The origin of Company-as-a-Product (CaaP)
Company-as-a-Product (CaaP) is a term coined by business strategist ZeMing M. Gao. It is a methodology that approaches new companies from a “CaaP engineering” point of view.
From ideation, design, creation, buildout, scaling, and transaction (e.g., exit, sale, or IPO), CaaP methodology integrates multiple dimensions of technology, intellectual property (IP), corporate structure, team-building, and business into a coherent product with a clear economic goal.
The CaaP concept initially grew from a striking observation of the tech startup space:
Many brilliant inventors and scientists who have developed a technology that has the potential to change the world fail to build a successful company.
Such failures are often broadly characterized as a failure to “commercialize.” But such broad and superficial characterization is a diagnosis without meaning. It fails to point out the root cause of the problem and provides no instructions or a solution to the problem.
The root of the problem is that the conventional founders of a tech company often do not understand the following critical facts:
First, a technology, a functionality, or even a solution, is not a commercialized product. The two are essentially different. A different kind of science governs the development path from the former to the latter.
Second, a startup company itself is a product in the making. Not only does the company make a commercial product in the conventional sense, but it is itself also a “product”. The two products have different purposes and different customers. The former is projected into a commercial market to face conventional customers, while the latter is projected into the capital market to face financial “customers” in that space accordingly.
There is an intricate and dynamic relationship between the two products. Many mistakenly think that the latter (company as a product) is a natural and passive emergent outcome from the former. But in reality, according to Company-as-a-Product (CaaP), building a company as a CaaP product requires a conscious and purposeful design and construction from the very beginning.
The first point above is relatively familiar to entrepreneurs and investors, but the second remains largely unrecognized, often an unknown unknown. Recognizing this critical oversight inspired the creation of the Company-as-a-Product methodology.
CaaP methodology for building tech startups
The CaaP methodology creates a company driven by a proper “powertrain” to become an effective product with a specific target.
The core insight of CaaP methodology is that a tech company not only makes a product but is itself also a “product”. This product is built with a specific type of target customer, which could be investors, a strategic partner, a competitor, or a potential buyer.
A company as a CaaP product is made (built) according to sound intellectual property (IP), business, finance, economics, and legal principles.
Creating an effective CaaP company needs a CaaP team as an insider expert.
The conventional startup model is a one-legged model with clutches. The “leg” is the founder(s), while the clutches are third-party service providers such as an incubator, lawyers, and other consultants.
The conventional model, therefore, almost completely relies on collaboration, which is necessary but not sufficient or optimal.
Collaboration is based on communication, and communication, in turn, is based on understanding, but true understanding is often lacking. Today, people collaborate a lot and communicate even more, but true understanding rooted at a deep “first principle” level about the economic value creation mechanism and business drivers, such as intellectual property, is rare.
In today’s tech realm, especially in cutting-edge technologies such as blockchain and AI, the conventional demarcation of various “disciplines” is being blurred and disappearing. Technology, law, economics, and finance are combined (or at least need to be combined) in a way that is far deeper than what people usually call cross-disciplinary collaboration.
The above calls for an “interdisciplinary” approach, but I believe even this very word “interdisciplinary” represents a misunderstanding.
For example, people call someone with a background in multiple areas “interdisciplinary”. However, separate knowledge of multiple areas qualifies as “multidisciplinary”, which is not necessarily “interdisciplinary”. The latter requires deep and purposeful integration. In my own case, I have a multidisciplinary background in physics, law, economics, and finance. But that alone does not make me interdisciplinary. It is the process of learning how innovation-driven economies and businesses actually work and how a tech company is successfully designed, configured, and built as a product that integrates multiple areas of knowledge into an interdisciplinary approach.
The very idea of the disciplines is artificial. Reality is a coherent single fabric.
What is really important is exactly how innovation-driven economies and businesses work.
The purpose of this inquiry is not to diminish the central importance of technological innovation itself in tech startups but to integrate technology with coherent mechanisms of law, intellectual property, economics, business, and finance that grow out of insider understanding (an organic “leg”) rather than “crutches” borrowed from outside.
From a microeconomics point of view, we need an ab initio Company-as-a-Product (CaaP) approach to each tech startup. Ab initio means “from the beginning”. It is to build a CaaP from the beginning of the startup rather than from when the company is entering or has already entered the purpose of a CaaP the capital market.
The purpose of CaaP is also not to diminish the importance of outside collaboration. The core of a CaaP company is to be fundamentally sound from within at an early stage and remain so after that. Only then will the utilization of outside help become more effective and less wasteful.
What should you do as a startup founder?
If you are a tech startup team, you should presumably already have a very strong “tech leg.” But beyond that, it helps to have a CaaP member (team or individual) who not only understands 100% the technological aspects of the company, but also has deep insight into intellectual property (IP), law, economics, business, and finance, and knows how to actually “machine” a Company-as-a-Product.
CaaP as a startup methodology is not merely a management method but a type of “engineering” with full-stack development. The CaaP principle means more than a lean startup philosophy; it is a holistic and inter-functional methodology of building a company as a “product” for the capital market (which is different from the consumer market defined by the end users of the company’s products).
CaaP is the integration of business, technology, intellectual property (IP), law, and finance.
Intellectual property (IP):
Here, especially, IP refers not just to a bunch of patents but to a business strategy and system that works as both a business and a tech driver rather than just a pile of intangible assets. In other words, proper IP should be an active driver of a CaaP vehicle (company) or a part of the powertrain rather than a cargo, or a passive result of R&D. Mere IP in the conventional sense is not enough.
CaaP builds an “Intelligent Portfolio of Intellectual Property” (IPIP) which integrates IP directly into the company as a product, as active drivers rather than passive depositors.
Facing the Capital Market:
Nearly all startup companies must face the capital market to raise money.
Fundraising is a familiar term, and even the most single-minded tech startup founders realize the importance and necessity. However, few understand the risks and benefits of how the company is structured, constructed, and packaged to face the financial market, and how important it is to have someone who serves as the interface and the communication channel.
If not done properly, the founders could face different kinds of risks:
(1) wasting the founders’ precious time and energy. If the key finder is also the primary innovation driver, the risk is not merely a waste of time but could very well be a waste of opportunity.
(2) failing to find acceptance in the venture capital market.
(3) falling into the hands of vulture capitalists (this is the opposite of the above #2).
(4) failing to build a healthy internal incentive structure to prevent destructive conflicts, fractures, and even fatal breakups. See more below.
Company organization and equity structure:
In addition, a CaaP expert must also have a keen sense of the values and incentives of different team members (including the founders) and know how to build a team with balanced motivations and relationships. This good sense needs to be applied to both hiring and the company’s equity structure, such as employee stock option plans.
Conventionally, this is considered a pure HR job with some assistance from a lawyer, but the conventional approach misses an extremely important factor of building a startup company: the knowledge of the underlying values themselves, and how they are created and interconnected.
HR professionals and lawyers know how to build business constructs that properly connect various value pieces, but they lack a deep understanding of the underlying values themselves and how they are created in the first place. At the same time, while some entrepreneurs intuitively understand these values, they are exceptions rather than the norm among tech startups. Such is the general condition of today’s superficial collaboration model in a tech startup ecosystem.
In addition, the CaaP team must also be an expert in championing a cause, whether it is the company as a whole, a technology, or an idea. It takes much more than “salesmanship” because it requires deep understanding and personal conviction of what is being championed at the CaaP level.
Finally, the CaaP expert knows how to “machine” a company as a product. Value is created by integrating the technology, IP, business model, and financing of the company, but all this starts from effectively communicating complex concepts across all sides.
Applying CaaP in well-established and competitive fields
The above are general principles of CaaP, which are applicable to all tech startups.
However, CaaP is especially suitable in fields where well-established and competitive companies already exist.
There is a deep disconnection between the existing tech companies and tech startups. Such is the case even when a particular tech startup noticeably provides a salient and much-needed solution to a conspicuous problem faced by an existing tech company.
Although many tech companies have a venture capital arm, the disconnection remains largely unsolved. It has much to do with the fact that these VC branches are managed by traditional VC managers, function like a traditional VC fund, and are counted as a financial component of the parent company rather than a more synergistic structural business development component.
But there’s still more that causes the disconnection.
Why can’t an existing tech company simply go ahead and build the solution by itself?
In most cases, it simply can’t. It is often not due to a lack of talent and knowledge (as many established tech companies have highly competent tech teams from CTO down to engineers and developers), but due to an inherent incentive and decision-making corporate structure. It is a problem that Clayton Christensen explained in his seminal book, ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma. ‘
But there’s still more that causes the disconnection.
Why can’t an existing tech company buy the startup that provides a much-needed solution?
The answer is that some do, but not only is the frequency of such acquisitions low, but both the accuracy and timing are poor.
Acquisition mostly happens only when the startup has grown to a billion-dollar company, having become more than a solution provider, but a competitor. Even then, the success rate is low due to a lack of pre-acquisition understanding and poor post-acquisition team synergy and compatibility. The cause for this is not a mere matter of lacking visibility but a lack of deep insight into startup valuation and how startup companies operate.
The kind of insight that is necessary for proper valuation of a startup does not simply come from general technological and business knowledge, but from deep domain-specific and even team-specific participation, which the existing tech companies simply don’t have, again due to the limiting corporate structures and business relations rather than a lack of talents in a general sense.
But why doesn’t an existing tech company become a partner with the startup from the very beginning?
Well, that’s a good question, and it is this very question that led to the concept of Company-as-a-Product (CaaP).
CaaP means building startup companies as a product targeting a specific market. The target market may be one type of corporate buyer or even a specific company buyer.
In other words, it is a mechanism of building a new company for another company (or a type of existing company).
However, this targeting is not mere planning or aspiration; it is through a concrete partnership at an early stage. That is, the potential buyer plays a partnering role in the new company’s early stage.
For example, the relationship may start as a consulting project for which a major corporation hires a team of solution providers. However, unlike traditional consultant-client relationships, the parties are eyeing the possibility of the project becoming a standalone product or even a separate company. Together, they study and identify not only the custom needs of the customer company but also gaps in the marketplace in general, and collaborate on an innovative solution that is applicable not only to the customer company itself but to a broader market.
Not every project will become a product or a company, but the pre-existing planning and willingness to allocate resources accordingly make a fundamental difference.
Although the germination of a new company can happen accidentally in an ad hoc fashion, proper cultivation in the early stages can benefit it hugely. It has not only to do with initial funding but also a different kind of incentive mechanism, the importance of which cannot be overemphasized.
It is on the latter point, i.e., proper incentive mechanism, that corporations fail to understand why startups succeed or fail and why a corporate team with ten times more resources cannot beat a lean and mean startup.
However, the other side of the coin is that entrepreneurs are often discouraged and even destroyed by the fact that many great technologies that clearly have the potential to provide a good solution end up failing in the traditional startup environment. That’s just one consequence of the disconnection identified above.
The unicorn disease
One significant consequence of the above-discussed disconnection between the existing companies and startups is a disease called ‘unicorns’. Less than one out of a thousand (1/1000) startups become a so-called ‘unicorn’ with a valuation of $1 billion or above. That fact is being revered as the symbol of tech startup power, but in reality, it is an unhealthy disease.
For entrepreneurs and society as a whole, it is far more productive, both short-term and long-term, to have ten $100 million companies than just one billion-dollar company.
People tend not to realize that startup companies’ exit distribution is not simply a natural outcome but rather a product of the VC culture and business models. VCs are fixated on exceptionally large exits, almost dictated by their business model and culture. However, this expectation and aim create an adversarial environment for the vast majority of startup projects.
Many good solutions never come to fruition, not because they are inherently flawed and destined to fail regardless of the support and partnership, but because of the way these companies are started, funded, supported, and partnered with others.
The problem is not merely that startups fail due to a lack of funding, but more importantly, because only a particular kind of startup is being created in the first place to appeal to the existing VC environment, many good opportunities simply never emerge to be tested. Instead of focusing on solving concrete problems for existing customers, everyone is forced to work on another potential unicorn; otherwise, no investor would be interested in investing.
The unrealistic high-aiming achieves a precisely opposite result: the environment silently kills ten healthy $100 million practical solution providers, each of whom would have had a 25% chance of succeeding, in exchange for one glorious unicorn, which has a 10% chance of succeeding. Statistically, the difference would be a $250 million outcome (25% x 10 x $100 million) versus a $100 million outcome (10% x $1 billion). Even if the unicorn also had a 25% chance of succeeding, ten $100 million companies would still be a better outcome than a single one billion-dollar company in terms of tech diversity and social benefit.
CaaP incubator
A CaaP incubator is the answer to the above problem. It does not aim for unicorns (although it does not prevent the project from becoming one) but focuses on solutions with the most synergetic partnerships. It allows solution products to naturally succeed and achieve their proper scale, be it a $5 million exit or a $500 million exit.
The CaaP model provides a foundation for a new kind of tech incubator. The CaaP incubator takes a lesson from the success of traditional incubators. It aims for a particular type of market with tailored organizational and business structures (including that of the founding team, key partner(s), employees, investors, etc.).
In addition to the common skill set of building startup companies, the CaaP incubator has the characteristics of a traditional consulting company that works with customers to provide custom solutions. Yet CaaP’s business model is different from that of a traditional consulting company, but rather a combination of both a tech incubator and a private equity (PE) fund, all designed not to maximize any particular party’s direct interest, but to maximize the chance of each CaaP company becoming a successful ‘product’ with a targeted exit, which naturally reward all participants according to the incentive mechanism.
Compared to traditional consulting companies on one extreme, and traditional incubators on the other, the CaaP incubator provides an effective mechanism to capture and manage ‘Common intellectual property (IP)’, which is optimized to benefit both CaaP products/companies and the CaaP platform.
The CaaP IP model solves the problem of the existing environment, which yields results polarized onto opposite extremes: IP is either wasted because of the lack of a common platform as an economically efficient IP depository, or completely falls into the hands of one lucky winner, who tends to enjoy an unhealthy monopoly.
The above is not a trivial task, but at least CaaP provides a more decentralized framework to build it with a coherent strategy and mechanism.
The CaaP incubator becomes a platform on which various CaaP products can be produced. The concept allows a high level of flexibility in the type of CaaP products/companies that can be built.
CaaP is firstly a methodology to approach conventional companies, such as tech startups, from a different angle for more efficient creation (production) of such companies.
We explore how the CaaP methodology is used to approach a tech startup as a product, aiming for a certain economic outcome.
However, the innovative model of CaaP introduces a new concept of “companies” which has led to the creation of completely new types of entities, ranging from virtual economic agents (which are nonlegal entities but organized in a fashion to achieve functions of a company) to virtual firms (which are legal entities but made up of virtualized workers). For example, Toolots develops patent-pending Virtual Firm Technology (VF Technology) to enable its more efficient cross-border e-commerce platform. It would require a separate article to explain.
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