Discussing All Things Innovation with Zorina from the Grownlearn Podcast

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Transcript:

what we find is that companies especially at the larger end who might already have an innovation team for

example um often end up in a world where that Innovation team feels stuck and

that stuck feeling comes from kind of what I was describing a moment ago the

need to talk about Innovation and put somebody in place as as a figurehead or as somebody who is kind of running that

effort but if you don't equip those people in those teams with the materials the resources and frankly the um the

kind of cultural mindset that they need to actually make those efforts a reality it becomes very difficult and very

frustrating for Innovation teams to have an impact over time and so we help companies think about you know what

Venture driven growth might look like for them how Corporate Venture Capital might be integrated into their

organization what it looks like to partner with younger or startup companies that sit outside of the

organization but might end up being a disruptor within their industry things like that welcome to the grow and learn

podcast your goto source for expertise and insights on a variety of topics business growth leadership technology

personal and business finance and more we've created a vast network of business experts ready to address your company's

most pressing challenges from corporate growth strategy to leadership marketing strategy sales strategy branding

customer relations technology AI it security and Beyond we connect you to

the best experts for your needs reach out to us for more information or schedule a call at grow learn.org to

explore how we can support you today we're speaking to Denny Nathan founder and CEO of Apollo

21 a company that is on the intersection of a consultancy venture Studio product

design studio he's a creative person he's uh dipped his toe in a lot of Industries and uh venues of life so I'm

curious to talk about such a diverse personality in a good in a good fence hi

Denny hi thanks for having me I'm happy to be here happy to have you uh what's

with the name Apollo tell us a bit about this story I get that one a lot um you know

naming a company is always such a Greenfield opportunity and as I was thinking about what we do at Apollo 21

and what the opportunities were um it led me to thinking about just sort of the idea of moonshots in general and of

course you know the Apollo program was the original moonshot in you know here in the US and so I started digging into

a little bit of the history of the Apollo program and discovered that Apollo 20 was the last scheduled Apollo

Mission um and so I just sort of liked the idea that you know we were next in line to help companies take their

moonshot and we were also founded in 2021 so there was a nice alignment there and uh it gives us lots of fertile

territory to play with from a branding perspective okay so Apollo was not the

name of the moon mission I I thought there was only one what do you mean the last one was number 20 oh no there were

many Apollo missions uh there were 17 Apollo missions that actually

flew and then the last three were cancelled uh for budgetary reasons so 18 19 to 20 happen where did they fly to

then the moon seriously okay I I was only aware of of the first one and and

then there were questions of why they never went back to the moon but apparently they did did they yes yes

there were multiple Moon missions some they actually landed on the moon some they didn't uh they didn't land they

just did early flybys things like that but there were there were numerous Apollo missions uhuh okay interesting

interesting I learn something new every day um I I I was with I was left with

the impression that 21 was um like uh

like a something like a platform because there were these platforms for but I think there were 24 maybe for cars

platform 24 Auto 24 are you aware of these no I'm not familiar with those

okay okay anyhow so what's your story Denny how did you get into Venture Capital product

design uh consultancy oh man uh it's been a long and twisted path I I started my career

many years ago in advertising and uh very quickly realized that I didn't enjoy advertising in general and didn't

really like interrupting people's lives at inopportune times to try and sell them something by screaming at them in a

TV commercial or you know slapping a big magazine ad in their face and so I made

a point to kind of shift my career away from advertising and spent a little time

trying to find myself if you will figure out what I wanted to do and ultimately landed uh at an innovation consultancy

here in New York that was a really eye-opening experience for me ended up spending about five years at that

company I was one of the um one of the first 10 or so employees and so I felt

like I had a lot of opportunity to impact how work got done and how we

engage with our clients and then also to learn a ton that I hadn't previously

been exposed to in the technology space and so that kind of five-year experience

really shaped the the remainder of my career since and pushed me headlong into

the technology and Entrepreneurship space MH and and uh one of the buzzword or the

key wordss that you have in your company is also Innovation so let's talk a little bit about that um how do you

approach Innovation do you use technology tell us a bit about it and then will Del in in yeah innovation's a

funny one it's uh it's one of those words that gets thrown around a lot and often you know sort of loses its meaning

and so what we find is that a lot of companies talk about pursuing innov or how they're being Innovative things like

that but when you really sort of start to peel away the layers of the onion what you find is that frankly much of it

is a talking point not much of an action point and so you know having spent much of my career focused on the Innovation

space and helping companies understand what it means to be Innovative what practices they need to put in place what

the operational and cultural impacts of a commitment to Innovation look like and then of course what the future facing

benefits of uh making Innovation kind of a core pillar might look like and so you

know we talked to a lot of clients about the opportunities for building longevity

and what it means to instill a culture of innovation within your organization

and um kind of growing comfortable with the idea that if you're going to be

innovating you're going to be trying and ultimately failing along the way and

that's something that's that's difficult for both companies in general and people within companies to kind of wrap their

head around and get comfortable with and so we help them get comfortable with the idea of failure in their everyday work

and creating opportunities for learning out of that failure failure so that they

can do funky experiments at the at the sort of gray edges of whatever space

they're in and learn about future opportunities so that they can continue to find new Revenue lines explore new

business models and ultimately build a lasting company does your work go more along the lines

of uh cultural reorganization um or do you go into processes what is the extent

of the Consulting that you do in terms of innovation uh we are less focused on

kind of the cultural impacts or the cultural restructuring although we are happy to kind of play in that area and

help people learn from our learnings over time but generally we are uh more

focused on the technology side of things helping companies understand um what it means to focus on Innovation and how

they can bring that to life so we're helping them instill processes and Frameworks for approaching the work

behind Innovation and then helping them execute on that work usually the first time or two through to bring something

new to life so that they can kind of see how it all comes together and then from there we work with them to figure out

you know whether they want to keep engaging us for that or whether they want to internalize those types of

changes and that's where we kind of get more involved in the restructuring along the lines of okay you know we've

built a software team around a product for example that we've helped you create do you want to bring that software team

inhouse or do you need help building an internal software team so that you can

keep doing the things that we've been doing together yeah what are the typical Industries or the sizes of companies

that contact you for for Innovation Services uh we are all over the map so

you know as one might expect we do a fair bit of work with early stage startups and with Founders who are

trying to figure out how to get new ideas and new companies off the ground and then we also work with anybody up to

you know Fortune 100 size organizations to help them Envision new product

opportunities new Revenue lines new business models and then to help them bring that to life and what we find is

that companies especially at the larger end who might already have an innovation team for example um often end up in a

world where that Innovation team feels stuck and that's stuck feeling comes

from kind of what I was describing a moment ago the need to talk about Innovation and put somebody in place as

as a figurehead or as somebody who is kind of running that effort but if you don't equip those people in those teams

with the materials the resources and frankly the um the kind of cultural mindset that they need to actually make

those efforts a reality it becomes very difficult and very frustrating for Innovation teams to have an impact over

time and so we help companies think about you know what Venture driven growth might look like for them how

Corporate Venture Capital might be integrated into their organization what it looks like to partner with younger or

startup companies that sit outside of the organization but might end up being a disruptor within their industry things

like that and um we as a company Apollo 21 are generally industry agnostics so

we've done work like this for anything from remote guarding in security to restaurants and fitness and music and

health companies and financial services and sort of everything across the board

so when you do the projects and you recommend let's say for a larger Corporation to um go into uh corporate

venture capital and invest in um startups do you actually do the search for the startups or is it just a

conceptual work that you're doing uh we lean more on the conceptual side but you know we are happy to help

kind of structure what that might look like for that particular company and you know if we need to help sort the first

few deals or help make some introductions to Founders so that so that they can get their feet wet in the corporate Venture Capital environment

and just start to understand what those relationships look like and what it means to talk to Startup Founders we're

more than happy to play in that space as well uhuh do you do you find that this was a a trend that is now subsiding the

corporate Venture units of large corporations is it still a big Trend uh

I think it's still kind of upand coming to be frank you know there's a lot of companies that for many years were

concerned about playing defense more than anything when it comes to potentially disruptive startups and I

think that the ideals around corporate venture capital and the idea that you can make strategic investments in

organizations that sit outside your company is something that a lot of folks are still kind of coming to terms with

and learning how that can be beneficial to them and to their organization without necessarily um opening the door

to the type of disruption that worries them and and

is there a change in the impediments to Innovation or is it like a constant

thing would you say that it's always the first thing is culture or is there a I I

think it's relatively Red Line yeah I think it is relatively constant and what we see is that um you know companies

that that are afraid of giving the people within the organization the freedom to explore and ultimately you'll

hear me talk about failure all the time but giving them the freedom to try things and to fail along the way are

those that struggle with the ideas of innovation because um basically the the

activities that support and Foster Innovation within a corporate culture are largely kind of dichotomous with the

metrics that most organizations use to measure their health so you know if you look at at large companies they're

focused on quarterly Returns on increasing shareholder value on internal

rate of return things like that that generally do not support longer term

efforts and one of the biggest challenges with Innovation is that it isn't quick it is one of those things that takes time it's generally you know

a multi-year commitment to start seeing the benefits of of those labors of those

Investments things like that and the idea that um you know a company might

have a team that is dedicated to spending money to try weird things that

do not ultimately offer an immediate return on investment is a really hard

pill to swallow however and I think that again kind of coming back to that corporate Venture Capital idea part of

the reason that that is becoming more um attractive is that it forces companies

to align their thinking to that of traditional VCS who know going into it

that they're going to place a lot of bets along the way and that only a couple of those bets are going to pay

off but they're going to pay off in such an outside manner that they pay for all of the failures and so companies are

kind of I think learning to play in that similar space and mindset uh I do want to talk more about

startups and and the VC part of your work but before that there's something interesting that I read that I I'd like

you to expend more about it's the meeting cost calculator it's a you've created what is it so uh that's actually

a great segue into our our kind of venture effort so um uh meeting cost calculator is a product that the team at

Apollo 21 has ideated and built and launched all kind of on our own so it is

uh it is wholly owned and operated by Apollo 21 and basically we looked around um I don't know about a year ago or so

and there was a lot of chatter around the impact of meetings particularly coming out of the pandemic and if you

look at some of the metrics around how remote work and the pandemic has impacted the way that people spend their

time while they're doing their jobs what you will find is that um the amount of time that people spend in meetings has

increased incredibly I believe that the value that the number is 250% or so so

we are spending two and a half times more of our time in meetings to

accomplish the same amount of work and we're getting 150% more meeting invites

so there's more meetings happening and they're taking up more of our time and of course the downside to that is that

um the people who are doing the work are then sitting around in meetings and not finding the time to get the actual work

done and so they're forced to make a a tough decision and so as an employee you

either get less of your work done every week because you're spending all of your time in meetings or you eat into your

personal time to do the work that you didn't get done because you were sitting in meetings and either way no matter how

you slice it somebody ends up unhappy either you know the managers are unhappy because less work is getting done or the

employees are unhappy because the work that's getting done is getting done outside of work hours and so

we created meeting cost calculator as a means to really begin to quantify and put the most the most valuable metric we

could think of which was dollars uh in front of every one of those meetings so that people could begin to understand

what their meeting culture looked like and really what the what the cost of that meeting culture is and depending on

again what source you look at um there's estimates that for every employee you are paying something along the lines of

$25,000 a year year of their time in sitting around in meetings which equates

to uh I believe globally $ 37 billion doll every year that we are paying

people to sit around in meetings and so if you look at it you know there are better ways to get work done and so we

built the tool to help people begin to understand and quantify that and have

some sort of measurable means to figure out what the impact of meetings is

within their workplace but but this does this tool quantify meetings across the line or

does it assign a different uh value to meetings uh depending on whether they're

really valuable or bringing anything or not uh so that's a great question today

meeting cost calculator is exactly that is a meeting cost calculator so it knows what the cost per employee is and how

much time those employees are spending in meetings and it spits out a dollar value that says you know Danny's time in meetings this week cost

$493 or whatever it was um future iterations of the tool however are very

focused on shifting from meeting cost calculator into the world of meeting value calculator and so we've spent a

fair bit of time thinking about what types of Technologies especially new technologies are available to us that

can help us begin to understand and quantify whether a meeting is valuable

or not and so I should be clear you know our goal with meeting cost calculator is not to get rid of meetings they are a

fact of doing business today and we have no expectation that we're suddenly just going to cancel all meetings of course

exactly exactly but to your point if we can figure out how to quantify the value

of those meetings then we can start to figure out more clearly who needs to be in a given meeting in order to make a

decision how long does that meeting need to be was this meeting valuable or do we need to rethink uh how long or how that

meeting happens next week or next month or whenever it happens again and so that is very much the future facing goal of

the tool we just had to start was something that was easily measurable and understandable and of course you know in

the business World dollars dollars make everything go around yeah wow this this will be a blast the tool sounds very

promising very much needed I I'd say yeah thank you I mean it was needed back then when I was in corporate and now

even more the yeah it's one of those never ending challenges yeah yeah all

right let's talk about Venture Capital now what what do you do in this sphere with the so I should be clear we are we

are not a venture capital firm full stop um we operate as in part a venture

studio and we do that a little bit differently so we do not have a fund attached to our business which means

that we are not injecting Capital into other companies the way that we support companies through the The Venture studio

is in part by creating things like meeting cost calculator that we've ideated and created internally but then

we also partner with early stage Founders and effectively operate on a discount for Equity type of structure so

you know early stage Founders are always strapped for cash and we know that getting the first MVP out the door is

often one of the hardest things to do and so for the partners that we think have an amazing idea and who are willing

to engage with us in this manner we are happy to take equity in lie of some of the cash earnings that you know Apollo

21 might charge for just a straight development process in order to help support them and help get them further

down the field and further towards launch and hopefully towards product Market fit so that they can begin to

build a valuable company okay fantastic fantastic uh and

how many um how many uh startups are you engaged with right

now uh right now there's a couple that we're working with it it varies based on sort of what we have going on in any

given time and you know often those folks will come to us and we will help with the very early stage MVP builds and

some of the prototyping and the um the customer development process we're huge Fanatics about lean customer development

and understanding and really heavily validating the idea behind a startup before we ever start building and so a

lot of our time is spent helping Founders navigate that process and in fact we are in the process right now of

uh building out the first cohort for an accelerator program that is focused purely on that customer development

process so um we're we're basically inviting what I call napkin stage Founders very early stage Founders to to

join the accelerator program and spend about 3 months working alongside our team and a number of experts that we've

brought in from other areas of the business to uh heavily validate and kind

of interrogate their idea so that by the time they're done by the time they're ready to go and build an MVP for example

they know exactly what it is they're looking to build and ideally they've talk to 30 50 100 people and they have

their first 10 customers kind of lined up and banging on the door going oh my God I need that can you build it already

please so the accelerator is within your company or are you doing it in partnership with with a VC firm no that

is within our organization so that is called the accelerator program is called Launchpad and uh if folks are listening

and they're interested in it they can find more information at countdown initiated. would you repeat that because

there was a Slowdown in internet connection just right when you were speaking out the the sure sure yeah the

uh the URL for our accelerator program is countdown initiated. comom so think

of counting down to launch a rocket or your company or whatever it is yeah yeah

okay so so so so this means that for startups you're actually more on the um

product design side rather than Innovation because you know yeah it's in Innovation is

integrated in the product design I would suppose uh it is and if you think about

you know innovation in the impacts of the efforts around Innovation um realistically you kind of can't separate

the ideas of startups and Innovation and you know a lot of I think that's what trips up a lot of larger organizations

as well you know larger companies get stuck in their ways they have a product that is selling and doing well and

that's how they've built their business but then they look around and you know all of a sudden some startup comes from

around the corner and is aiming to disrupt that industry and so startup disruption and corporate innovation in

many ways are kind of two sides of the same coin in my mind so you know big companies build something they grow big

and become the incumbent and then the next startup comes around and aims for disruption and there are ways to make

those two sides of the coin work together and then there's you know the more traditional path that we see which is startups disrupt Industries and they

grow to become the incumbent and then the whole cycle happens again yeah and so the way they usually disrupt is via

business models it's not really via product modification or change unless it

changes the business model and then there's there's just competition if it's just a

minor product Innovation wouldn't you say agreed I mean I think that yeah I think that

minor product Innovations are difficult to to turn into a fully disruptive kind of uh business however the rate at which

technology is changing enables uh I think new products and new business

models to come to bear that perhaps weren't even possible when an incumbent company started their business and so

you know For Better or Worse large companies are generally not great at keeping up with the pace of change of technology which is why startups have a

place in industry and you know have that kind of poised disruptive opportunity in

front of them that's that's a that's a great point now how do you see the future of uh large corporations when it

comes to surviving the emerging Technologies um I think that there's a

number of ways about it you know there's there's some companies that are building internal Innovation labs and things like that where they're trying to experiment

and play in the space um I think that can work although it is a pretty difficult uh business model or different

difficult model to create successfully um this is where I come back to sort of

corporate venture capital and the idea of partnership and investment into uh startups and smaller companies so you

know if you think about the old way of doing things if you will corporations would look at a potentially disruptive

startup and get scared and go oh my God we need to defend our turf uh do we make sure that this startup you know doesn't

grow or how do we change our messaging or our offering to limit their opportunity for growth and I think that

what we're starting to see with the idea of corporate investment into startups is

almost like building out an insurance policy so if you're a large company and you see a disruptive startup coming to

you know change your industry another way to look at that situation is well if we invest in that startup and they don't

succeed then we've lost a little a little bit of capital which we probably would have spent on marketing or something else anyway but if they do

succeed then we own a stake in that company and effectively we're hedging our bets against the future of our own

industry by investing in the disruption itself and therefore even if the larger

company fails or begins to slow down they still have the financial upside of that investment to kind of pad them and

help think about what the future might look like and whether you know an acquisition might be in order for

holding that disruptive startup into the operations of the larger company or whether they want to just kind of shift

their mindset and their business model entirely and let that disruptive startup become the next

incumbent it sounds fantastic in theory the question is would would they would the incumbents be fast enough to

integrate all of these new Ventures and new Innovations within within their culture because they it's so difficult

to change culture specifically and and that's I I guess required to integrate these new companies and also to my

observation uh usually corporate Venture Capital um units um look for startups that

um that provide a product or a service that the existing company needs it's

like they're not forward thinking they're trying to replace um a supplier

or a vendor um with the product that the startup is providing so

I I I personally am not very optimistic in the ability of incumbents to to uh

run corporate Venture Capital units absolutely and I never said it was easy there's no question I'm not making the

claim that this is an easy change to swallow but there is the opportunity for

that change and um you know I've been to a number of events recently and heard some some corporate VCS talk about why

they invest in what they do and what they're kind of invest thesis is and uh for better or worse I think we're

starting to see a bit of a shift um to be more inclusive around companies that

might otherwise be disruptive to their own operations or to your point that allow them to expand into a new

technology space faster than they could do on their own and so the integration of the the startup into the company

culture becomes less about tying down the people in the startup for example and more about um creating something

entirely new that both organizations can take advantage of what what what does personally excite

you in this line of work uh for me it always comes down to

solving the problem I I get excited about challenging problems especially

ones that other folks are are banging their heads against and I I just sort of can't help but you know have my brain

start turning on oh interesting you said this you said this is a problem why why

does that happen how do we solve it what technology could play a role in it and I just I even if it's not something that

I'm working on like my brain will spin on it for a while until I just sort of either get it out of my system or have

an opportunity to say to somebody you know I've got this idea we need to talk about it fantastic Danny where can

people reach you um sign up for your newsletter and sign up for the accelerator again absolutely so I our

company website is Apollo 2.io we have a bunch of case studies and articles and all sorts of fun stuff that

you can read there we do have a Weekly Newsletter called innovate disrupt or die which is focused on all of the

wonderful things that we've been chatting about that is available at innovat disrupt or die.com and then of

course once more the uh URL for the accelerator program is countdown

initiated. is there a deadline for the accelerator is or is it on a rolling basis uh it's on a rolling basis right

now we are we're getting the first cohort together and so it's a little bit of a question of how long is it going to take to get the first batch of companies

in and uh you know to be frank we're sort of experimenting with it and getting our feet underneath us with that program and we'll see how it goes okay

fantastic good luck with that thank you so much for the Insight um anything else

that you'd like to share I have a personal motto leaving

space leaving space for anything that we've missed sure well now I feel like I have to fill it um I I'm often asked for

a piece of advice and the one that I I have lived by myself and that I enjoy sharing is uh fail beautifully which is

sort of a personal motto and it's a reminder to me that anything worth trying is worth trying well and you know

you're going to fail along the way inevitably so just learn to embrace that and enjoy the

ride fantastic this sounds good fa fail beautifully that that means

with pride yes very much so with pride I had fun talking to you Danny good luck

with thank you with the first cohort of the accelerator and with everything you do thank you thanks for having me it's

been a great pleasure welcome to the grow and learn podcast your goto source for expertise and insights on a variety

of topics business growth leadership technology personal and business finance and more we've created a vast network of

business experts ready to address your company's most pressing challenges from corporate growth strategy to leadership

marketing strategy sales strategy branding customer relations technology

AI it security and Beyond we connect you to the best experts for your needs reach

out to us for more information or schedule a call at grow learn.org to explore how we can support you

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