The model, point by point
The problem-solution matrix
Eight axes. On each one, the real problem of whoever wants to innovate (or to invest in innovation) and Volcano's concrete answer, with the link to the page that proves it.
14 min read
The rule that governs this page: nothing enters the right-hand column without a page behind it. This page does not promise: it hands out evidence. The full model, with the thirteen-phase path and the measured efficiency gain, is in the model.
Axis 1
The pieces
An innovation project needs eight capabilities at once, not one.
The problem
What Volcano does
Many pieces are needed at once, and of different natures
A real problem, an idea, a base technology; and then R&D, marketing, finance, corporate and tax structure. It is not a wish list: if one is missing, the project stops at that one and does not advance through the others.
A venture builder builds the whole company, from beginning to end
The eight areas live inside the house, they are not subcontracted one by one.
Whoever innovates, or wants to invest, almost never has them all
The engineer has the technology and not the tax structure; the investor has the capital and not the team; whoever lives the problem has neither. Each one has a piece and none has the machine.
You do not need to bring them all: you bring one
Eight doors in, one for each form of capital, and the rest is put in by Volcano.
Contracting each piece outside costs capital and adds execution risk
Not only because of the price. When each piece is executed by a different supplier, nobody answers for the whole system: each answers for their own job and charges for it. Decisions that affect two areas at once (a technical choice with tax consequences, a contract with intellectual-property consequences) fall into no man's land. The founder ends up acting as integrator without being one, and discovers the gaps late.
The expertise already exists in house
And that reduces the capital needed and the execution risk: the decisions that cross areas are taken by whoever sees both.
The talent and the capital exist, but they live scattered
There is whoever has a problem nobody solves, whoever has an idea put away, whoever has a network they do not monetise, whoever has a tax burden that goes without coming back. Separately, none of those things produces anything.
They all converge on one point, and from there they are redistributed
It is the extended theory of capital: seven forms, one single principle.
Axis 2
Repetition
What is done once costs what it costs. What is repeated gets cheaper.
The problem
What Volcano does
Every project starts from zero, and pays again for what has already been paid for
The corporate set-up, the search for funding, the certification calendar, the standard contracts: it is the same work every time, and every team learns it from the beginning. That cost appears in no account because it is paid in time.
It is built in series, not one at a time
The same machine serves all the projects: the set-up is done once and repeated. It is from here that the efficiency gain the model quantifies comes.
With no declared path, every project invents its own milestones
And then comparing two projects with each other becomes impossible: they are not on the same scale.
Thirteen phases, the same for everyone
Any project in the portfolio is placed on the same map, and that is why it can be compared.
The side routes and the failed attempts are thrown away
In an isolated project, whatever led nowhere is abandoned with the project. The knowledge that cost money disappears with it.
They are kept: serendipity is not wasted
A side route useless here may be the starting point of another project. The failures are remembered too.
Axis 3
The risk
It is not eliminated. It is removed layer by layer, and the part that remains is declared.
The problem
What Volcano does
The risk is discovered at the end, once the money has been spent
The usual order is to build first and validate afterwards. If something does not fit (the market, the technique, the regulation), it is discovered with the product already made, and then correcting it costs what building it cost.
It is removed layer by layer, before the capital comes in
Each layer is closed before the next is opened.
Risk is spoken of as if it were one thing
«It is risky» is not an actionable sentence. Technical risk, market risk, regulatory risk and execution risk do not arrive at the same moment nor are they fought in the same way.
They are six distinct risks, each with its lever
Six concrete levers, each on a different phase.
The sector invests little at the beginning and a lot at the end
Saving on the initial analysis looks prudent and is the opposite: every error not detected at the beginning is multiplied by everything built on top of it.
An inverted pyramid: a wide base of analysis
And it comes out cheaper, not dearer: the later phases cost less precisely because the base is wide.
Decisions are taken with too little information, or the analysis never ends
Both errors have the same origin: not knowing how much information is enough. One leads to deciding blind, the other to never deciding and overpaying to know.
There is a decision window, and it can be calculated
The cheap information first, by levels, and you stop when the cost of continuing exceeds the value of knowing more.
There is no method for deciding how much to risk
With no protocol, the decision depends on the mood of the day and on how the project has been told.
Four questions, always in the same order
And they end in a criterion: with how much to come in so that the worst case is acceptable.
Around 2% of traditional startups make it to a listing
And a large part of those losses does not come from the idea or the market, but from the craft. A first-time founder does not know which phases exist, in what order they are travelled, what has to be closed before opening the next thing, or which tools measure it. It is not a lack of talent: it is a lack of infrastructure, and it is paid for with money and with time.
The risk is genuinely reduced, and moreover it is shared
It is reduced because the phases are described and each is closed before the next is opened: whoever builds here does not learn the method at their own expense, they find it already assembled. And it is shared because part of the research is paid for by public funds and tax capital before a single private euro comes in. What remains afterwards is the industrial risk, the one nobody can remove: that one is declared and shared with you.
Axis 4
The selection
Here is the part that decides the outcome: which problems come in.
The problem
What Volcano does
Investment goes to incremental improvements of what already exists
Improving something that already works is easier to explain and to sell, and that is why there is a lot of capital there. But an incremental improvement competes in a market that already has an owner.
We are not looking for improvements
We look for the problems a sector has taken as inevitable. A problem everyone goes around has gone years without a solution because nobody has attacked it at the root.
A good team in a bad market loses
It is venture's most repeated and worst applied observation: the market decides before the team. An excellent team solving well a problem nobody finds urgent does not build a company.
The market-idea-team triad decides before a project is opened
Of seven possible zones, only one sustains a company, and every project that is opened is built to land in that one.
You start from the void, or from the already known
From the void, because there is nothing to lean on; from the known, because everything is already done there and the margin belongs to someone else.
You start at the edge of knowledge
Where what exists supports the first step and what is missing has no owner yet.
Social and environmental impact is treated as a communications add-on
The company is built and afterwards a sustainable narrative is found for it.
Three pillars, and they are an entry criterion
Environmental, social and economic. A project that stands on only one is not opened. Here is the «maximisation»: it is not a promise of return, it is a filter. Only a problem whose solution changes something big enough to sustain a company comes in.
Axis 5
Speed · the AI-native engine
Why Volcano describes itself as a machine: it is not a metaphor, it is literal.
The problem
What Volcano does
Generating and validating inventions is slow and depends on few heads
The most creative part of the work, finding the invention that solves the problem, is also the one that can least be scaled by hiring. It depends on specific people and their time.
Machine speed with human judgement
The agents generate, the people decide. The generation is multiplied; the decision is not delegated.
Unlimited automation produces volume and bad decisions
A system that generates a thousand proposals with no criterion moves the bottleneck, it does not solve it: now a thousand proposals have to be read.
Automation has a clear, declared limit
Where what the machine decides ends and what a person decides begins is written down, it is not left to interpretation.
Scattered knowledge is lost if it is not captured
A problem heard in a conversation, a patent, a paper: what is not recorded at the moment does not come back.
Capture and validation are part of the engine
Not a manual task somebody will do when they have time.
Axis 6
The capital
Capital is not only money, and the order in which it comes in is not indifferent.
The problem
What Volcano does
Capital means only money, and everything else does not count
Whoever brings a real problem, a technology already built, a network of contacts or years of craft, contributes something that reduces the project's risk as much as a cheque does. In the classic model, none of that is remunerated with a stake.
Everything that reduces risk is capital
Whether or not it takes the form of money: seven forms, eight doors, and each with its way of turning into a stake.
Private capital comes in late, once someone else has paid for the risk
It is rational for whoever comes in and lethal for whoever starts: the hardest phase is precisely the one left without funding.
Volcano is the first investor in every project
We come in where the risk concentrates, and that lowers the risk for everyone who comes afterwards. And we gain only if the startup gains.
An incremental improvement attracts little public money
R&D and technological innovation incentives reward what widens the state of the art, not what repeats it. An incremental project reaches the low band: less public support and less deduction, so private capital ends up bearing almost all the risk of the uncertain phase.
Doing real research opens the high band
And that is not an advantage of ours: it is yours. The more public funding and tax capital come in, the less risk private capital bears in the phase where the project can still fail. Choosing big problems and reducing the financial risk of whoever contributes are the same decision seen from two sides.
The Tax Lease · The Canary regime · Where an invention begins
Public money exists, but activating it is a craft
Requirements, certifications, calendars, reports: public R&D funding is not hard to deserve, it is hard to process, and that is why many projects that fit do not apply for it.
From 45% to 100% of research costs, depending on the project
Before committing a single private euro, and the paperwork is part of the house. Part arrives as a non-repayable grant, which is neither repaid nor dilutes anyone; another part, in many calls, as a soft loan: it does not dilute either, but it comes back, and it weighs on the balance sheet. The proportion is set by each call, not by us.
Tax paid does not come back
That liability is going to be paid anyway. The only variable is what it turns into.
It turns into a tax credit plus a stake
A double return: the tax benefit is certain; the stake, for the part the credit does not return, follows the value of the company.
Investing in innovation seems reserved for large fortunes
Classic venture tickets leave almost everyone out.
A minimum ticket of €10,000, and two different doors
The tax investor recovers through taxes whatever happens to the project; the private investor comes into the startup with a convertible note.
Nobody says who is paid first if the project ends badly
Who puts in the money and when is explained in detail, and hardly ever in what order it is recovered. And that is where you really see how the risk is shared: in an ordinary round, whoever came in earlier and cheaper usually gets out earlier and better.
The order of recovery is written down, and we are last
While the convertible note is credit, the private investors are the startup's only debt and are paid first, after the privileges the law reserves for anyone; the public loans of the operating phase come after conversion; and last come the founders and Volcano. We enter before anyone, in the phase where there is no third-party money, and we leave after everyone: if the project ends badly, the first to lose are us.
The classic Tax Lease operator charges a margin on the cost
The more the project costs, the more the intermediary charges: the incentives are not aligned with the project's efficiency.
For Volcano the Tax Lease is a means, not an end
It is applied only to its own projects and managed at cost. The margin does not disappear: it shifts to the value of the company.
Axis 7
Control and ownership
Who decides, and whose is what you bring.
The problem
What Volcano does
Whoever puts in the money ends up taking control
It is the implicit price of most rounds, and it changes who decides about the project just as it starts to work.
We do not take control, nor the majority
Volcano keeps the part corresponding to what it contributes, and nothing more: the rest is left to whoever puts in theirs, whether money, capabilities or know-how. We coordinate and guarantee; each startup hires its own team and decides on its own affairs.
Telling an idea is risking losing it
It is the reasonable fear of anyone arriving with something of their own, and it is hardly ever answered in writing.
The intellectual property stays yours, under licence
And it is settled before anything else. Without agreement, there is no transfer.
The intermediary gains even if the project does not
When the remuneration is a fee on the set-up, the project's outcome stops being a problem for whoever set it up.
We gain only if the startup gains
Volcano's remuneration lives in the value of the company, not in the cost of the project.
The work is paid by the hour and the value is kept by someone else
Years of craft build the estate of the company that invoices, not that of whoever executes it.
Capabilities can turn into a stake
Or remain a paid role, or both at once.
Axis 8
The evidence, not the promises
This axis does not answer a problem of the innovator, but of how the sector communicates. Everything this page claims on the right has proof underneath; what has none is not written.
The problem
What Volcano does
Projections are published and called results
A well-laid-out projection looks a lot like a track record, and it reads the same.
The figures page is empty on purpose
Until there are closed deals to report, and it is published empty so that it can be seen to be empty.
The reward is shown and the risk is hidden
The order of presentation is not neutral: what comes first is what is remembered.
The large print of the risk before the small print
And the comparison with bonds, housing and equities made with sources.
The sector's simulators promise
A number on a screen reads like a commitment, even if nobody has signed it.
They are marked as indicative
And a whole page is titled «an exercise in scale, not a promise».
What cannot be delivered is promised
In innovation, promising a result is promising something that depends on what is not yet known.
There is a section titled «what we do not promise»
Literally, and it is on the page that explains where an invention begins.
The central axis, in one sentence.
A venture builder is the infrastructure that makes innovating cost less and fail less: the pieces in house, the phases built, and a machine that generates while the people decide. We take the risk first, and we only go into problems a sector has given up on.
John F. Kennedy, 1962