Ardent optimist. I build startups at @Alloy_Partners. Author of The Illusion of Innovation.
Indiana, USA
Joined January 2009
- Tweets1.9K
- Following625
- Followers944
- Likes35.8K
It’s not just the shareholders who benefit. The world does. Civilization increases resiliency by gathering knowledge and wealth. What entrepreneurs like @elonmusk do is solve problems and the result is that civilization progresses and endures.
Elliott Parker retweeted
Most of my AI conversations are about creating value inside the business a company already runs: growth, margin, customer experience, etc. Today I talked with someone using it to build new businesses alongside big companies, which is harder and can pay off a lot more.
Elliott Parker is CEO of Alloy Partners, a venture builder that launches startups with large corporations. He worked with Clay Christensen at Innosight and wrote The Illusion of Innovation.
Elliott’s spent more than twenty years in corporate innovation. In that time he's seen a few corporate ventures turn into real businesses and watched far more of them stall inside the companies that paid for them.
Today we talk about why that keeps happening, and whether AI changes the math.
A few things we discussed:
🟩 By Elliott's count, 30 years of corporate innovation teams haven't produced one transformed core business. His explanation: incentives. Inside a big company you get promoted for being right often, and the bets that matter require being wrong a lot. Has obvious implications for AI experimentation.
🟩 AI is bad at ideation and very good at the middle of the process. Validation, product design and business model design have collapsed from weeks to hours. But ask it for ideas and you get incremental ones close to what you already do.
🟩 24 hours to sketch a cancer vaccine business. Alloy asked its agents what it would take to make personalized mRNA cancer vaccines a $10,000 proposition. A day later they had a business model, potential partners, the bottleneck (the lab work in the middle), a robot design to handle it and a company that could build the robot. Used to be weeks or months of analyst time.
🟩 Agents that hire agents. Their OneHealth studio started with one person overseeing eight agentic CEOs and more than 1,300 agents. After one investor meeting, the notes went to the agents automatically, and by the time the team drove 15 minutes back to the office, the agents had built a dozen new ones to cover gaps the meeting surfaced.
🟩 More bets for less money. Alloy will launch 15 companies this year for less than it spent launching 10 last year. A $20 million studio planned for 10 to 12 companies now looks closer to 18.
His advice to anyone listening is that you're probably not running enough experiments, and the ones you run should be fast, cheap and weird. Sounds right to me.
Full episode dropping soon.
Super cool. But the earnestness is what is most inspiring.
The statue of Prometheus is finally finished.
It was cast in Paris, crossed the Atlantic, and was assembled at Starbase. It took us 100 days to go from nothing to this.
People of the West, we have lived through an era devoid of dreams, devoid of destiny.
But the time has come to reclaim our dream of antiquity.
In a few months, we will start building a new city. It will be the most magnificent city in all of history.
After all, the great dream of the West has always been to rebuild Rome.
Come walk beside us in this endeavor. The world is waiting.
Theories are important because they provide clarity amid uncertainty. Disruption theory is such a useful lens right now to understand how the world is changing and where opportunities are emerging.
Napoleon would have had opinions on the AI race: “A revolution can be neither made nor stopped. The only thing that can be done is for one or several of its children to give it a direction.” h/t to @davidsenra; this quote jumped out to me on the recent Napoleon episode of @FoundersPodcast
Elliott Parker retweeted
"Systems that are good at error correction make larger errors" -@DavidDeutschOxf
I went to church today in another country. My Ukrainian friend from Ireland came with me. I met people from India, Philippines, USA, Nigeria, and Ghana. We sang the same hymns that Mormon pioneers sang while crossing the plains in the 1800s. Life is beautiful and God is good.
Elliott Parker retweeted
this is insane. i genuinely don't understand why ambitious people aren't shown this lecture before their careers start consuming their entire lives.
clayton christensen spent his career studying why successful companies collapse. in his final class, he asked students to apply the theory to themselves: if you keep allocating your time the same way, what life are you actually building?
he had already seen the answer in his own harvard mba class. everyone looked successful at the fifth reunion; by the 10th, 15th, 20th, and 25th, many were unhappy, divorced, and living far from their children.
work shows you the score immediately. close a sale, ship a product, finish a presentation, earn a promotion, get paid.
an hour with your child may produce nothing you can measure today; it may take 20 years to understand what that hour built. so the next free hour goes back to work, one rational decision at a time.
this is how people build lives they never planned: through hundreds of right decisions that lead in the wrong direction, day after day.
money, titles, and headcount are easy to count. christensen believed a life should be measured by the people who became better because you were there.
he died in 2020.
one question remains: if someone saw only where your time, energy, and attention went this year, what would they think actually mattered to you?
the full 19-minute lecture is in the video below.
Elliott Parker retweeted
Today our 1842 Fund officially launched Suvi Health, a new company built to bring clarity and continuity to hospital care.
Elliott Parker retweeted
It took 140 years to finish the Duomo in Florence, Italy.
The original architects knew they’d never live to see the dome rise. Yet, they laid the stones anyway.
When you believe in eternity, you build things differently.
Elliott Parker retweeted
Today, we're launching our newest company, Perenna Health.
One in 10 Medicaid enrollees lose coverage every year due to missed paperwork. Indiana disenrolls at nearly 3x the national average. And with federal work requirements arriving in '27, that number is about to get worse.
Elliott Parker retweeted
"The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die.”
- George Washington, July 2, 1776
Miracles all around us.
Five cancers that used to be death sentences. Pancreatic. Glioblastoma. Triple-negative breast. Renal. Melanoma. The median survival for metastatic pancreatic cancer is still 6 months. Glioblastoma, 15 months.
Now personalized mRNA vaccines are producing complete remissions in some of these patients. Not responses. Remissions.
BioNTech’s pancreatic cancer vaccine has 6-year follow-up data. 8 of 16 patients who mounted an immune response are still alive. For a cancer that kills 95% of patients within 5 years, that's incredible.
Topol’s pyramid here maps the trajectory. From broad checkpoint inhibitors at the base to personalized neoantigen vaccines at the peak. The technology is climbing.
Elliott Parker retweeted
Reject this hogwash, America is electric right now. There’s opportunity everywhere if you’re willing to work, learn, risk trying things, and participate in life. The upside on optimism is uncapped. You live in the greatest period of innovation in history, fade the malthusians
We owe an enormous debt to entrepreneurs and the people who support their vision early on. They build the future.
“People have an overwhelming bias to just do the thing they feel like they’re supposed to do.”
“[As a founder], it’s your job to look inside your mental dictionary of language and identify 500 to 1000 words in the right order that are going to jailbreak people and reprogram them to come and join you off the path.”
“It’s very doable. It’s been done to convince an entire nation to continue fighting a war. It’s been done to convince racists to consider the possibility of allowing civil rights. It’s been done to inspire a nation to go to the moon.”
“These things, we’ve seen them, we just don’t really recognize them for what they are, which is packaging 1000 words in the right order, in combination with the right curation, and delivering them such that they jailbreak people at scale.” @lulumeservey