The Startup Gold Mine: How to Tap the Hidden Innovation Agendas of Large Companies to Fund and Grow Your Business

Learn how your startup business can benefit through early stage investment, sales revenue, or partnership by identifying and aligning with corporate innovation initiatives within larger companies.

Corporations are becoming desperate to change their culture (and perception) as giant, bureaucratic dinosaurs that are too slow to react in a rapidly changing business landscape. They are all trying to be more innovative and agile, more “start-up like.” One of the easy ways to do this is through acquiring or partnering with a startup. While it was once rare to find a large corporation listed among shareholders on a startup cap table, Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) now makes up 25% (~$18 billion) of all venture capital dollars in North America. To tap in to this growing source of capital, startups need to understand how corporations operate and what they are looking to gain in these relationships.

The Startup Gold Mine reveals how the world’s largest and most prestigious brands make innovation decisions, including new product launches, vendor/startup partnerships, and even billion-dollar acquisitions—and how startups can take advantage of corporate’s strengths and weaknesses to their benefit. Author Neil Soni draws on his experience as an entrepreneur and in external innovation with premier brands like Estée Lauder, MAC, and Smashbox to share the hidden inner workings of large companies as well as how startup founders and employees can use this knowledge to close the biggest deals of their lives. If you’ve ever wanted to learn how some startup founders manage to partner with a brand like UnderArmour, get acquired by a behemoth like General Motors, or sell their services to Bacardi, The Startup Gold Mine shares all that and much more, including: 

• How to understand who your large company counterpart is, what they are incentivized to do, and how to get them to take actions that benefit your startup
• Why the “Innovator's Dilemma” is leading large companies to seek out insurance policies that come in the form of partnerships with startups
• A complete start-to-finish playbook for getting a deal done with a large company, from first connection to getting paid
• A troubleshooting guide for common land mines startups run into when trying to work with large companies
• How to navigate the convoluted corporate innovation landscape without blowing a fortune on conferences and consultants