Industrial Opportunities for Startups

Thanks for the comments and questions.

Our thinking follows, what we call a ‘venture client’ approach, through which startups get a valuable asset, a globally operating reference customer, without a hassle. For instance, we use an expedited procurement process and leaner legal approach in POs. The industrial companies, on the other hand, get to apply new technologies and talent quicker in building new services, solutions and products that can add value to their customers or other stakeholders.

Venture Client approach also means, that when announce a business opportunity, we also make sure there’s significant need from the company, budget to make purchase order (revenue for the startup) and team in place to act fast given there’s a solid applicable solution. Venture Client also means that the industrial company understands there’s associated risk in building something new with startups - but also major upsides in time-to-value if done succesfully.

So far our approach has been warmly welcomed by startups and investors. We aim to keep it simple, fast and fair. We have plenty of references which we are adding to our website, some you can already access on our site.

Needless to say, this might not be of interest to all entrepreneurs or startups but there might be plenty of those who could benefit from the approach.

I don't trust industrial companies to seriously engage in technology. Too many times I've seen a big industrial company buy a startup, just to kill it for big-company reasons. Like, it competes with a cash cow and somebody inside doesn't like that. Or development costs more than another iron shim or whatever they make normally and it looks marginally worse on the books. Or they just don't know how to manage it. Or they don't adopt what they've bought because their processes are ponderous and ossified.

I thought the best bet was to compete with them externally, so they'd have to take notice and react either by buying your solution or hiring you or something. But instead, anecdotally, a big company had a private meeting with the owners of our innovative small company and made a deal to offer some of our products in their showroom. After that all our development projects dried up mysteriously (the next Friday everybody was let go).

So no, I'm not going to invest any (more) of my life's worktime on helping old industrial companies figure it out.

This is the first time that I'm ever asking this: how is this interesting?

I don't see this article as educational. I fail to see how this is interesting, because I can't understand through their business speak what they mean. Is it a consortium of some sort? They are connecting startups to industrial leaders, okay which ones, in which country? I presume the US (edit: I just saw now that they're from Finland). What does it mean to be an industrial leader? They list 5 companies that I have never heard of, which in itself is fine but combined with the other things gives me even more questions in my mind.

Can anyone tell me what's appealing about this article? I'm missing it. Normally when I see an article, I may or may not like it but I succeed to see how it's interesting to other HN'ers, with this article I have no clue.

I mean this in the most constructive way possible and would really appreciate someone 'on the other side' to see how this is interesting.