Portfolio entrepreneurship, AI research, and brain development with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about portfolio entrepreneurship, how AI tools are transforming market research and new brain research that indicates adulthood starts later than you think. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, and Miles Zero's Robyn Bolton. As we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started.

Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

AI Driven Innovation Trends and Founder Mindset Shifts

[00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and with me, I have Robyn Bolton from Mile Zero. Welcome, Robyn.

[00:00:34] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Great to be here.

Great to have you, again. This is episode 3 43 ish. We're excited to continue to talk about innovation. There's always something new and exciting to talk about.

[00:00:45] Brian Ardinger: Anything going on in your world this week?

[00:01:04] Robyn Bolton: I feel like this week I'm going to be spending at grading finals papers wrapped up my corporate innovation course at Boston College, and everyone submitted their finals and that's all great and they're done. And I'm now just looking at a stack of virtual digital stack of papers.

[00:01:21] Brian Ardinger: At Nelnet this week we've got our Spark, which is our monthly gathering of folks. We find some interesting project and give them opportunities to sit on stage and talk about what some of the new things that are building out there. That's an opportunity to get our movers and shakers in the same room and share what's going across the different business units. So we're always excited for our Spark this week. Those are some of the things that are happening in my world. 

[00:01:44] Robyn Bolton: I'll happily come out and go to your Spark event, and you can grade papers. 

[00:01:46] Brian Ardinger: You're welcome anytime. We've got a lot of things to cover today. We've got three articles that we've curated over the last week or so. The first one we want to talk about is everyone's a founder now and it's from every, and it's a YouTube channel, and it's an interview with Henrik Werdelin

Portfolio Entrepreneurship and AI Agents Reshaping Startups

And Henrik is a person who started Pre-Hype, started BarkBox, and he has got a new company called Audos. It's a platform that helps people use AI agents to turn ideas into profitable companies. This particular YouTube video in this interview was talking a lot about some of these new tools and how it's really changing the landscape of startups and can apply to corporate innovation as well. With these new tools, Henrick was talking about this idea of portfolio entrepreneurship, so the idea of a new breed of entrepreneurship that's shepherded in by AI.

Where founders build family of products or services around the same customer instead of like one moonshot idea. So rather than coming up with Facebook and building that out, there's an opportunity now for entrepreneurs to create maybe more single, double, triple types of companies around a core set of customers that they know and can work with.

And it's a variety of different projects and services that can serve that particular marketplace versus the traditional model of venture capital that we've seen out there kind of shooting for the moon. 

[00:03:02] Robyn Bolton: It's a really interesting video and I encourage people to go watch it. They talk about a lot in this video and you know, some of the ones that I wanna highlight, and you've already touched on this is one, what he's building with Audos. Going back to our last episode where we talked about the Mad Lib. I actually went over to Audos and you can fill in a Mad Lib for your business idea and I think in 10 minutes it built a fully functioning website, videos, everything. It was amazing. I have no idea how to edit any of it or do anything but like just the speed at which you could take a mad lib and create something that looked like a viable business was astounding.

Deep Customer Focus and the Rise of Multi Product Founders

He also talked about, as you mentioned, the importance of picking a target customer and one that you want to serve for 10 years. And he talked about with BarkBox, it was all about serving the dog owner, and most people would talk about, oh, well, you did BarkBox. Now do Meow Box, now do whatever box. And he's like, that wasn't going to work. They went from BarkBox to basically like airplanes for dogs to other things. And it was always the people who are gonna win in this new kind of world are the ones who go really deep on a very specific customer.

Then kind of where this all started of the portfolio entrepreneur. He did a great job calling out VCs. Mm-hmm. And saying, Hey, VCs will tell an entrepreneur you have to go all in on one idea. Don't you dare get distracted with a portfolio. And yet the VCs are there being like, here's our portfolio and is a great point. 

[00:04:39] Brian Ardinger: Yeah, and I'm seeing more and more folks, I've been having conversations about like startup ecosystems then. And it used to be where you'd have a players and they'd have to find a team and build out something from that perspective. And now an A player can use these platforms like ADOS to vibe code and kind of get things up and going. And they don't necessarily have to raise money.

They don't necessarily have to go through the 10 year journey to get to an exit before they're actually profitable in that. You know, these tools allow you to, if you have some insight, some access to customers, something like that, you can start quickly. You can start making progress and, you know, maybe you don't have the billion dollar exit, but a nice a hundred million dollar exit that you built yourself might be a nice little, way to play this particular game that wasn't possible necessarily before AI and some of the new tools and, no-code stuff that's available to you now.

AI Powered Personas and Synthetic Research in Market Insights

[00:05:28] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I don't know too many people who would turn their noses up at a hundred million or even a $10 million exit. 

[00:05:33] Brian Ardinger: Zuckerberg did. But other than that, well.... Let's see. The second article on our list today is from HBR. Harvard always seems to put out some good stuff, but their article in the Harvard business reviews called the AI Tools that are Transforming Market Research.

This was an interesting take on how AI is impacting how research is done. And so the interesting things that they're talking about are some of the new ways that people are using AI to create a variety of different personas and a digital twins and using the AI as a way to interact and kind of mimic or facilitate what used to be something you'd have to do with actuarial customers or creating the real thing before you could actually get some feedback on it. And AI is allowing you to create these synthetic personas and digital twin types of scenarios that speed up the learning process when it comes to work...