Bloom is a "venture collective" - an organization for a bunch of my colleagues and I to work together on would-be ventures. "We" having changed over the years, but always including myself and James, and in the last 5 years, Berk. We used to think of it as a "venture studio," but "collective" seems to be closer to the vibe we're going for right now.
In practice, it's a corporate structure to allow us to formally account for income and expenses on various projects (the income mostly being from consulting, and the expenses mostly being on speculative projects). Now that we've adopted the VNTRHB model, the Bloom Ventures corporation is effectively a "fiscal host" for our portfolio of not-yet-spun-out VNTRHB-style ventures.
In 2013, after the Penyo Pal founder fiasco, James, Jane and I needed a new vehicle under which to do whatever we wanted to do next. And so we incorporated, calling ourselves Lean Pixel (which I still use to refer to the "consulting arm" of Bloom). In the early days, when we weren't fully sure what we would be working on, there were inklings of a "venture studio" - but the concept wasn't even a "thing" yet, and our mentors pushed us hard to just focus on one idea.
We had been part of Creative Destruction Lab with Penyo Pal, but with it on ice, the advisors gave us an ultimatum: pitch a strong new concept at the next meeting (in a month), or get kicked out. After a little bit of exploration (children's ebook software?), we grabbed onto the first thing that got a customer to bite: software to help certain charities (particularly universities and hospitals) raise money for their annual fund (ie. small donors) - we called it Donor IQ. We built some tools, had a few clients, survived through CDL... but less than 6 months later, we decided that "digital marketing" wasn't what we wanted to be doing with our lives - at least that's the rationalized I give it now; in the moment, it was chaos. Things ended when Jane suddenly left Bloom (and the startup life in general, for several years).
The rest of 2014 and 2015 is a blur. I think James and I kept ourselves busy (and afloat) with a bunch of consulting work. (In retrospect, I think I spent that time trying to keep myself busy and look like I'm still an entrepreneur, while avoiding any attempt at processing what had happened in the prior 3 years - startups be tramautic, yo!)
Seeking a new venture to work on, the idea of the venture studio model once again took hold. In early 2016, Samantha and Simon, two cohort-mates from Next 36 (and former house-mates) joined in and we transitioned Lean Pixel into "Bloom Ventures". The concept was: several entrepreneurs, working on several ventures, collaborating, focusing on what they do best (and some consulting on the side to stay afloat).
This era of Bloom included a lot of work on Braid, Rookie, how the studio model should work, and internal tooling (along with many abortedn ventures).
Since we had each person working on each venture a different amount of time, as well as different amounts of time in total, we needed something more flexible than "you get 25% of shares, vested over BLAH BLAH BLAH". We decided to track time on each project, something something dynamic equity, and keep discussing and iterating on the model. Corporate-structure-wise, one of the ideas floating around was the umbrella: Bloom owning all the projects and the entrepreneurs owning varying amounts of Bloom (ultimately, too simple; particularly because all failures stay on the books, disincentivizing future participants from joining Bloom, compared to say, starting fresh).
Things fizzled out in 2018, with Simon deciding to focus on a marketing venture with someone else, and Samantha eventually feeling burnt-out and leaving for BCG.
So, it was back to just James and me, continuing on with occasional consulting projects and trying to push existing ventures or start new ones. (Of course, "life" still happening in the background and throwing wrenches at us.) In 2020, Berk joined (having met us at Lighthouse Labs and liking my crazy rant on the Bloom website), and we largely continued as before.
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Bloom has morphed over the years, to be whatever James and I needed. And the fact that it has survived this long, with people coming and going, our focus changing, and varying amounts of energy and involvement from us over the years - that speaks to the resilience of... a good corporate structure (I'm expecting a few eye-rolls from those in the know on that... of course, I'm sure our general level-headedness, mutual trust, and hard-headed persistence played a role)
The "venture studio" framing gave me something "respectable" to attach to. But was it crazy to try to do tens of ventures, with 2-4 people, bootstrapped (while doing some consulting on the side)? Probably.
Trying to make it work as a "successful venture studio", but still bootstrapped, was driving me mad and miserable. (By the way: the venture studio concept eventually did become a fairly common thing in startup-land). But being a "serious entrepreneur" or "Silicon Valley startup bro" didn't appeal to me.
...eventually, I realized I just wanted to make cool things with awesome people, and maybe make some money. Hence reframing as a "venture collective".
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All that being said, our experience with the studio model inspired what we're calling "VNTRHB": a set of legal agreements and software tooling for speculative for-profit collaboration. "Bloom v3" in a way. Or, "Bloom in a Box." No umbrella corporation. Something a little like OpenCollective, GitHub, Artists Corporation, and DAOs. But more about that on the VNTRHB page.