Business Outlook with Adam Hammer of Roadrunner Venture Studios

A new venture studio is orchestrating the next technological revolution, helping build deep-tech startups with investment, talent and anything else they need to find success.

That company is Roadrunner Venture Studios, which launched last year in Albuquerque.

Roadrunner’s co-founder and CEO Adam Hammer was the guest on the Business Outlook podcast this week, during which he talked about the company’s founding, how Albuquerque is positioned to become the next tech hub and the company’s upcoming tech forum.

Business Outlook podcasts are released on Monday afternoon and are available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. The topics discussed include real estate, small businesses, technology and emerging leaders.

Here’s a preview of the conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Before we get to talking about the company, Adam, tell us a bit about your background and where you’re from.

“I was born in Houston, Texas. Grew up there for the first few years of my life, and then actually moved abroad. So I lived in North Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East. My dad was in the energy business, so we did a lot of moving around, and spent most of my adolescence there. Moved back to Houston for high school, and then did college on the East Coast, in North Carolina, and have lived in New York, D.C. and now, of course, New Mexico since then.

I started my career in banking, so I worked with a lot of large corporations, thinking about how to think about (mergers and acquisitions) activity, how to think about when early companies should go public and think about (initial public offerings). And that was a really formative experience for me. It taught me a lot of the fundamentals of business, how corporations make strategic decisions, some of the challenges that they face, but also how to continue to be innovative and think about new products and new companies.

From there, I left and joined a place called Schmidt Futures, which was a venture facility started by the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt. I was head of strategy there, and was really focused on betting on people, products and ideas. … And then, from there, helped to run a post-quantum encryption quantum computing company. And from that experience, came to Roadrunner Venture Studios.”

Define what venture is. We typically hear venture with venture capital. In this case, venture studio. Help us understand that language.

“So the basics of what we do is we invest in early-stage companies. That means companies can be one, two, three people. They usually haven’t had financing partners yet. So founders are bootstrapping it, using their own capital, or capital from friends and family to help build that early business.

And kind of the basis of venture capital … is we invest in those companies, we take an ownership stake, and we help catalyze them, fuel them for growth.

And what we do at the studio is a little bit different than that. At the end of the day, we do provide capital to a lot of the early companies we work with, but we’re also building them from the ground up. So we have a team of product managers, business folks, we have recruiters that work with us. And really what we’re saying is we can start with an idea — it can be in someone’s head, it can be an idea or a patent coming out of a national lab or a university, it can be a product and wireframe — and we’re going to help you take that core concept from idea all the way through to company. … We take that basic venture capital concept, but it’s a lot more hands-on, working directly with founders and creating new companies.”

This company, Roadrunner, was founded last year and launched in Albuquerque. What is it the company does?

“We are a venture studio focused on building new, disruptive companies, with entrepreneurs, with scientists, with innovators. We’re headquartered here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We launched last year. We have an amazing team that partners with me day in, day out to build these companies with our founders.

The core insight of building Roadrunner was, in this state and a lot of states around the country, we have a wealth of amazing research and development and scientists, but what we need to do is take that technology and build it into products and build it into companies to create jobs and more capabilities in the state.

New Mexico is blessed with some of the highest (research and development) per capita, some of the most postdocs and PhDs per capita. It has a wealth of amazing research institutions and great universities, but it hasn’t had a lot of venture attention. And what we’re trying to do is turn that tide — we’re going to come here and build companies that investors can invest in, and that can build prototyping facilities and factories and really spur more economic job growth here.

Where this all started was, well, first in my own journey when I was at Schmidt Futures — a lot of what we were doing was science and tech investing and thinking about ways to what we call de-risk these early ideas.

So when you get an idea and it’s coming out of the lab, it has some potential, but it’s still very risky. There are things that need to be proven. There are teams that need to be built around them. You need to figure out a business model if it wants to become a company.

These ideas start with a lot of risk around them, and the goal of what we were doing at Schmidt Futures is taking those early concepts and removing the risks so that they’re more palatable to the next investor.

And our goal really was to get these companies to have more attention from government, from capital markets, and otherwise, to kind of crowd in behind us after we had de-risked them.

Using that core concept, and then a formative experience I had at a place called Qrypt, where I was serving as chief operating officer, actually building a deep tech company with some of the core technology and (intellectual property) that came out of Los Alamos National Labs. So I got a firsthand view of how much amazing technology and how talented scientists are here in New Mexico, but that there’s not that many companies created out of the labs. Many of those lab ideas die for totally avoidable reasons. Not all lab ideas should become companies, but some should, and I think more should than the numbers show today.

So we took these core insights and I partnered with an amazing team from America’s Frontier Fund, namely Gilman Louie and Jordan Blashek and Steve Weinstein, who really created the core concept around Roadrunner and the venture studio, and they brought me along with them to partner and really build out this idea into a reality here in New Mexico.”