On January 21, 2026, the OSS Ventures team joined us in Rotterdam for a full-day, in-person Studio Roadshow.
Just venture studio operators sitting in rooms, comparing notes on how venture studios actually work once theory meets reality.

OSS Ventures builds deeply vertical, manufacturing-focused companies out of Paris. Builders operates more horizontally, across AI and enterprise. On paper, both models work. In practice, they force very different trade-offs.

The goal for the day was simple: look closely at how decisions are actually made, where those choices hold up, and where they start to strain.

Why we wanted to do this in person

Most Studio Roadshows we run are online. They are efficient and high-signal.
This one was intentionally not that: We wanted a full day together, in person, with the people who actually make the calls. Paris is not that far from Amsterdam, and it felt slightly absurd to keep these conversations confined to screens. Being in the same space made it easier to work through how things are actually done today, and why.

What that created was less performance and more honesty, assumptions surfaced quickly and so did doubts.

Two studio models, side by side

OSS Ventures

OSS has been building companies for over seven years, with a clear focus on manufacturing. Around 40 projects launched so far, 22 still active including ventures like fabriq, Mercateam and Bonx. Their model is structured around four pillars that guide how work gets done day to day: Builders (0→1 discovery and validation close to the factory floor), Scalers (continued involvement as companies grow), Networkers (deep access to manufacturing sites), and Transformers (using the fund and portfolio to drive change inside large industrial groups). You could feel that structure during the day in how quickly the team aligned on decisions and trade-offs.

Builders

Builders is a lean studio in Rotterdam focused on business-critical AI and enterprise software. We run fewer parallel bets, keep the team intentionally small, and bring founders in from day one. Autonomy is given early, which creates speed and ownership, but also makes certain decisions hard to undo later. A constant tension runs through the studio: how to help founders move faster without building long-term dependence on the studio.

Where approaches start to diverge

Validation: who carries risk, and when

OSS Ventures pushes much of the validation work upstream. Product specialists and EIRs spend time on factory floors, pressure-testing problems with real operators. Founders are brought in once there is enough evidence that a problem is worth scaling.

Builders takes the opposite route. Founders are involved from the very beginning. Conviction forms early, sometimes before enough evidence exists. Validation happens fast, but there is always the risk that belief runs ahead of signal.

OSS reduces false starts, but at the cost of very high intensity for EIRs, sometimes before a company even exists. Builders creates early momentum, but has to actively fight confirmation bias once founders are emotionally invested.

What stood out was how aligned both studios were on one point: invalidating a hypothesis early is not failure. It is progress. That mindset surfaced repeatedly throughout the day, even though it is applied very differently in practice.

Tech and product: standardization versus autonomy

OSS runs a standardized tech stack across its portfolio. Frontend, backend, infrastructure, deployment. Decisions are made once and reused everywhere. CTOs can join and ship code on day one, without spending the first weeks rebuilding basics.

Builders comes at it from a different starting point. We typically begin with a CTO or founding engineer and treat them as the owner of the technical direction from day one. They start building with their own team around them, and a lot of the early leverage comes from that autonomy and speed.

Speed is not the same as velocity

OSS optimizes for intensity. Weekly learning cycles. Clear hypotheses. Features that take more than two weeks to build are treated as warning signs. Forward deployment with customers forces reality into the room fast.

Builders optimizes for speed of learning. If something cannot be tested quickly, it is often deferred or the venture is pushed out of the studio entirely. Not as a punishment, but as a recognition that autonomy has reached its limit.

A shared takeaway here was that speed on its own is meaningless. What matters is whether learning compounds over time.

Capital, ownership, and letting go

Both studios converge around similar equity positions at seed. Both are moving toward evergreen fund structures. Both are actively thinking about secondaries and liquidity for early stakeholders.

Where things get hard is not structure. It is behavior. Knowing when to stop helping. When to reduce involvement. When founder dependency becomes a liability rather than an advantage. Both studios admitted this is one of the hardest parts of the job. Not because the answer is unclear, but because acting on it is uncomfortable.

Things we did not fully expect going in

A few moments stood out during the day:

• How openly OSS questioned the sustainability of their own intensity model.
• How candid Builders was about the cost of early autonomy that cannot be revoked.
• How similar the blind spots were, despite radically different setups.
• How often both teams recognized they were trying to save ventures that should probably be killed earlier.

There was no sense of one model being right and the other wrong. If anything, the conversations functioned as a mirror.

Why we keep doing Studio Roadshows

Studio Roadshows are not about sharing outcomes. They are about sharing process.

OSS Ventures did not come to Rotterdam to pitch their model. Builders did not host to defend its own. The value came from exposing decisions that usually stay implicit and stress-testing them with peers who understand the trade-offs. That only works when the conversation is honest.

Open threads

We did not leave with consensus on everything.

• When exactly should studios step back?
• How much standardization is too much?
• At what point does founder autonomy turn into technical debt?

None of these questions were resolved that day, the conversation continues. And that was the point.

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This was our 3rd Studio Roadshow, read recaps from the first two here: Polymath Ventures; High Alpha
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If your studio is working through similar challenges and would like to join a future Roadshow, we would love to connect.