dogs and then be really focused on what’s the initial problem. For us, it was basically dog products, dogs, and it’s difficult to find them. And then really instead of then defining yourself on what you do, then define yourself on who you serve so that your next product can just be another problem that you’re solving for your customer rather than necessarily for the same thing that you are doing for somebody else. And so for us, it was an airline for dogs and not a cat box, for example. And so there’s a bunch of like things that I think I’ve taken with me on how do we build businesses from those kind of principles that worked with Roe, which is serving initially men who had embarrassing health problems and managed by Q that served office managers. And so we’re now very focused on this idea of centering in on the customer you want to serve.
Brian Bell (00:18:07):
Yeah. And then somewhere along the line, you came up with the Acorn method. Maybe you could tell us what that is.
Henrik Werdelin (00:18:11):
Yeah, The Econ Method is a book. So along the lines of building our own stuff, we also went into big companies and then we basically helped them figure out what are some of the new things that you build. If you look at the half-life cycles of companies, it’s getting shorter and shorter. So basically most companies just stopped growing at one point.
Brian Bell (00:18:30):
And if you look at the Fortune 500 used to have like a 10 year of 30 years and now it’s like 11 or something like that.
Henrik Werdelin (00:18:37):
Exactly right. And the ones that seem to be keep growing, what they do is that they didn’t find themselves not as trying to become the biggest tree, but becoming a forest. So if you look at the Amazon, they obviously have AWS and Kindle and all these different things.
Brian Bell (00:18:51):
Or Microsoft or Google, they all do that, right? They’re just constantly building new trees rather than trying to...
Henrik Werdelin (00:18:56):
So the ACON method was to try to articulate that kind of way of thinking about growth in a company, that you really need to drop a lot of ACONs. And then when you get nerdy about it, you figure out that trees are this amazing species that basically have found these very clever ways to survive for hundreds of thousands of years. And so ACON and the ACON method became a description and a process on which companies could, that they could use to kind of build new things. And in many ways, it was a little bit of a, book out of frustration because the truth of the matter is that we at the time had offices in four or five countries we were building a lot of these incubation programs for fortune 500 and we were way more successful with building our own stuff than we were with building stuff that we build for clients
Brian Bell (00:19:41):
little bit of like on that thread a bit like why why do you think that is you know because you guys are able to incubate some pretty great companies out of your venture studio working with corporates, you were able to do the same. Maybe we can kind of tug on some of the reasons why that is.
Henrik Werdelin (00:19:57):
I’d love to talk about it. I think it’s such an interesting topic. And I don’t think necessarily we naturally have an answer to it right now. And I think now with the immersion of AI, a lot of the same problems is now getting even more exaggerated with that. To start with building something from scratch is difficult. You know that as a venture guy, the statistical chance of something working is just low.
Brian Bell (00:20:20):
That’s the stuff that’s working.
Henrik Werdelin (00:20:24):
I mean, that’s a good strategy. But I think there’s a reason why you sit in a venture firm and not in a corporate venture place. There’s structures inside these organizations that makes it complicated. A few of those structures is Most of them, they optimize for cash flow and not for return of capital over the long run. So if you go down, normally like it shows itself at the A round. It was not easy, but we built a lot of stuff that got out to the races, got out of the block really fast and would get to, let’s say, a million dollar run rate revenue. If you go to a venture firm with a million dollar run rate revenue that been up and down for 18 months, it’s pretty doable to do a you know, at that time, like an A round. But you go into a CFO and saying, hey, I would like six to $10 million and I’m still losing money. They would be like, say what? You know, like that doesn’t, that makes no sense.
Brian Bell (00:21:19):
And by the way, there’s like a one in 50 chance this is a, you know, $100 million business someday.
Henrik Werdelin (00:21:23):
Exactly right. And so they would say, and by the way, you probably already heard about us because we’re pissing off the sales team a lot because we’re building something that’s kind of like competitive.
Brian Bell (00:21:33):
Cannibalize their revenue and their pipeline.
Henrik Werdelin (00:21:35):
all just is annoying, right? So you often would have these like really successful, I would say, zero to one kind of initiatives and then just hit these hot walls. Or it would just take a long time to make a decision, right? Basically, with venture, you go into committee and on Mondays, you basically meet with your partners and you get a decision. With a corporate venture, you would go in there. There would be like all these things you had to think about. You might have like an earnings call that had to go through. time that you kind of got a decision you’ve been like basically waiting for three to five months at one point the talent of course went like i can’t sit around and wait for this stuff so there’s all these small structure thing and and definitely i’ve done some work with stanford on what could be some of the new methods that you could use but i think the structures define the outcomes and i think a lot of the structures in a big company is really to make sure that tomorrow looks like today not a
Brian Bell (00:22:31):
that you have like a whole process for origination. Preserve the earnings and salaries of the executives.
Henrik Werdelin (00:22:36):
So it was honestly frustrating. The same people, like all the people that I now had go through the prehab process that went out to build unicorns or $100 million plus kind of companies. They were all at one point working on a corporate venture and most of them were. And so it wasn’t that the talent wasn’t the same and it wasn’t that the process wasn’t the same. It was just the structure in which we operated were different.
Brian Bell (00:22:59):
What do you think companies like Amazon get right? Because they release tons of new services and products and features and same with Google as well. Google’s famous for killing lots of stuff too that’s working.
Henrik Werdelin (00:23:11):
I mean, like that, they launch a lot of stuff, right? You know, if you go into Amazon, and I had never worked there, but from what I read from afar, and you have a good idea for something new, they’ll ask you to write like these papers that I think has to be in the style of a press release.
Brian Bell (00:23:26):
Yeah, the PRFAQ, yeah, the six pager.
Henrik Werdelin (00:23:29):
And if somebody buys into it, you get that job. They go like, okay, now go and make it.
Brian Bell (00:23:35):
Now you go do that.
Henrik Werdelin (00:23:37):
I don’t know any other company, pretty much, except for the other ones that are successful, that has a process to do that. If you work in, I don’t know, I haven’t worked with Unilever for a long time, so they might have a process. But I assume not. If you’re a Unilever product manager, they call them something else there, and you have an idea for something you can do, and so you have two problems there. A brand manager, probably.
Brian Bell (00:23:55):
Brand manager, yeah.
Henrik Werdelin (00:23:56):
So you’re a brand manager, which are these very talented people who run big businesses, right? If you come in and say either you want to launch a new business, I’m pretty sure they’ll shove you somewhere over in the corner and probably they’ll say, hey, you’re going nowhere. You’re doing Orioles already and you’re putting like $150 million on the bottom line every year. Like, please just stay, do that. or they might shove you over to like basically this theater that they have that’s the innovation thing or you might come and say hey we shouldn’t sell a cookie we should do this other thing which is like this app or whatever then at which point the internal organizations just go like we don’t like an app what like you know where where we put that so i think the amazons and the googles and these ones they really have like a pretty good process or they have a process for basically allowing entrepreneurial people to try to build something out of nothing and and that i think to start with is just amazing
Brian Bell (00:24:45):
So how has your thinking changed since you published the book and if you were doing a second edition now like what would you change and how is your thinking involved
Henrik Werdelin (00:24:55):
Yeah, I think I have a few things. I think you have to build for where you are. And I think if you want to be abstract about it, I think that both goes for companies and it goes for individuals. I think we ask ourselves too seldom, what is the type of new venture I want to build? And it’s partly because... The world has in many ways been captured by venture. And so the startup that most people naturally think about is one where you come up with idea, you go out to raise money and you go and try to build something that hopefully become a unicorn. obviously entrepreneurship is this kind of big bouquet of everything else. So in the corporate landscape, for example, I got big on this thing, I call them revenue exploration vehicles. So instead of doing incubators, you basically build companies, but the companies you are building, which is all focused trying to build revenue. Equity value did not matter at all because obviously for Uniliver, you add like $100 million of equity value, nobody’s going to give you credit for it. It doesn’t matter anywhere and it’ll take you like six to eight years at which point like the CEO has changed three times. So you have to be better at building the business for the structure on which you’re within. And for corporates, I think they should build these revenue exploration vehicles. So that’s one. I think second, they should be A lot of them spend a lot of time spending a lot of money trying to set up these new incubation programs. And they often set them up with, I think, the wrong people. So the people that get hired is often somebody internally or a McKinsey consultant that honestly haven’t billed anything from scratch, probably ever. And so the first year gets spent basically getting the office and the fishbowl table going. And then... And they’re promised that they have three years, but they never have three years. And so when 18 months roll around and they spend five to $10 million, the CFO come down and going, hey, it’s a soft quarter. Why are we spending all this money? You don’t have anything to show for it. They don’t have anything to show for it because A, they haven’t built anything. And sometimes there’s a good reason for that. But also they haven’t used the learnings that they’ve got from what they built and productized that. So nobody internally is getting any value out of the things that they’re building. So I think that’s the second insight is that basically knowledge or learnings is a product you could ship. You could actually become much better at creating basically insights that then get distributed into them. So, I mean, as you can hear, I’ve thought about this for a gazillion years. So, The list is long, but those are some of the more important ones.
Brian Bell (00:27:25):
So let’s talk about Autos. Am I saying that right? Is it Autos?
Henrik Werdelin (00:27:28):
I call it Autos. It was a .com that was available, so the name is tough to say. I’ll give you a little bit. It’s an interesting, I think, for a venture person, it’s an interesting kind of journey. So 21, I hear about OpenAI. I tweet at the CTO going like, hey, I heard about you. Basically, can you hook me up? And I get access to this playground, which is like very, very early. This is JPT 2.0. before 3.0 this is before chat dbt so this is when they just had this thing called the platform the playground and the playground was basically just a big text box with some buttons on the side and you could write something that text box and press a button and basically it’ll just continue whatever you’d written and i saw this and my mind was blown like i think i was i mean you’re not as old as i am but i remember first i’m seeing the web and i was like when i look So I was on Thitonet and Gopher and Veronica and suddenly one day somebody showed me a browser, right? Like Mosaic or whatever it was called. And I was like, I can now see what the world would be. I mean, like just that stupid like gray background and like the links were all blue and everybody had like under construction gifts kind of like going everywhere. But you can kind of like squint your eyes and then you’re like, okay, I now know how a lot of this stuff will happen, what will happen. I had the same experience with the playground. I was like, this is everything. So I went into Bark and all my portfolio companies and our incubation studio and the base like, okay, everybody saw what they’re doing. This is what we have to spend our time on. And so we obsessed of kind of to say, can we take the process on how we build companies and can we atomize all the different workflow? And can we then create agents that basically help us do this in a much better way?
Henrik Werdelin (00:29:06):
And the initial idea was that we basically wanted to not have founders. We basically wanted to get AI founders that build that. We built a system that would go out and slurp the internet for problems. We’re big on this thing. We have this phrase called, it sucks that, which is basically we always try to go for them. So we basically was trying to find problems on the internet. Then we would automatically have open AI generate ideas. We would create landing pages. We would do conversion funnels. And then basically we would have the system ping us when there was a hundred prepaying customer. It kind of worked, but it was crazy. The stuff that came through and often stuff that just wasn’t doable. We found there was a low cack on people who would buy fecal transplant from Olympian athletes to get their microbiome. Not legal to do, probably not scientifically sound, but people would buy it. As part of that, we got obsessed about this idea that the future moat for everyone is going to be what we call relationship capital. It is when in a world where everybody can do everything, the relationship between the founder and the customer, that unique bond, the ability to have authenticity and authority and the ability to predict basically new problems that you can solve for the customer is where you’re going to have lower chance of having AI outcompete you for a while. So then we were like, how do we find a lot of founders? And at pre-historically, people came to us and then we had coffee with them and we worked with them and got to know them and blah, blah. And then we built like three to five companies a year. This was really like an attempt to say, how do we get that to 100,000 a year? How do we make 100,000 companies every year? So we need to find 100,000 founders. Segue to next thesis, and that is, in a world where everybody can do everything, in a world where 60% of Americans would like to start something and only 8% does. There is a cohort of people that has the entrepreneurial chump but just doesn’t do it. And they don’t do it for good reasons. It’s difficult. It’s emotional hard. You need technical skills. You need finance. You need all this different things. So we were like... Can we build a system that help the everyday entrepreneur, what normally the people that would do a mom and pop store? Can we help them figure out a customer they’d like to serve? Can we help them identify a problem? Can we build the product for them with AI? Can we help them find customers and can we finance them all under one platform? And so that is the experiment that we’re doing with autos where we have built all that and we’re soon to announce our first 10 people that we signed. And the reason why we use the word signed is that our business model is different than yours because we don’t take equity, we take a royalty. So we offer people money and then we take a royalty on the product they build on our platform.
Brian Bell (00:31:47):
Okay, almost like a franchise model. So you’ll take a percentage of revenue over time. Interesting, but no equity. But no equity. Why’d you do it that way?
Henrik Werdelin (00:31:57):
Because I think a lot of these companies will never get sold. I think these will be, we call them donkey corns instead of unicorns, right? One million dollar turnover people with two people less. Donkey corns? What does that mean? Donkey corns. Dungeons, it’s because we got into like, they grind like mules, but they party like unicorns. And so they’re like these like- Yeah, they won $1 million companies, but there’ll be these like, you know, $1 or $2 million revenue lifestyle kind of companies. And for many, that has been unfinanceable because, you know, you wouldn’t put money into them. But if we could build- Like a cool lifestyle business, like you’ll probably cap out at a few million revenue and it’s just not VC backable. Yeah. But because that you now have access to the world, you could have all these very specific groups that we’re seeing on YouTube and TikTok that’s kind of forming. And then you could build a business just for them. And so they won’t get sold to anybody. And honestly, a lot of these people, they might not even be legal entities. They might just be somebody, you know, a woman. We have, just to give you some example, like a woman from Texas who offer kind of fitness advice for women after they’ve given birth or Or Sarah, who lost her dad and found out that basically the process of death is like really, it’s both traumatizing, of course, but it’s also like just logistically very difficult. And so she built a business with that. Or, you know, somebody who’s very good at analyzing your golf swing. Like none of these things will be venture baggable, but they got built on our platform and now people are using them.
Brian Bell (00:33:26):
That’s really cool. So I guess part of the thesis is, I mean... I see AI, you know, accelerating big venture scale outcomes, but it’s also a kind of a rising tide that lifts all entrepreneurial boats as well, where now you can get from zero to one or one to five faster than ever, easier than ever.
Henrik Werdelin (00:33:45):
A hundred percent. I think it’s just like if you, if you draw the curve, right? Like it’s, it started. The curve is shifted up and to the right. Yeah. You’re going to have more unicorns than ever, but you’re also going to have all the, like more lifestyle million dollar, Small business tech companies than ever as well. And honestly, from a society point of view, we need to. The country was built on everyday entrepreneurs. Small business owners, right? They employ half of the population, right? And they do that in the UK and here and stuff like that. Meanwhile, we haven’t really, I think, as people in the entrepreneurial space, been very good at celebrating. You know, we use the word lifestyle company. And for many, it’s like a derogatory term. Yeah, yeah. And, and you, I mean, but I think for many people, specifically people that might get unemployed by AI, like if somebody said to you, you know, you can work with people that you really like, and you don’t have to have a boss and you’ll make like, let’s say you do like a million dollar turnover and you make like 400 K a year, you know, like three or four K a year is a great lifestyle. It’s like an incredible lifestyle for most people. So, so, so I think, and so I think, You know, everybody obviously tried to sack when somebody sticks. And we’re trying to basically say, YouTube did this for media companies. Airbnb did this for hospitality. Shopify did this for small e-commerce. We think that there’s going to be this play for basically simple apps for very specific groups. And somebody should help these entrepreneurs make it. And so that’s the bet we’re doing.
Brian Bell (00:35:10):
It’s amazing. Let’s talk about the future a little bit. What do you think entrepreneurship looks like over the next five years and where ai automates a lot of this process i mean like
Henrik Werdelin (00:35:18):
having been deep in uh what cloud bot and all these like agents this weekend i mean like it’s tough not to get swept away with a feeling that it’s going to be a wild wild ride right now right you know week i can just see the way that i operate how companies that was born after 24 operating it’s just night a day it is literally like this is not like a web technology this is like electricity like where we have to reinvent a lot of stuff because It’s going to be wild. So I hope because I’d like to have a positive view on the world that it is incredibly useful for society if there’s more entrepreneurs. And I think it was very, very, very difficult for somebody to start something 15 years ago. With cloud and SaaS, it became easier. and I think now with AI it’s becoming much easier and so I hope that there’ll be a lot of people who want to serve their customers and we can see as many people building these lifestyle companies as the one person unicorns because I mean I am impressed by people that do unicorns but from a society point of view I’d like to make you know, a million companies that do a million dollar turnover, like maybe more than I want to make 10, one people unicorns. And so, so I think society is going to be wild. I think that we see all these kind of like structures that are kind of like eroding. And, but I think for somebody with an entrepreneurial mindset, I think it could be a bit of a golden age.
Brian Bell (00:36:44):
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I totally agree. Had to start over from scratch right now. What kind of company would you build?
Henrik Werdelin (00:36:50):
You know, I mean, like, I’m building every day on auto. So, I mean, like, I would build something for myself for a problem with a, you know, with a problem I could identify that was meaningful for me. And then I would build it with some people that I really liked. I am. Have you ever read this book called By Greatness Can’t Be Planned? It’s a bit of a niche book. It’s a guy called Ken Stanley. He was a professor in Miami. Then he built an algorithm, sold it to Uber, became head of AI for Uber, then went to OpenAI, and then he started somewhere else. He wrote this book about how we get to AGI. And his thesis is that we’re trying to kind of think our way there and that is flawed because all great innovation is always kind of stumbled upon. He called the system for open-endedness system. And so his thesis is that you have to, with great intensity, follow what he calls interestingness. And if you do that, that creates stepping stones. And then these stepping stones, if you’re lucky, will kind of bring you somewhere else.
Brian Bell (00:37:45):
So I think for me, every day, you know, that’s how science is done, right? I have a hypothesis. This looks interesting. I’ll run a test.
Henrik Werdelin (00:37:53):
Yep. Yeah. And then I, what I even like about like, because my wife sees me like a biologist, you know, when she fails, she doesn’t use the word fails. She just say, oh, that was non-viable. Like there’s nothing emotional about it. You’re just like, it wasn’t unviable. Yeah. So even for example, that I think being what I refer to as a portfolio entrepreneur, like start with a bunch of things. And then obviously when some of it worked, just kind of throw everything away and then just run at that. This idea that you kind of have an epiphany and that right idea just materializes, it just never happens for me. Yeah. So I think what would I build? I mean, I’ve been, I’ve been for the last many years, I’ve been in the business of building businesses, right? So my customer is a founder and my my my skill is how to build from scratch and so i’m building on top of that because that’s what i know but i think for people that want to build something i think it’s good to look inwards a bit and the book me my customer and the eye i we have this framework and it’s probably too long to go through now it’s called the five p’s and it’s basically a way like passions and possessions and all these different things so ways that you can try to look inward to figure out where is there energy that you have, what you have energy for, that might be a good object for you to explore in order to build something around it.
Brian Bell (00:39:06):
Love that. Well, let’s wrap up with some rapid fire questions. What’s a product, a physical or digital, you wish you had invented?
Henrik Werdelin (00:39:13):
That’s a great question. I have many of those. What would we like to have invented? You know, we use that example. I think SpaceX is just so incredible and it’s so audacious and it has so many cool attributes. So I pick SpaceX.
Brian Bell (00:39:27):
That’s awesome. Yeah, we’re investors actually, at least in the late stage. I wish I invested in the early stage.
Henrik Werdelin (00:39:33):
I mean, that might be a good investment. I tried to figure out how I got into that deal like eight years ago, but even at the time, it was always so expensive that-
Brian Bell (00:39:43):
Yeah, you’re like, what? It’s billions of dollars with no revenue? What? Yeah, and the minimum was a $1 million and I didn’t have that so what’s the most underrated entrepreneurial skill in the age of ai
Henrik Werdelin (00:39:53):
empathy
Brian Bell (00:39:55):
Love that if you had to delete every app from your phone except three which would stay i think for me right now it would be claude my ai app it would be i’ve been i’ve been thinking about switching to claude from chat gpt i feel like i feel like open ai has really dropped the ball on their product lately yeah like the ai is still really excellent but everything around it is not as good as cloud
Henrik Werdelin (00:40:14):
Yeah.
Brian Bell (00:40:14):
Does that make sense?
Henrik Werdelin (00:40:15):
100%. Also, I’m deep cloud code. So I’m now in that kind of universe. And then you got cloud code work now, you know. Yeah. Which is incredible too.
Brian Bell (00:40:24):
Have you messed around with that?
Henrik Werdelin (00:40:25):
Yeah. I think it’s incredible. I mean, like they just seem to have a real mojo. And honestly, I think they seem to just be building with a lot of good principles.
Brian Bell (00:40:34):
I like Dario as a CEO too. He’s technical, but he has a really good ethical and moral framework for AI. And yeah, they’re building a really good product. I pay for open AI too.
Henrik Werdelin (00:40:46):
And I use Grok voice mode when I have to have a conversation with some things. And then the third app, I’ll tell you what I have on my front page. I think the second one is probably Signal. It’s just an incredible voice app. And it’s one of those where WhatsApp is cool too, but you can’t easily install it on your computer and signal is nice because you can have it on all your devices and it kind of like jumps seamlessly around just to give people something new i’ll give people tail scale which is a tail scale is a vpn network that you can install on your a phone and your computer at home and your service and stuff like that. And then you don’t have to think about VPNing around. So you just create like all like a virtual network. I’ll throw you a fourth in just because pretty obsessed with Obsidian. I moved from Notion to Obsidian, which basically is an open source Notion, but they use mockdown files, which is very good when you use a lot of agents because the agents can read these mockdown files natively.
Brian Bell (00:41:39):
And so that’s interesting. Maybe I’ll check those guys out. I need a better document management for Team Ignite. We’ve been using Google Docs and it’s just like, it’s fraying. You know, it’s thousands and thousands and thousands of files in Google Drive.
Henrik Werdelin (00:41:52):
Yeah, I mean, but if you take clock code and connect with it through an MCP, you know, you could also have it help you organize it.
Brian Bell (00:41:58):
Yeah, I could go just make changes, right? Yeah, that’s pretty cool. I always run out of time. Like, I’m always like, there’s like this thing about being an entrepreneur, which I am, right? I’m a solo GP, right, of Team Ignite. where you’re kind of like working on the business or in the business, right? Kind of the difference of like building the system and building the business process and AI and automation and the tools and processes and team. And then there’s like the work. Try to build more systems as much as possible. So the thing kind of runs itself rather than kind of just doing the work.
Henrik Werdelin (00:42:28):
I think that is such an, I have this framework called the A plus one framework, which is basically my mental model of how I allocate resources to my life. And so I’m very, I’m very specific on, on time allocation. And I think you have to allocate time every week to build systems for yourself. Now with Cloud Code, you know, you can just tell it to build it for you. And I really get a lot of time back now because I have systems that do all these things. It’s like, hey, here’s this repetitive thing I keep doing and go tell Cloud Code, hey, I keep doing this repetitive thing. Build me a system to do it. There’s really no excuse anymore.
Brian Bell (00:43:02):
I kind of want to go build something that goes and crawls my inbox every morning. And basically takes all the context window of everything for Team Ignite and basically drafts replies for everything. I’m so surprised Gmail hasn’t done this.
Henrik Werdelin (00:43:14):
They have a new feature. Just draft me a reply.
Brian Bell (00:43:15):
Yeah, I think for everything.
Henrik Werdelin (00:43:17):
You know what’s called Dan Shipper? He has this company called Every. And they created a product like that that go in and basically make a draft reply for you and understand how you’re right and things like that.
Brian Bell (00:43:27):
Yeah, just crawl all the emails I’ve ever done. Crawl this folder in Google Drive or Obsidian whatever. notion and just come up with a reply for everything.
Henrik Werdelin (00:43:37):
Honestly, it sounds like you just made the prompt. You are two hours away from having that product.
Brian Bell (00:43:43):
Yeah, basically. Yeah, I just have to go talk to Cloud Code over the weekend. What’s a book or thinker that’s most influenced your philosophy of building?
Henrik Werdelin (00:43:49):
We mentioned that I think it will be this, I have two ones that are both weird. One is Why Greatness Can’t Be Planned, which is this book from Kenneth Stanley. This book that I was thinking about is basically about building a mega church, and I’m not a religious person, but it’s an incredibly book of understanding how you build community around your customers. The Purpose Driven Church. Purpose Driven Church is a book that is only about building churches. It has nothing to do about entrepreneurship. But, and I don’t know how I stumbled into it, but if you read it and you squint your eyes and you kind of can abstract from and talking about gods and churches and you think about basically a product and a community then it has like these playbooks basically of how you do it yeah it’s a fascinating book and then I’ll throw this in just because I have that in mind is there’s one called the secret life of trees, which basically goes deep on how trees have evolved. And again, if you want to try to kind of extract system thinking that you could apply to product development business, thinking about all these amazing things that tree have done, like they have systems that warn each other when there is infections going on and they drop these kind of acorns in specific way where they are more prone to make sure that they basically find soil. And it’s, it’s, it’s a cool book too.
