One of Eric Schmidt’s venture funds, Innovation Endeavors recently caught my eye.
Too often, in tech investing or entrepreneurship, there is a herd mentality resulting in a narrow field of vision in seeing, pursuing, or funding opportunities. Think group messaging or photo apps earlier this year, for example. Dror Berman, the head of Innovation Endeavors, has a nice quote in BusinessWeek about taking a broader view, recognizing and pursuing other opportunities beyond the flavor of the moment:
Venture capital firms typically focus on a few tried-and-true industries; Innovation’s investments are intentionally all over the map. “Ninety percent of the world’s entrepreneurs are working on solving 10 percent of the world’s problems,” says Berman. “We’re trying to find entrepreneurs who want to solve the other 90 percent.” He’s backed startups as wide-ranging as Project Slice, a service for organizing shopping receipts in an e-mail inbox, and ReBloom, a sleep-inducing soft drink.
The fund also has a competition called Runway to put together teams of people who hadn’t previously known each other to search for a business to work on after formation of the team. This approach, empowering entrepreneurs with a general passion to be innovative above all, even pre-idea and pre-team, also reflects a broader view. It’s a bet that there may be high returns from betting on and reducing barriers for people with an overwhelming passion to do something innovative, even where there isn’t a fully-formed idea or team.
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