Everyone tells you to focus on one thing. They're wrong.
The gospel of monogamous entrepreneurship, chanted from the pulpits of Silicon Valley VCs and accelerator programmes, is a dangerous relic. It’s advice from a bygone era, an era before agentic artificial intelligence made the cost of experimentation and parallel execution collapse to near-zero. The idea of dedicating a decade of your life to a single shot on goal is, frankly, an inefficient way to build. It’s a bet against market volatility. And in the AI sector, that is a fool's bet.
After exiting my last marketing agency for a sum north of £10M, I didn't take the winnings and place a single, high-stakes wager. Instead, I adopted the thinking of a portfolio manager. Today, I run seven distinct AI ventures in parallel: from Competable, our agentic market intelligence platform, to Autoemails, which handles autonomous outbound marketing. This isn't a story about frantic multitasking or burnout. It's a story about building a machine that builds machines. A playbook for parallel entrepreneurship.
The core risk of the one-product model is its fragility. If your single bet is wrong—if the market shifts, a competitor outmanoeuvres you, or the technology simply doesn't find a product-market fit—you are finished. Zero. All that time, all that capital, evaporates. A portfolio approach, by contrast, is an explicit strategy to de-risk the entire entrepreneurial endeavour. It is a calculated hedge against an unpredictable future.
I developed this approach not in a university lecture hall, but from watching single-product SaaS companies and agencies get wiped off the map. They would spend years perfecting a single, elegant solution, only for a platform shift like the rise of generative AI to render their entire value proposition obsolete overnight. Their singular focus was not a strength; it was a fatal vulnerability.
Running multiple ventures is not a symptom of founder ADHD. It is a diversification strategy. Some bets will fail. Some will yield modest returns. And one or two, if you've architected the system correctly, will produce exponential outcomes that cover the losses of all the others and then some. This is how venture capital works, and it’s how founders should think in the agentic age. You can find more of my thinking on this in our collection of deeper insights.
The Operating System for a Parallel Venture Model
Managing a seven-product portfolio would be impossible without a rigid, explicit operating system. This is the machine's blueprint. It’s built on a set of core principles that prioritise efficiency, standardisation, and ruthless prioritisation. Chaos is the enemy; the system is the answer.
Principle 1: The 'One Team, Multiple Missions' Framework
I do not have seven separate, siloed teams. That would be a financial and operational nightmare. Instead, I have one core 'A-Team' of specialists who operate across the entire portfolio. This team comprises product, engineering, and marketing experts who are deployed to different ventures based on a quarterly 'mission' cycle.
This structure has several profound benefits. The most obvious is the catastrophic reduction in overhead. I am not funding seven different marketing departments or seven different backend engineering squads. We have one of each, and their expertise is allocated as a managed resource.
Less obvious, but more impactful, is the prevention of knowledge silos and the encouragement of intellectual cross-pollination. An architectural breakthrough in AutoSettle’s agentic framework can be immediately ported to AutoTill. A successful outbound messaging sequence discovered by the team working on Autoemails can be adapted and deployed for Competable the next day. The learnings from one venture constantly inform and accelerate the others. This creates a compounding effect that a single-product company can never replicate. The entire portfolio gets smarter, faster.