The third hiccup hit right as I reached the slide regarding ‘Shared Service Synergy.’ It was violent-the kind of internal spasm that makes your teeth click together in front of twenty-three potential limited partners who are already wondering if you’re too young to be managing $43 million of their capital. I stood there, a glass of lukewarm water in my hand, feeling my diaphragm betray me in a room that smelled of expensive cedar and desperate ambition. My throat felt like it had been scrubbed with industrial sandpaper. Every time I tried to explain how we ‘de-risked’ the entrepreneurial journey, my body physically rejected the lie. I had spent 13 months perfecting the pitch for our latest venture builder, and yet, in that moment, the hiccup was the most honest thing in the room.

We were selling a dream of safety, but what we were actually building was a sophisticated machine for the privatization of failure.

Jasper M. would have hated that room. Jasper is a soil conservationist I met while scouting for a project in the Midwest, a man who spends his days looking at the microscopic architecture of dirt. He once told me that if you try to force a nitrogen cycle by pumping 103 pounds of synthetic fertilizer into a tired plot of land, you might get a massive harvest for three seasons, but by the fourth, you’ve turned the earth into a sterile brick. ‘You’re not farming,’ he told me, leaning over a fence post with a look of profound disappointment. ‘You’re mining the future to pay for the present.’

That is exactly what the startup studio model does to the human element of entrepreneurship. We take a founder-usually someone bright, hungry, and perhaps a little bit too trusting of institutional structures-and we place them into a pre-fab business. The studio provides the idea, which has been ‘vetted’ by a committee of 3 people who haven’t launched a product in a decade. The studio provides the CTO, who is actually just a fractional lead developer working on 13 other projects. The studio provides the initial capital. And in exchange, the studio takes 43 percent of the equity before the first line of code is even written.

It feels like a partnership until you look at the liability. When the office lease needs a personal guarantee, it’s the founder’s signature on the dotted line, not the studio’s. When the pivot fails and the company needs to wind down, the studio moves its ‘shared services’ to the next project in the portfolio. The studio’s risk is diversified across 23 different bets. The founder’s risk is concentrated in a single, life-altering commitment. If the venture succeeds, the studio has a massive win for its IRR. If it fails, the founder has a hole in their resume, a bruised ego, and often, a bank account that has been stagnant for 3 years because they were paid a ‘reduced founder salary’ to keep the burn low.

The Illusion of Support

I remember sitting with a founder-let’s call him Elias-who had been recruited into a high-profile studio in London. He was brilliant, a former logistics lead who could optimize a supply chain in his sleep. The studio gave him a ‘proven’ concept for a last-mile delivery app. They gave him a beautiful office. They gave him a shiny title. But they didn’t give him the one thing a founder actually needs: the autonomy to admit when the idea is garbage.

Elias was 13 months in when he realized the unit economics were impossible. He wanted to pivot. The studio’s investment committee, however, had already promised their LPs that this was a delivery play. They refused to let him change course. They needed the data points for their next fundraise. Elias was essentially an employee with the equity risk of a founder and the decision-making power of a middle manager. He was stuck steering a sinking ship that he didn’t even design, all while the studio used his ‘activity’ to justify their management fees.

There is a specific kind of cruelty in providing a safety net that is actually a web. We tell these entrepreneurs that we are ‘supporting’ them, but we are often just outsourcing the most painful parts of the startup lifecycle. We want the upside of the creative spark without the messy, unpredictable trauma of the forge. Jasper M. would see right through this. He understands that you cannot manufacture the resilience of a wild-grown oak in a greenhouse. When you protect a plant from every wind, its root system stays shallow. When the greenhouse glass breaks-and in venture capital, the glass always breaks-the plant has no way to stand on its own.

The Myth of Efficiency

I’ve changed my mind about this three times in the last 233 days. I used to think the efficiency of the studio was the solution to the high failure rate of startups. I thought that by standardizing HR, legal, and tech stacks, we were clearing the path for genius. But genius isn’t a commodity you can plug into a standardized stack. Genius requires the existential terror of being wrong. It requires the ownership of the failure. When you privatize that failure-when you make it the founder’s burden while the studio keeps the portfolio upside-you aren’t helping them. You are exploiting their desire to build.

We see a lot of this in the way modern growth is handled. It’s why some people are moving away from the factory model and toward more authentic support systems. For instance, the way Hilvy approaches the growth of a company isn’t about fitting a founder into a pre-determined mold, but about providing the actual tools and strategy for someone who already owns their vision. It’s a subtle shift, but it’s the difference between a support system and a cage.

The Cost of ‘Derisking’

I think back to that presentation where I had the hiccups. I finally stopped talking, took a deep breath, and drank the entire glass of water. The LPs were staring at me. I looked at the slide that showed our ‘Proprietary Founder Sourcing Algorithm.’ I realized I was looking at a list of people we were planning to burn through like high-grade coal. We were looking for ‘gritty’ individuals who wouldn’t complain when they realized they only owned 23 percent of their own life’s work after the Series A.

I told them the truth, though I phrased it as a ‘market observation’ to keep my job. I told them that the studio model works perfectly for the studio and rarely for the human. I told them that the 103-page operating manuals we gave our founders were actually just scripts for a play they didn’t write. The hiccups returned, smaller this time, like a rhythmic reminder of my own complicity.

The math of a studio is cold. If you launch 13 companies and one becomes a unicorn, the studio is a massive success. It doesn’t matter if the other 12 founders are left with nothing. In fact, those 12 failures are just ‘market data’ used to optimize the 13th. We treat human careers like disposable test tubes in a laboratory of capital.

Jasper M. once showed me a patch of land that had been over-farmed for 53 years. The dirt was grey and crumbly, like old ash. He told me it would take at least 13 years of doing absolutely nothing-just letting the weeds and the wild things return-before the soil could support a real crop again. ‘You have to give it back its agency,’ he said. ‘You have to let it decide what it wants to be.’

We are currently over-farming the entrepreneurial landscape. We are creating a class of ‘Founders-in-Residence’ who are effectively high-priced contractors with no long-term security. They are being used to till the soil for the benefit of the fund, and when they are spent, we look for the next batch of 23-year-olds with impressive degrees and no sense of their own value.

Reclaiming Agency

I’ve spent the last 3 weeks talking to founders who escaped the studio system. They all say the same thing. They felt like they were living someone else’s life. They had the title on LinkedIn, they had the fancy business cards, but they didn’t have the soul. They were operating in a vacuum where the feedback loops were artificial. In a real startup, the market tells you you’re wrong. In a studio, the management committee tells you you’re wrong. One is a lesson; the other is a performance review.

If we want to build things that last, we have to stop trying to industrialize the spark of creation. We have to accept that failure is a part of the process, but it shouldn’t be a debt that is uniquely carried by the person with the least amount of structural power. We need to move toward models that prioritize the health of the founder as much as the health of the cap table.

I finally quit that studio. It took me 153 days to untangle my own interests, to walk away from the management fees and the ‘guaranteed’ carry. I went back to Jasper’s neck of the woods for a while. I watched him work the soil, and I realized that growth is always slow, always messy, and always personal. You can’t aggregate it. You can’t put it on a dashboard and call it ‘deal flow.’

The True Tragedy

The next time I see a ‘Startup Factory’ raising a new fund, I won’t look at their success stories. I’ll look at the people they left behind. I’ll look at the founders who were ‘derisked’ right out of their own futures. I’ll look at the 43 percent equity chunks taken for the ‘privilege’ of using a shared office and a template for a pitch deck.

Entrepreneurship is supposed to be the ultimate act of agency. It is the moment a person decides to take their survival into their own hands. When we turn that into a structured program, we aren’t just privatizing failure; we are colonizing the very idea of independence. And that, more than any market crash or failed product, is the real tragedy of the factory model.

I still have the hiccups sometimes, usually when I’m about to say something I don’t quite believe. It’s a gift, I suppose. A physical reminder that the truth doesn’t always fit into a 13-slide deck. Sometimes the truth is just a man in a field, looking at the dirt, wondering why we’re so obsessed with the harvest that we’ve forgotten how to care for the ground.