Every executive has a mental list of their thorniest problems — the ones that feel too complex, too systemic, or too far from the core to truly fix.
They get analyzed, debated, and modeled, but rarely solved. They become the weather systems of corporate strategy: forces to be monitored and hedged against, not reshaped.
At Alloy Partners, we believe these problems are often your biggest opportunities. And we built a product called Venture Strategy to help you go after them.
What Is Venture Strategy?
Venture Strategy is for companies who want to do something bold:
Build a new startup to tackle a hard, important problem.
The issue is many companies don't know exactly where or how to start. The idea might be half-formed. The problem might be murky. The case for action might be more intuitive than concrete.
That’s where we come in.
Venture Strategy is not consulting, and it’s not ideation theater. It’s a structured, venture-building process designed to turn ambiguous opportunity spaces into sharp, actionable startup theses.
In just a few weeks, we help you understand where to focus, what could be built, and whether it makes sense to launch a new venture — either within your organization or outside of it.
We begin by working closely with your team to define the problem space. This means more than just outlining a business challenge. It means understanding the:
- Forces that shape it
- Constraints that sustain it
- Opportunities it might contain
Then, we go to the field. We conduct original user research, connect with experts and operators, and uncover the real dynamics at play — not just in your boardroom, but on the ground.
Along the way, we break the problem into its component parts, map out where the biggest pain points and opportunities lie, and start to frame the shape of potential solutions.
From there, we build.
Using the tools of product design and early-stage venture creation, we construct venture-grade theses that outline not just a concept, but a viable, fundable, scalable business. We identify the TAM, model the economics, assess strategic fit, and define the path to launch. Crucially, we help you understand not only what could be built but also what you’re uniquely positioned to build.
Case Example: Top-3 National Healthcare Payer
To illustrate how this works in practice, consider a project we led in 2023 with one of the largest managed care organizations in the U.S. The company's challenge was deceptively simple:
How can we improve health outcomes for our members in a meaningful, scalable way?
The corporation's hypothesis: Food and nutrition security — specifically, access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — could be a powerful lever.
SNAP is one of the most effective public health tools in the U.S. Yet millions of Americans who are eligible for benefits don’t enroll or churn in and out of the program due to administrative barriers.
For our partner, the potential was clear: Higher participation in SNAP could improve population health and reduce overall healthcare costs — by as much as 24% for low-income Americans, according to peer-reviewed research. But the path to making that impact real was far from obvious.
Through our Venture Strategy process, we:
- Mapped the user experience of SNAP across different populations
- Interviewed members, community health workers, and policy experts
- Synthesized public health data and identified barriers, ranging from paperwork and interview scheduling to language access and social stigma
After all this work, we turned our focus back to the business and asked ourselves two questions:
- Where could our partner create value, how large was the opportunity?
- And what would a purpose-built solution need to look like to succeed?
What emerged wasn't just a business case for intervention, but a clear rationale for venture creation.
A new startup, focused entirely on improving enrollment and retention in SNAP, could deliver impact far beyond our partner’s existing footprint.
More specifically, it could scale nationally, attract multiple customers (including competitors), be financially sustainable — and most importantly — move faster than any internal initiative ever would.
In other words, the answer wasn’t to build in-house, buy an existing solution, or partner with a nonprofit. It was to create something new.
This is the decision point we help our clients reach — not just, “What’s the idea?,” but also, “What’s the right model to bring this to life?” Increasingly, we’re finding that the missing tool in many corporations’ innovation toolkit is venture creation itself.
For decades, corporate leaders have been told they can “build, buy, or partner.”
But there’s a fourth option: create.
- Create a startup that is designed from day one to solve a problem that no existing company is solving well.
- Create something with the focus of a startup and the advantage of your scale.
- Create something that can work outside the bounds of your org chart, your timelines, your politics — and do it with your strategy at its core.
That’s what Venture Strategy enables. It’s a path for ambitious companies to tackle complex problems with a venture builder’s mindset: structured, fast, and purpose-driven.
You bring the problem. We’ll help you build the path forward.
So, if you’re staring down a challenge that feels too messy, too entrenched, or too far afield, don’t shelve it. Let’s explore whether it might be the foundation for your next great startup.
Come build with us.
