This week on AdExchanger Talks, David Kidder, four-time founder and bestselling author, talks about his current project helping scaled companies ignite growth using the tools of VC and entrepreneurship.
His work in this area has led to a new company, Bionic, as well as a book, titled “New to Big.”
In Kidder’s words, “Bionic is a collective of entrepreneurs and investors who are installing what we call a growth operating system inside of large organizations. It’s the idea that the ‘big to bigger’ engine in large companies is effectively at war with growth because it’s paid to de-risk and create efficiency. Trying to do growth inside that ‘big to bigger’ box is a… fool’s errand.”
The “new to big” startup engine – the entrepreneurial function in the economy which is great at discovering new growth – requires a distinct set of rules that are walled off from the “big to bigger” mindset, Kidder says. Bionic has installed startup factories at GE, General Mills, Microsoft, Citigroup, P&G and Nike, among other clients, that are accomplishing just that through a process of rapid iteration.
“It’s our belief that venture capital and entrepreneurship are literally forms of management,” Kidder says. “We [Bionic] stand up and operationalize that as a form of management.”
Kidder knows what he’s talking about. His path from entrepreneur to startup guru includes having founded four companies, one of which was social ad buying platform Clickable. He also wrote bestseller “The Startup Playbook,” a bible for entrepreneurs that features more than 40 case studies with the likes of Sarah Blakely, Stephen Case and Reid Hoffman.
Kidder goes into depth on those experiences in this episode and shares his key lesson from the Clickable experience: “Don’t build a company on someone else’s monopoly.”
