Wavetable Labs launches!

by Matt Moog
April 22, 2013

 

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Today we are formally launching a Chicago based digital business incubator called Wavetable Labs.  The team behind Wavetable are experienced entrepreneurs, technologists, designers, and marketers who have spent their careers starting, scaling and operating successful digital businesses.  We are committed to being a positive and contributing member of the rapidly growing Chicago digital community.  We will bring together our experience, a network of relationships, a proven process for building great businesses and capital to help entrepreneurial teams focus on meaningful problems to create scalable businesses.

We plan to blog and tweet regularly so you will learn more in the coming weeks and months about us, but here are some key things to understand about who we are, what we will do and how we will work.

#1 – Wavetable is a digital business incubator

We plan to recruit Founders In Residence (FIR) to help them identify and build promising new digital businesses.  Our core team will devote a substantial amount of time to helping them evaluate new business opportunities, build the product and launch and scale the business.

Wavetable Labs is not an accelerator (like TechStars or Y Combinator) and not a venture capital investor.  We will pursue fewer businesses each year than those types of organizations typically do and we will be involved in the earliest stages of vetting the idea. Our core team will devote substantial time and effort, working shoulder to shoulder with Founders-in-Residence, to getting the business off the ground in the early stages.

#2 – Who is on the core team?

Matt Moog (CEO), Josh Mallamud (COO), Corey Haines (CTO), Zach Walsh (Sr UX Designer), Drew Gilliam (FIR) and Kendall Elliott (Office Manager).

Together this team will provide advice and actively contribute to strategy, technology, design, marketing, operations, sales and business development.  Over time this team will grow to enable us to provide an even higher degree of service to Wavetable companies.

#3 – What is our value proposition to entrepreneurs?

Many potential entrepreneurs, operating as seasoned executives or professional, have some combination of great ideas, deep digital experience and lots of passion but they may not be ready to fully take the leap to be a solo entrepreneur.  We think our approach will appeal to many of those people and help provide a bridge between working as an employee of an existing business and partnering with Wavetable to be responsible for launching a new business.

#4 – How will we work with corporate partners?

We hope to partner with top-flite mid- and large-cap companies on innovations that will both improve our partners’ competitive position and allow us to jointly spawn new, profitable, stand-alone businesses.  We believe Wavetable is a unique, collaborative platform that provides a nimble, flexible, experimental environment that fosters creative thinking, vastly collapses cycle times and provides access to a pool of “start-up” talent that may not be easily accessible to our partners.  We will hire dedicated teams to focus exclusively on the innovation needs of each partner, giving us the ability to intimately familiarize ourselves with our partners’ innovation needs and discover obscure, non-obvious pain points buried deep within the company’s operations but that plague a broad group of industry participants.

#5 – How can you get involved?

Please, come talk to us.  If you are a

  • Venture Capitalist and want to get an early look at the companies we incubate, we’d love to familiarize ourselves with your investment strategy and focus so we can bring you relevant opportunities when the time is right.
  • Large corporation and want to add to your company’s existing innovation efforts with an external effort that you control
  • Advertising agency, innovation or design firm and want to bring your clients new ideas or potentially collaborate on vetting and jointly building great businesses
  • University and have ideas, research or discoveries that you want to commercialize
  • Entrepreneur with the passion, moxie, skills and experience to build a business and are interested in our Founder-in-Residence program

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