The
Genesis of tCR:
An On-Going Journey
It all started in the NYC creative agency scene…
Josh began his career as a designer inside NYC’s boutique creative agencies. The world’s biggest brands - Nike, Goldman Sachs, Verizon, SiriusXM - were his clients, outsourcing their creative work to R/GA, LBi, and Code and Theory. But what exactly was this creative work? More than pure brand, it was initially called user experience or interface design. With the digital explosion of the 2010s, it evolved into an entire discipline known as digital product design - a nod to the well established discipline of physical product design.
Product design requires the same creativity and rigorous stylistic eye as brand design but it requires something else as well - a deep understanding of the who, the what, the why behind the product. Who is this product for? What problem is it solving for them? Why do they need and want this specific product versus something else? Will they pay for it and how much, informs whether it is a luxury or a commodity that needs to differentiate on access or cost.
The design agencies were exactly that - creative first. Designers and their strategy counterparts - brand strategists - weren’t equipped to deeply penetrate the market research, value hypotheses, or monetization theories behind these new products. The who, the what, and the why of these nascent digital products was born and evolved deep inside the Nikes, Goldmans, Verizons, and Siriuses of the world - companies who at the time were themselves just learning to navigate what it means to develop valuable, monetizable, easy to use and scale digital products.
Divorcing creative from strategy is a fatal flaw many organizations make. Designers are integral to bringing business and product strategy to life because their craft requires them to focus on solving concrete problems with tangible solutions through functionality and experiences that feel intuitive, specific, and considered.
The reason creatives were and often still are excluded from strategy isn’t personal, it’s operational. It is difficult to connect the threads of who, what, and why across multiple functions and even organizations as is required in the creative agency world. Connecting these threads - even as they evolve - is doable if intentionally structured within an expert team custom built to business stage and product maturity.
Product design requires the same creativity and rigorous stylistic eye as brand design but it requires something else as well - a deep understanding of the who, the what, the why behind the product. Who is this product for? What problem is it solving for them? Why do they need and want this specific product versus something else? Will they pay for it and how much, informs whether it is a luxury or a commodity that needs to differentiate on access or cost.
The design agencies were exactly that - creative first. Designers and their strategy counterparts - brand strategists - weren’t equipped to deeply penetrate the market research, value hypotheses, or monetization theories behind these new products. The who, the what, and the why of these nascent digital products was born and evolved deep inside the Nikes, Goldmans, Verizons, and Siriuses of the world - companies who at the time were themselves just learning to navigate what it means to develop valuable, monetizable, easy to use and scale digital products.
Divorcing creative from strategy is a fatal flaw many organizations make. Designers are integral to bringing business and product strategy to life because their craft requires them to focus on solving concrete problems with tangible solutions through functionality and experiences that feel intuitive, specific, and considered.
The reason creatives were and often still are excluded from strategy isn’t personal, it’s operational. It is difficult to connect the threads of who, what, and why across multiple functions and even organizations as is required in the creative agency world. Connecting these threads - even as they evolve - is doable if intentionally structured within an expert team custom built to business stage and product maturity.
Building an early stage start-up design team
After learning the ropes of what would soon be called digital product design, Josh joined Oscar Health as the first head of design. In a 40 person company, the design work required was both strategic and tactical, spanning both product and brand. In a small company, Josh saw how it was possible for design to be integrally involved in business and product strategy - not just understanding but helping to define the who, the what, the why, and even the how much - and expressing these strategic decisions in design.
Oscar was able to establish a brand and product / market fit with the value proposition of making medical insurance easy to approach and understand for individuals and families. The differentiator was an intuitive, mobile accessible user experience and interface design and personalized recommendations via telemedicine and 24/7 digital customer support.
Working deeply with a team of internal product managers, engineers, and data analysts as well as external brand agencies, Josh established Oscar’s design team which spanned product and brand and eventually grew to 12 people in support of Oscar’s growth to 500+ total employees. As is unfortunately often the case with company expansion, the once tight connection between business and product strategy and design began to fragment and design was once again in the dark about the who, what, and why for new products and initiatives.
Oscar was able to establish a brand and product / market fit with the value proposition of making medical insurance easy to approach and understand for individuals and families. The differentiator was an intuitive, mobile accessible user experience and interface design and personalized recommendations via telemedicine and 24/7 digital customer support.
Working deeply with a team of internal product managers, engineers, and data analysts as well as external brand agencies, Josh established Oscar’s design team which spanned product and brand and eventually grew to 12 people in support of Oscar’s growth to 500+ total employees. As is unfortunately often the case with company expansion, the once tight connection between business and product strategy and design began to fragment and design was once again in the dark about the who, what, and why for new products and initiatives.
Unifying product and brand strategy with design
Josh left Oscar in 2017, jumping at an opportunity to bring design expertise to the intersection of product and brand at the NEA-backed travel company GoEuro, headquartered in Berlin. GoEuro was a fast-paced, growing company whose design needs were outrunning the internal design team and also overwhelming an externally hired brand agency. The company was in the middle of a product evolution - expanding to travel planning in North America and Asia - and also needed to rebrand from its European-centric origin.
From his agency and in house experience Josh was quick to understand the inefficiencies that had developed between two design teams not unified under a single leader or strategy. First Josh established the specific, measurable goal for the design organization - to support GoEuro to both rebrand the company and to test and launch its new product offering with unified design.
To reduce waste he exited the under-performing agency and brought together a small, specialist team with deep skills and expertise. It turned out that under the direction of a single design leader who was plugged into overall business and product strategy that three brand designers, two product designer, one copywriter, and one illustrator were able to do what 3x that number of people had failed to accomplish - define and apply the new brand to a re-designed digital product.
GoEuro was relaunched in 2018 as a global company - Omio. Josh hired a new head of design, and slowly transitioned the work to this new leader and his team.
Omio was not the only company born from this project - tCR was established as a legal entity to hire and manage the small specialist team of expert design resources.
One of the key founding lessons of tCR was that small, expert teams of people who like working together and who are organized around specific, measurable goals directly tied to business and product stage are orders of magnitude more effective than larger functional teams with layered management, disparate goals, and fragmented communication.
From his agency and in house experience Josh was quick to understand the inefficiencies that had developed between two design teams not unified under a single leader or strategy. First Josh established the specific, measurable goal for the design organization - to support GoEuro to both rebrand the company and to test and launch its new product offering with unified design.
To reduce waste he exited the under-performing agency and brought together a small, specialist team with deep skills and expertise. It turned out that under the direction of a single design leader who was plugged into overall business and product strategy that three brand designers, two product designer, one copywriter, and one illustrator were able to do what 3x that number of people had failed to accomplish - define and apply the new brand to a re-designed digital product.
GoEuro was relaunched in 2018 as a global company - Omio. Josh hired a new head of design, and slowly transitioned the work to this new leader and his team.
Omio was not the only company born from this project - tCR was established as a legal entity to hire and manage the small specialist team of expert design resources.
One of the key founding lessons of tCR was that small, expert teams of people who like working together and who are organized around specific, measurable goals directly tied to business and product stage are orders of magnitude more effective than larger functional teams with layered management, disparate goals, and fragmented communication.
Pattern recognition
Josh returned to NYC where there was similar need for reducing waste and hand-picking best-in-class specialist resources. In house teams at early stage start-ups were working closely with small design studios or individual designers on discrete pieces of work. Josh fit seamlessly into these teams, connecting threads between product and brand strategy and design. As he worked with more and more start-ups, he started to see a pattern - he realized that weeks and months of work would come down to a founder or head of product's opinion. The who, the what, the why were being reduced to a single person’s point of view at a single moment in time.
This felt very off especially after the research, testing, and data motion Oscar and Omio had taken to understanding market opportunity, user need, and desirability of a new solution. Josh knew that he could deliver high quality design and build teams of extremely effective design specialists across brand and product. What he wasn’t confident in was that these were or would ever be the right experiences if they weren’t grounded in research, data, and the needs of real people.
Josh was looking for a consistent way to establish business and product foundations to design beautiful things for real people who wanted and needed them.
This felt very off especially after the research, testing, and data motion Oscar and Omio had taken to understanding market opportunity, user need, and desirability of a new solution. Josh knew that he could deliver high quality design and build teams of extremely effective design specialists across brand and product. What he wasn’t confident in was that these were or would ever be the right experiences if they weren’t grounded in research, data, and the needs of real people.
Josh was looking for a consistent way to establish business and product foundations to design beautiful things for real people who wanted and needed them.
Building foundations
Jenny started her career at Deloitte Consulting in the Strategy & Operations practice. Like a creative agency Deloitte had a fee for service business model and like creative agencies the way Deloitte made money was by charging clients by the hour for the labor of specialist resources. If the team delivered on time and with the resources forecast, Deloitte made money. If the team delivered late or required more resources than had been scoped, Deloitte lost money.
While Josh was designing as part of the machine, Jenny was learning how to build and run the machine - by way of a $10M management plan. Every week she tracked the progress made on each workstream, how many hours had been used by each specialist resource, and then calculated the burn rate. A burn rate that was ahead of schedule was good and could be quantified in expected profits. A burn rate that was behind schedule was bad and meant the team was going to have to cut scope, do more work with less resources, or worst of all renegotiate the contract.
If design agencies kept creatives at arms length from business strategy and its real world implications, Deloitte consultants got an up close and personal education on what happened when a project went strategically off course - individual specialist resources were rolled off, sometimes laid off, and in the worst case partners who mismanaged client expectations and resourcing to deliver were fired from the firm.
Delivering agreed to value is in the DNA of tCR. Saying one thing and doing another has real life consequences both financially and reputationally. Failing to deliver costs someone and companies with long-term ambitions understand that integrity takes showing responsibility and accountability especially when things go wrong.
While Josh was designing as part of the machine, Jenny was learning how to build and run the machine - by way of a $10M management plan. Every week she tracked the progress made on each workstream, how many hours had been used by each specialist resource, and then calculated the burn rate. A burn rate that was ahead of schedule was good and could be quantified in expected profits. A burn rate that was behind schedule was bad and meant the team was going to have to cut scope, do more work with less resources, or worst of all renegotiate the contract.
If design agencies kept creatives at arms length from business strategy and its real world implications, Deloitte consultants got an up close and personal education on what happened when a project went strategically off course - individual specialist resources were rolled off, sometimes laid off, and in the worst case partners who mismanaged client expectations and resourcing to deliver were fired from the firm.
Delivering agreed to value is in the DNA of tCR. Saying one thing and doing another has real life consequences both financially and reputationally. Failing to deliver costs someone and companies with long-term ambitions understand that integrity takes showing responsibility and accountability especially when things go wrong.
Real business
After 5 years at Deloitte Jenny left for the NYC start-up scene. While she had seen the implications of not delivering on time and on budget, selling large services contracts still felt abstracted from “real business.”
Her first job was as an operations manager at a flash sale ecommerce company called ideeli. Ideeli was a Gilt Group competitor and as Jenny uncovered in her first few months on the job there were massive operational challenges with the business model.
• Flash sales required a very fast turnaround of large numbers of products across ready-to-wear, shoes, and home goods.
• Because ideeli wanted to sell in season goods at off price prices these products were often coming to the showroom with a very short window to be photgraphed, spec-ed, put on the website, sold, and shipped to the customer.
• This type of operation - even when optimized - required a large number of specialized resources working in parallel and often around the clock.
Potential business model solutions included:
• Selling at least some products at full price to recoup cost to produce the sales
• Selling off-season goods to reduce timeline pressure and resourcing
• Reducing the number of products, sales, or types of products sold to decrease volume and increase optimization through category specialization.
This was the early 2010s - the heyday of growth at all costs - and ideeli leadership was not interested in fundamentally changing the company’s business model. Jenny defined a lifecycle for consistently producing daily online sales and hired and managed a team of 25 to own hundreds of monthly sales at a $10M MRR, standardizing digital event readiness company-wide.
One of the findings from the deep dive into company operations was even more important than process optimization - the company needed a merchandising system to better account for its sprawling, diverse inventory and to help with the monthly and annual financial accounting of what goods were on the books versus owned by customers or partners.
In the early 2010s there was no Shopify and no ecosystem of digital native software companies building digital native software for other digital native software companies. Hence the merchandising system implementation ideeli undertook was complex. It required a team of business analysts, systems analysts, and technical experts to understand how a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) merchandising system designed for brick-and mortar retailers worked and to configure it for ideeli’s flash sale ecommerce model.
One of these business / systems analysts was Jenny. Having built the processes for how to run new sales as efficiently as possible, she was intimately familiar with how ideeli did business and could help translate these processes into software. The system implementation was ultimately successful and set ideeli up for an acquisition by Groupon. Jenny’s experience earned her a product commercialization position at an up-and-coming software company called AppNexus.
Her first job was as an operations manager at a flash sale ecommerce company called ideeli. Ideeli was a Gilt Group competitor and as Jenny uncovered in her first few months on the job there were massive operational challenges with the business model.
• Flash sales required a very fast turnaround of large numbers of products across ready-to-wear, shoes, and home goods.
• Because ideeli wanted to sell in season goods at off price prices these products were often coming to the showroom with a very short window to be photgraphed, spec-ed, put on the website, sold, and shipped to the customer.
• This type of operation - even when optimized - required a large number of specialized resources working in parallel and often around the clock.
Potential business model solutions included:
• Selling at least some products at full price to recoup cost to produce the sales
• Selling off-season goods to reduce timeline pressure and resourcing
• Reducing the number of products, sales, or types of products sold to decrease volume and increase optimization through category specialization.
This was the early 2010s - the heyday of growth at all costs - and ideeli leadership was not interested in fundamentally changing the company’s business model. Jenny defined a lifecycle for consistently producing daily online sales and hired and managed a team of 25 to own hundreds of monthly sales at a $10M MRR, standardizing digital event readiness company-wide.
One of the findings from the deep dive into company operations was even more important than process optimization - the company needed a merchandising system to better account for its sprawling, diverse inventory and to help with the monthly and annual financial accounting of what goods were on the books versus owned by customers or partners.
In the early 2010s there was no Shopify and no ecosystem of digital native software companies building digital native software for other digital native software companies. Hence the merchandising system implementation ideeli undertook was complex. It required a team of business analysts, systems analysts, and technical experts to understand how a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) merchandising system designed for brick-and mortar retailers worked and to configure it for ideeli’s flash sale ecommerce model.
One of these business / systems analysts was Jenny. Having built the processes for how to run new sales as efficiently as possible, she was intimately familiar with how ideeli did business and could help translate these processes into software. The system implementation was ultimately successful and set ideeli up for an acquisition by Groupon. Jenny’s experience earned her a product commercialization position at an up-and-coming software company called AppNexus.
80% grunt work and 20% glory
At ideeli Jenny learned that implementing software products was not only hard work, it was a lot of grunt work. Understanding how people did things and why, mapping processes, customizing user interfaces and work flows, quality assurance testing, training teams on how to use new technology - required strong interpersonal skills, rigorous analysis, and being realistic about how things would ideally work versus how people really work and use software.
At AppNexus Jenny’s job was to take software that had already been built “to market.” That meant to figure out the legal or tax implications and train sales, services, and users on how to use it. Instead of following the check-list provided by her manager, Jenny started asking questions - who was this product for, what problem was it designed to solve for them, how did they solve this problem today, why was this new solution better?
Her manager wasn’t happy but the president and CEO took notice and Jenny was given the chance to help take the AppNexus core network product and expand it to international markets first through a market entry strategy in Europe and APAC and eventually by partnering with the company’s largest client Xaxis, the WPP digital trading desk.
During her time working with Xaxis, the trading desk went from using the AppNexus trading network product 20% of the time to using it 80% of the time. The increase was due to many small tactical improvements to the software that were made over an18 month time period as well as building a deep trust between the teams.
At AppNexus Jenny found product / market fit for the network product globally through a lot of conversations, observations, and trial and error. Ultimately solving concrete user problems with tangible solutions through functionality that was specific and considered and informed by hundreds of hours of research and testing and underpinned by terabytes of data.
tCR learned in that trenches that products that succeed require lots of research, data, and deeply understanding the needs and wants of real people. Making product strategy decisions from a single person’s opinion at a single moment in time do not lead to sustainable companies. Building trust with real people who have real needs and who will collaborate on building the solution is a tried and tested approach.
At AppNexus Jenny’s job was to take software that had already been built “to market.” That meant to figure out the legal or tax implications and train sales, services, and users on how to use it. Instead of following the check-list provided by her manager, Jenny started asking questions - who was this product for, what problem was it designed to solve for them, how did they solve this problem today, why was this new solution better?
Her manager wasn’t happy but the president and CEO took notice and Jenny was given the chance to help take the AppNexus core network product and expand it to international markets first through a market entry strategy in Europe and APAC and eventually by partnering with the company’s largest client Xaxis, the WPP digital trading desk.
During her time working with Xaxis, the trading desk went from using the AppNexus trading network product 20% of the time to using it 80% of the time. The increase was due to many small tactical improvements to the software that were made over an18 month time period as well as building a deep trust between the teams.
At AppNexus Jenny found product / market fit for the network product globally through a lot of conversations, observations, and trial and error. Ultimately solving concrete user problems with tangible solutions through functionality that was specific and considered and informed by hundreds of hours of research and testing and underpinned by terabytes of data.
tCR learned in that trenches that products that succeed require lots of research, data, and deeply understanding the needs and wants of real people. Making product strategy decisions from a single person’s opinion at a single moment in time do not lead to sustainable companies. Building trust with real people who have real needs and who will collaborate on building the solution is a tried and tested approach.
Learning what product / market fit is not
Jenny quickly learned that expanding the application of a mature product is very different from taking a raw piece of technology and figuring out who will use it, why or why not, for what purposes, and if they’ll pay for it.
The AppNexus Programmable Bidder (APB) seemed to be a wanted technology. Jenny and a small team found 30+ users who were willing to provide hours and hours of positive feedback on the technology. And yet - none of these users were willing to pay for it, nor did they make up a sizable enough % of the entire AppNexus user base (.01%) to warrant investment. Ultimately the technology was incorporated into the core bidding algorithm and not spun out as its own product line.
This is probably the single most important lesson for establishing tCR’s definition of product / market fit. It’s not enough to have enthusiastic users - aligning value to customers who need or want your solution enough to pay for it is the only way to build a viable business. PMF requires the revenue coming from paying customers to more than cover the investment in or cost to run the business. PMF = path to profitability. If enough people won’t pay for it - kill it.
The AppNexus Programmable Bidder (APB) seemed to be a wanted technology. Jenny and a small team found 30+ users who were willing to provide hours and hours of positive feedback on the technology. And yet - none of these users were willing to pay for it, nor did they make up a sizable enough % of the entire AppNexus user base (.01%) to warrant investment. Ultimately the technology was incorporated into the core bidding algorithm and not spun out as its own product line.
This is probably the single most important lesson for establishing tCR’s definition of product / market fit. It’s not enough to have enthusiastic users - aligning value to customers who need or want your solution enough to pay for it is the only way to build a viable business. PMF requires the revenue coming from paying customers to more than cover the investment in or cost to run the business. PMF = path to profitability. If enough people won’t pay for it - kill it.
Marketplaces
If finding product / market fit for a single product offering was difficult, building marketplaces with healthy marketplace dynamics was even more challenging. The first marketplace Jenny focused on included external media buyers (who had built their own bidding algorithms and plugged into AppNexus for access to more media placement supply) and sellers (who had built their own ad servers and plugged into AppNexus for more media spend) transacting through the AppNexus platform.
This wasn’t a closed marketplace - meaning on platform media buyers also bought from external sellers and exernal media buyers bought from on platform sellers. The reason for the focus on the external companies was that there were massive challenges for external buyers to understand where to find the most high quality, technically sound, transparent, efficient paths to their desired media properties when comparing on and off platform supply. On the flip side external sellers were inundating the platform with duplicative media placements - already available on platform - through APIs that were outdated and prone to bugs and impression and spend tracking errors.
To resolve challenges with access to high quality, technically sound, transparent, efficient paths to media placement supply, Jenny led definition, development, and productizing of what became an industry-wide solution for managing an overabundance of duplicative supply caused by header bidding technology while maintaining objectivity and clean technical infrastructure for both buyers and sellers (Supply Path Optimization).
To resolve challenges with API integrations, Jenny standardized technical integrations and commercial contracts with major external sellers, turning a product line losing $10M annually into a positive $5M ARR business in one year
As her last project and as part of the strategic positioning of AppNexus in its acquisition by AT&T, Jenny grew a fledgling video marketplace comprised of four major products into a $15M MRR business while establishing a strategic POV on the convergence of the digital video and traditional TV marketplaces, business models, and technologies.
This wasn’t a closed marketplace - meaning on platform media buyers also bought from external sellers and exernal media buyers bought from on platform sellers. The reason for the focus on the external companies was that there were massive challenges for external buyers to understand where to find the most high quality, technically sound, transparent, efficient paths to their desired media properties when comparing on and off platform supply. On the flip side external sellers were inundating the platform with duplicative media placements - already available on platform - through APIs that were outdated and prone to bugs and impression and spend tracking errors.
To resolve challenges with access to high quality, technically sound, transparent, efficient paths to media placement supply, Jenny led definition, development, and productizing of what became an industry-wide solution for managing an overabundance of duplicative supply caused by header bidding technology while maintaining objectivity and clean technical infrastructure for both buyers and sellers (Supply Path Optimization).
To resolve challenges with API integrations, Jenny standardized technical integrations and commercial contracts with major external sellers, turning a product line losing $10M annually into a positive $5M ARR business in one year
As her last project and as part of the strategic positioning of AppNexus in its acquisition by AT&T, Jenny grew a fledgling video marketplace comprised of four major products into a $15M MRR business while establishing a strategic POV on the convergence of the digital video and traditional TV marketplaces, business models, and technologies.
tCR
Josh and Jenny met in 2019. Jenny had left AppNexus after the AT&T acquisition and was working as a transitional head of product helping start-ups find product / market fit. Her approach focused on understanding how people did things and why, mapping customer journeys, talking to lots of people, sending surveys, gathering landing page and usage data, conducting rigorous analysis, and probably most importantly being realistic about how things would ideally work versus how people really work and use software.
The type of research and testing Jenny structured and ran consistently uncovered market opportunities and the needs of real people. This approach resonated with Josh. He felt like this was the type of research and data - getting to the root of the needs of real people - that could be a repeatable way to establish business and product foundations for designing beautiful things.
From 2019 until early 2023 they operated in a fee for service model with 100% organic inbound business largely with the NYC and SF start-up communities. Companies came to them with a business problem that they then helped to solve with strategy and design. Engagements generally lasted months or quarters. Due to the depth in their background, they were able to start from a product or design perspective depending on the maturity of the product, the stage of the company, and the internal team’s experience.
The type of research and testing Jenny structured and ran consistently uncovered market opportunities and the needs of real people. This approach resonated with Josh. He felt like this was the type of research and data - getting to the root of the needs of real people - that could be a repeatable way to establish business and product foundations for designing beautiful things.
From 2019 until early 2023 they operated in a fee for service model with 100% organic inbound business largely with the NYC and SF start-up communities. Companies came to them with a business problem that they then helped to solve with strategy and design. Engagements generally lasted months or quarters. Due to the depth in their background, they were able to start from a product or design perspective depending on the maturity of the product, the stage of the company, and the internal team’s experience.
tCR + fund
One thing always nagged them though - in almost all of their engagements a tension inevitably grew between an organic path to product / market fit arising out of rigorous market research and concept and monetization testing and the expectation of building a billion dollar venture scale company. Nine times out of ten they saw that a venture scale model was not a fit for a company both because of market size and business model viability - things that could be figured out long before lots of time and money was spent on deep prototyping and development.
This cognitive dissonance grew and became front and center in the national consciousness with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank - which was taking structural capital risks of its own and couldn’t rely on the stability of its start-up and VC customer base. Josh and Jenny agreed it was untenable to continue to bet the future of the business on a funding and building model they ultimately didn’t believe was long term viable for most of the companies with whom they had worked closely.
While many are complaining about the state of venture capital and the US tech sector, tCR has an alternative model to offer in the creation of a joint studio + profit sharing fund.
In 2023 they pivoted into building businesses as joint ventures - co-founding companies at 0-1 stage to find the path to profitable, product/market fit. They are testing, designing, and building with small, expert founding teams in million dollar markets. In each case they are following the tCR first principles developed over decades of agency, consulting, big and small tech company experience.
The profit sharing structure of the fund they are building to support the studio, inherently aligns founders, investors, and partners in building and nurturing profitable, long-term self-sustaining businesses, grounded in a clear understanding of and explicit agreement on big picture and financial incentives across all three parties.
This cognitive dissonance grew and became front and center in the national consciousness with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank - which was taking structural capital risks of its own and couldn’t rely on the stability of its start-up and VC customer base. Josh and Jenny agreed it was untenable to continue to bet the future of the business on a funding and building model they ultimately didn’t believe was long term viable for most of the companies with whom they had worked closely.
While many are complaining about the state of venture capital and the US tech sector, tCR has an alternative model to offer in the creation of a joint studio + profit sharing fund.
In 2023 they pivoted into building businesses as joint ventures - co-founding companies at 0-1 stage to find the path to profitable, product/market fit. They are testing, designing, and building with small, expert founding teams in million dollar markets. In each case they are following the tCR first principles developed over decades of agency, consulting, big and small tech company experience.
The profit sharing structure of the fund they are building to support the studio, inherently aligns founders, investors, and partners in building and nurturing profitable, long-term self-sustaining businesses, grounded in a clear understanding of and explicit agreement on big picture and financial incentives across all three parties.
tCR First Principles
1. Small, expert teams of people who like working together and who are organized around specific, measurable goals directly tied to business and product stage are orders of magnitude more effective than larger functional teams with layered management, disparate goals, and fragmented communication.
2. Saying one thing and doing another has real life consequences both financially and reputationally. Failing to deliver costs someone and companies with long-term ambitions understand that integrity takes showing responsibility and accountability especially when things go wrong.
3. Products that succeed require lots of research, data, and deeply understanding the needs and wants of real people. Making product strategy decisions from a single person’s opinion at a single moment in time do not lead to sustainable companies. Building trust with real people who have real needs and who will collaborate on building the solution is a tried and tested approach.
4. It’s not enough to have enthusiastic users - aligning value to customers who need or want your solution enough to pay for it is the only way to build a viable business. PMF requires the revenue coming from paying customers to more than cover the investment in or cost to run the business. PMF = path to profitability. If enough people won’t pay for it - kill it.
2. Saying one thing and doing another has real life consequences both financially and reputationally. Failing to deliver costs someone and companies with long-term ambitions understand that integrity takes showing responsibility and accountability especially when things go wrong.
3. Products that succeed require lots of research, data, and deeply understanding the needs and wants of real people. Making product strategy decisions from a single person’s opinion at a single moment in time do not lead to sustainable companies. Building trust with real people who have real needs and who will collaborate on building the solution is a tried and tested approach.
4. It’s not enough to have enthusiastic users - aligning value to customers who need or want your solution enough to pay for it is the only way to build a viable business. PMF requires the revenue coming from paying customers to more than cover the investment in or cost to run the business. PMF = path to profitability. If enough people won’t pay for it - kill it.