Taylor Black - Innovation Science Fund & Microsoft Incubator
with Taylor Black — Principal Product Manager, Office of the CTO Incubator
Taylor Black, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft's Office of the CTO Incubator, shares his non-traditional path from law school to deep tech and corporate innovation.
5 Things You'll Learn from This Episode
- Build a passive income stream by automating a niche service, like a managed WordPress server farm.
- Run effective 'invention sessions' by preparing all participants with deep research materials beforehand.
- Triage deep tech ideas by evaluating technical feasibility, customer demand, and alignment with your fund's thesis.
- Understand why open-source platforms like WordPress thrive due to strong communities and the right level of abstraction.
- Structure a corporate venture studio to find, grow, and incubate new business units that fall outside existing roadmaps.
About the Episode
Taylor Black details his journey from co-founding a web agency in law school to working at the cutting edge of deep tech at the Innovation Science Fund. He shares the unique process behind their 'invention sessions' attended by Nobel laureates and Bill Gates, and how they commercialized breakthroughs in metamaterials, before explaining his current role building a venture studio inside Microsoft.
Timestamps
- 0:00 — Introduction: A Non-Traditional Path to Tech
- 3:15 — Starting a Web Agency in Law School
- 7:45 — Building a Passive Income WordPress Server Farm
- 12:01 — Why WordPress Still Dominates the Internet
- 16:50 — Joining the Innovation Science Fund
- 20:30 — Running Invention Sessions with Bill Gates
- 27:11 — The Triage Process for Deep Tech Ideas
- 34:38 — Breakthroughs in Metamaterials and TerraPower
- 41:25 — The Decision to Move to Microsoft
- 45:40 — Building a Venture Studio in the CTO's Office
- 50:15 — The Goal: Finding New Big Businesses for Microsoft
About Taylor Black
Taylor Black is a Principal Product Manager at the Office of the CTO Incubator at Microsoft. Before joining Microsoft, he worked at the deep-tech venture studio Innovation Science Fund and co-founded Fizzy Inc., a web development agency he started during law school.
Principal Product Manager, Office of the CTO Incubator at Microsoft
About the Host
Nataraj Sindam is the creator of The Startup Project, a podcast featuring founders, investors, and operators building the future.
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