FAQ

Silicon Foundry is the world’s leading innovation and venture advisory firm and guides corporates in navigating the innovation ecosystem by helping senior leaders understand the ever-evolving technology landscape in order to identify and leverage the most relevant emerging companies, technologies, platforms, and business model innovations. Our model is based on membership, allowing us to build long-term relationships with our members and serve as extensions of their teams.

Calibrating on each of our Member’s unique existing focus areas, our team provides a curated and continuous flow of opportunities, insights, strategic support, diligence, senior-level introductions, bespoke executive treks, and a physical presence in the heart of Silicon Valley.  The outcomes of these activities include partnerships, investments, co-creation of new ventures, spinouts, and acquisitions – we support these innovation activities end-to-end, from strategy to launch to ongoing management. We also support Corporates with defining their innovation strategy more broadly – from understanding how to build their innovation organization to defining their technology roadmaps.

We serve a diverse set of the world’s leading corporations across a wide range of industries, from entertainment to retail, financial services, telecom to transportation, oil & gas to mining, chemicals to cosmetics, and economic development organizations. Our colleagues often work across multiple verticals and can bring unique perspectives to your organization based on trends they see in other spaces.

We believe in long-term relationships and in crafting sustainable innovation strategies and programs. Innovation doesn’t just happen over the span of an 8-week project. Organizations need to have a finger on the pulse and assess the ever-changing landscape to determine which emerging players to engage – such activities don’t have a natural start or end date.

Long-term engagements allow us to strategically engage across the organization and support from the very early stages of evaluating new and emerging trends and assessing their potential impact to proof of concepts to eventually seeing innovation initiatives grow and scale.

While each membership is guided by the focus areas and strategic priorities of a Member, the following components are central to our work::

• Targeted connectivity: Leveraging our extensive network, we proactively deliver a continuous stream of exclusive insights and introductions to cutting-edge, impactful startups and solution providers based on the Member’s priorities needs, and interests.
• Executive education: End-to-end programming and coordination of senior immersion treks; connecting decision-makers with founders and thought leaders operating at the forefront of emerging technology and innovation.
• Intelligence briefings and research: Providing comprehensive technology intelligence briefs and market landscapes; proprietary due-diligence briefs and investment memos which are tailored and custom to each of our Members.
• Member events: All Members gain access to an ongoing slate of exclusive in-person and virtual events within the Foundry community. These gatherings – held in Silicon Valley, New York, Los Angeles, London, Frankfurt, Dubai, and other key metros around the globe – convene leaders in relevant ecosystems, generate intimate networking opportunities, relevant senior connectivity, and purposefully architected occasions for senior relationship building.
• Hub Access: Each Member has drop-in access to use our physical hub space in San Francisco for daily work and meetings when traveling to San Francisco.

While our primary business model is memberships, we will do projects but often with the mutual goal to result in a membership eventually. Ideally, a project will allow us to:

1. Demonstrate our skills and capabilities and give a flavor of what a full membership would look like.
2. Build relationships with the  key stakeholders and decision-makers who would also be contacts for a membership

We will always charge for projects and will not do them for free.

Every week brings a new challenge and no member is the same, but below are some example questions we might help Members solve:

• What are the key emerging trends and technologies impacting my business?
• What are the key use cases for generative AI  that are relevant to my business? What is my competition doing in this space?
• How do I get started if I want to explore quantum computing for my business?
• Who are the top startups in the humanoid robotics field? Who should I be speaking to?
• How should my technology roadmap evolve to remain relevant and competitive?
• What are the potential risks and challenges associated with adopting AI technologies in our industry?
• What decarbonization technologies could help us reach our sustainability goals?
• Which strategic partnerships or collaborations could uncover new business models and revenue streams for us?

We leverage deep connectivity within the entrepreneurial ecosystem to glean first-hand intelligence regarding new ideas, thought paradigms, edge science, and frontier technologies of strategic interest to a member. While we of course have an extensive list of research tools at our disposal, our primary insights come directly from the thought leaders in our network. From founders, VCs/ PEs, academics, strategists, corporate innovation leaders (from our members and beyond)  to our media contacts, we seek a wide variety of perspectives to distill and synthesize the insights that matter.

While Corporates are our primary customers, we work with selective startups to support them with their go-to-market strategy and land enterprise clients – an offering we call Business Development as a Service (BDaaS). We will always fully disclose to our Members when we are introducing a company we are affiliated with to avoid conflict of interest. If you are a startup with a proven product that is enterprise-ready (and adopted) and would like to drive growth, please reach out to Chad Shuford to learn more about how we work with startups.

No — our focus is on supporting Corporates to manage successful relationships with startups – whether that is investing in them or partnering with them.

Our biggest competitors are corporate teams who believe they can do it themselves.

Typically a mix of both. We generally prefer to do kickoffs in person and love to meet with Members several times a year, Once or twice a year we generally host a Member’s executive team in our office for innovation treks and strategy sessions. Many of our members also choose to work from our hub when they travel to San Francisco or may even make our hub their permanent home.

Our main office is in Soma in San Francisco where we are neighbors to the top startups the Bay Area has to offer.  Complementing our Silicon Valley headquarters “across the pond,” our satellite office in Dubai, UAE serves as our home base for the MENA region, supporting the development of startups, JVs, and partnerships globally, and in alignment with our strategic partnership with the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC).

Aside from our own team, of course, all our members have drop-in access to the hub and you might bump into them any given day. Some of our members also purchase dedicated office space.