"Building a startup community is not a zero-sum game in which there are winners and losers: if everyone engages, they and the entire community can all be winners."

- Brad Feld, serial investor and entrepreneur // Managing Director of Foundry Group // High Alpha board advisor

Here at High Alpha Innovation, we’ve got some exciting news: today marks the launch of Fusion, our Corporate Executive Network.

Building is in our DNA at High Alpha Innovation: in less than 100 days, we move from a broad set of ideas to a fully-formed new company, all in partnership with some of the world’s leading organizations. For us, startups are mini laboratories -- they allow us to test concepts, take risks, and learn as quickly as possible -- but they’re also tangible. Instead of a strategy recommendation or the addition of another internal process or structure, the new companies that we build are living, breathing evidence of the work we do and the impact we make. You may have heard us talk about “eliminating innovation theater,” and we can’t think of a better way of doing so than launching the next big software startup into the world.

For good reason, the venture studio movement is gaining momentum. We’d be lying, however, if we said that creating new startups isn’t hard. Beyond a whole lot of hard work, successfully creating a new company and moving past innovation theater requires rapid assumption testing and validation, but it also needs the right people behind it. In fact, the ultimate success of a NewCo is predicated on access: access to thought leaders who can help shape ideas, access to talented entrepreneurs who can build around those ideas, and access to a community of advisors who can weigh in and lend their expertise to our team and our portfolio companies. We’ve amassed an impressive group of expert builders, designers, and strategists at High Alpha Innovation, but we value diverse perspectives, too -- leaning on a smart network that knows more than we do is not only a key part of our playbook: it’s a point of pride.

Today, we’re taking that smart network to the next level: we’re making it an official part of the High Alpha Innovation community via the Fusion Corporate Executive Network. Fusion is a diverse group of forward-thinking senior executives from large organizations who are passionate about innovation through startup creation. Fusion Advisors share their expertise with our team and portfolio companies, learn from and connect with peers, and get early access to board, advisory, and investment opportunities at the startups we build. Our founding cohort consists of 12 Advisors from corporations like Salesforce, Allegion, and Marriott, and we plan to add more as High Alpha Innovation and our portfolio companies continue to scale. To learn more about all the Fusion Advisors and the work they’re doing, we invite you to check out the newly-launched Fusion page on our website. And if you or someone you know is interested in becoming a part of Fusion, we’d love to hear from you: send us an email at fusion@highalphainno.com. 

We’re thrilled to have these Fusion Advisors join us to help advance the way big companies approach innovation and bring about tangible change. We have learned through first-hand experience that combining the speed of a venture studio with the knowledge and scale of a large organization can lead to amazing results, but we think of Fusion as an extra superpower on top of it all. As the name implies, we’re combining perspectives, building community, and expanding the reach of our startup-building experiment. And as Fusion continues to grow, we’ll be sure to share what we’ve learned and built together: as Brad Feld suggested above, we’re all in on this winning community.