The Santa Monica Lab That Builds Companies Like an Assembly Line
Most venture firms wait for founders to knock. Science builds the company first, then writes the check - and the method has turned razors, canned water and robo-advising into billion-dollar exits.
In the standard story of how a startup gets made, a founder has an idea in a garage, raises money, and hopes. Science, a firm headquartered a few blocks from the beach in Santa Monica, runs that sequence backwards. It picks a market, builds the company itself with in-house operators, proves the model, and only then treats it like an investment. The founder often shows up after the company already exists. It is a strange way to run a venture firm, and it has produced Dollar Shave Club, Liquid Death, Wealthfront, Bird and Rover.
Founded in 2011 by Mike Jones, the former chief executive of MySpace, Science calls itself a "startup studio." The label matters. A studio is not an accelerator that ushers cohorts through a three-month program, and it is not a passive fund that waits for deal flow. It is closer to a workshop with a payroll of marketers, engineers, designers and growth specialists who can be pointed at a promising idea and told to build it. When Jones raised the studio's first roughly $10 million - with backing that reportedly included Eric Schmidt - the pitch was that company creation could be made repeatable, more a process than a lottery ticket.
01 / The MethodWhat Science actually does
Science operates on three tracks at once. It develops new businesses from scratch, staffing them with founding teams and operational muscle. It invests capital into emerging startups, both its own and outside ones. And it takes later-stage internet assets and reworks them with new talent. The connective tissue across all three is a bias toward consumer products - things people buy, subscribe to, or open on their phones every day.
The in-house teams are the differentiator. Where a typical seed investor offers a check and some introductions, Science fields fleets of specialists across fundraising, marketing, advertising, app development and accounting. That means a young company can borrow a growth-marketing engine it could never afford to build on its own. It also means Science can move quickly - kill an idea that is not working, and redeploy the same operators onto the next one.
"Unlike incubators and accelerators, a startup studio doesn't work within a fixed time period, a class, or a fixed equity take."The venture studio model
02 / The DifferenceStudio, not accelerator
The distinction sounds academic until you see it on the ground. Accelerators run on cohorts and clocks: a fixed number of weeks, a standard slice of equity, a demo day. Science throws that structure out. Companies stay as long as they need - months or years - and the equity split is negotiated deal by deal rather than stamped on a template. Ideas that falter get cut early; the survivors get the full weight of the studio behind them.
| Typical Accelerator | Science (Venture Studio) | |
|---|---|---|
| Origin of idea | Founder brings it | Often built in-house |
| Timeline | Fixed cohort (~3 mo) | As long as needed |
| Equity | Standard % | Negotiated per deal |
| Support | Mentors + demo day | In-house operating teams |
| Focus | Broad | Consumer brands |
That flexibility is the whole bet. By owning the earliest and riskiest stretch of a company's life - the part where most fail - Science aims to shape outcomes rather than simply pick them. The trade-off is that it can only run so many bets at once, because each one draws on real people and real hours, not just money.
03 / The CustomersWho it actually serves
There are really two sets of customers here, and they sit on opposite ends of the same machine. On one side are founders and early-stage consumer companies that partner with Science to get built and scaled - the razor startup that needs a growth engine, the beverage brand that needs a distribution strategy, the fintech product that needs a launch. On the other side are the investors and limited partners who put money into Science's funds because they want exposure to that pipeline without having to run a studio themselves. The Rolling Fund exists precisely to serve that second group.
The problem Science is really solving is the failure rate of early consumer companies. Most new brands die not because the product is bad but because the team cannot acquire customers profitably, cannot raise the next round, or runs out of time before it figures either out. By supplying those capabilities from a shared bench - marketers, media buyers, engineers who have done it before - Science tries to remove the most common causes of death before they happen. It is an attempt to make the unglamorous parts of company-building available as a service.
04 / The ScoreboardThe companies that made the case
The clearest argument for the model is the exit sheet. Dollar Shave Club is the founding legend: Science put in $100,000 in 2012, the razor-subscription brand did roughly $65 million in sales by 2014, and Unilever bought it in 2016 for a reported $1 billion. Liquid Death - water sold in a beer-style can and marketed like a metal band - reached a $1.4 billion valuation in 2024. Wealthfront, the robo-advisor, listed on NASDAQ in 2025 near a $2 billion market cap. Bird went public on the NYSE, Rover was acquired, FameBit went to Google, and HelloSociety went to The New York Times.
Figures are reported public valuations and acquisition prices; bar lengths are relative and approximate.
The most successful build so far started with a $100,000 check and ended in a reported $1 billion acquisition.Dollar Shave Club, 2012-2016
05 / The MoneyHow Science makes money
Underneath the brands is a fairly simple economic engine. Science earns returns from equity - the founding stakes it holds in companies it builds, plus the positions it takes as an investor - realized when those companies are acquired or go public. It also manages outside capital. In 2021 it added a new vehicle: a Rolling Fund, co-founded by Priscilla Guevara, that lets accredited investors commit capital on a quarterly subscription basis rather than locking into a single closed fund.
Guevara's own path says something about where the firm sits. She spent two decades on Wall Street - at SMBC, Neuberger Berman and Moore Capital - before joining Science in 2018 to run investor relations, and was promoted in 2024 to General Partner, the firm's first new GP. The Rolling Fund she helped launch is, in effect, a way to widen the door: it opens Science's pipeline of studio-built companies to a broader set of backers than a traditional fund would.
06 / The PeopleOperators, not spectators
The culture reads straight off the founders' resumes. Jones came from MySpace; co-founder and General Partner Peter Pham had earlier helped build Photobucket and Color. Both are growth-and-distribution people, and the studio reflects it - a roughly 220-person operation that behaves less like a fund and more like a company that happens to spawn other companies. The instinct is to build the thing, market it hard, watch the numbers, and move fast when they disappoint.
That instinct also defines where Science fits in the market. It is not competing head-on with a classic Sand Hill Road fund writing Series B checks. Its peers are the other studios and operator-led shops - Betaworks, Atomic, Expa, Human Ventures - and the consumer-focused investors like Forerunner. Within that group, Science's edge is a long, public track record of consumer brands that actually reached the exit it promised.
07 / The TimelineFourteen years, one method
08 / The ReadWhy the boring version keeps winning
The startup world tends to romanticize the lone genius. Science bet on the opposite: a floor full of operators, a repeatable process, and a discipline about killing weak ideas before they drain the studio. It is a less cinematic story than the garage myth, and the results - a reported $1.3 billion-plus in lifetime exits across a portfolio that has produced multiple IPOs and acquisitions - suggest the unglamorous version has real merit.
What can an outsider take from it? The transferable idea is not "start a studio." It is that distribution and operating capability are assets you can build once and reuse - that if you know how to acquire customers cheaply and run a brand, you can apply that muscle across many products instead of betting everything on one. Science just industrialized that insight and pointed it at consumer markets, one company at a time.