Ep. 210 - Henrik Werdelin, Co-founder BarkBox and Prehype Venture Studio & Author of The Acorn Method on MTV, Entrepreneurship, Experimentation, and Talent

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest, the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of Insideoutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Henrik Werdelin. He is an entrepreneur, author, he is best known for co-founding Bark and BarkBox. He also started the venture studio Prehype and he's author of a new book called The Acorn Method: How companies get growing again. Henrik, welcome to the show. 

Henrik Werdelin: Thank you. 

Brian Ardinger: Was that not a good enough intro for you? 

Henrik Werdelin: Perfect. No, no, no. I appreciate it very much. I am just hot in New York. It's a very humid here. And so, I get all aware with you being able to see yourself.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you, because we could go 30 minutes of your introduction to the things that you've done and that. And. One of the reasons I'm so excited to have you on the show is because you epitomize the insideoutside.io world of both startups and corporate innovation.

You're a builder, a maker, a doer, investor. So, we could take this conversation in a lot of different ways and we'll see where it goes. As people come into the live show, feel free to put your questions in the Q and A we'll try to get to that as well. I thought where we could start off is how did your founder journey start? How did you get going as an entrepreneur? And how did that lead you to the path you are at today? And then we'll get into the book and some other things. 

Henrik Werdelin: I mean, I don't think I've ever seen myself as a founder. I think, you know, it's a relatively new term, this idea of identifying yourself as an entrepreneur. And when I went to primary school, I was the idiot that started the school magazine. I was the one that says, Hey, we should have a radio station and so I've always just found that it was relatively easy to just do things, I guess. Like it started all the way back in the like eight or nine and just stuff like that.

I thought I wanted it to be a journalist. And then I ended up working for MTV back in the late nineties. And I was lucky enough to stumble into what later became a product role. I had the fortune / stupidity of bringing into the studio of MTV and transmit an hour live for some show that I thought was good. And luckily the people there thought it was good too. So instead of getting sued or fired, I ended up getting promoted. And so, for a good eight years or so, I got to fly around on MTVs dime and build products, you know, ranging from SpongeBob to Teddy bears to making computer games. And so that is where I always felt where the whole thing started, I guess. 

Then after that I started a few startups, some that were successful and we sold, and some that was less successful in that we talk less about, but I never kind of like necessarily see myself as a founder of something.  I've always seen myself as somebody who gets intrigued about problems and try to find a way to solve those problems in a scalable way.

Brian Ardinger: And that's an interesting point because I think a lot of founders or people who want to be founders, they approach it from the solution side rather than the problem side first. Yeah, I want to be a founder because Bitcoin's hot right now. So, I'm going to start a Bitcoin startup. Something along those lines versus really trying to dig into what's of interest to you, where are the problems that you can solve and then back your way into solutions and that around that.

You've got a new book out called The Acorn Method that journeys or chronicles this methodology that you've been using to help corporations and other folks spin up new ventures by themselves. So maybe talk a little bit about Prehype and then talk about how the book came about, and then we'll go from there.

Henrik Werdelin: I was fortunate enough to be part of a company that we started that ended up selling into Facebook. And I think after that, I was trying to figure out what to do next. And I think as people who have done entrepreneurial endeavors will sympathize with, you have this interesting kind of point after that you leave your startup for whatever reason.

And that is that everybody's pushing you on what do you want to do next? Like, do you want to go to corporate? Do you want to be an investor? Do you want to do a start up again? And I think the reality is often you just don't know, and you're just tired. You probably often don't want to do anything remotely associated what you did before, because you're very tired of that. And so, I kind of felt there was a need for this halfway house for second time founders that didn't really know what to do with their life. And I couldn't really call it that. So I packaged it up as Prehype and that became a network of entrepreneurs and residents that are trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives and to not sound like we're in self-realization mode, we package it up a little bit nicer.

And so, on the top of that, we've built an Institute where we teach entrepreneurship, corporate entrepreneurial classes, and we teach at universities like Stanford. And then we have our own incubation units where we managed to build a number of relatively successful startups. Bark being one of them, but Managed by Q and Roman, other companies that come out from our building.

And then thirdly, we had a consultant arm that helped corporations build the incubation programs. And those three things allowed all us misfits to figure out where in those kind of buckets we would like to play, but also to generate a little bit of cashflow while we were figuring it out. 

Brian Ardinger: It sounds like it was scratch your own itch and the scratch the itch were the folks that you had around you that were in the same mode of like, what do we build next? How do we do this? Did you have a methodology or a thought process around how you're going to do this? Or did you just kind of experiment with different things? Threw it out there to see if it would work? 

Henrik Werdelin: I think both. Right. You know, I think it used two words that I love a lot, which is experimentation and methodology. Right. I do think that we as entrepreneurs. Need to become better at building from scratch in the way that we become better is not necessarily always to kind of like have a higher chance of success. It's also, how can we become better of stopping things that do not work? 

I take great inspiration in my wife as a scientist who look at experimentation as a problem she's trying to solve. And then she architects a way to try to solve it and experiment. And then either it is viable or is not viable. And if data doesn't suggest her, that is viable, then it is just not like, you can't pitch a great experiment in the scient...