84 — Ventures (New Ops & Innovation)
Most ventures fail. Document them anyway. The lessons compound.
What Lives Here
The frontier of your enterprise — new ideas being evaluated, early-stage experiments, and projects in incubation before they graduate to their own domain.
- Idea pipeline — business ideas captured, rated, and awaiting evaluation
- Active experiments — current bets with hypothesis, timeline, and success criteria
- Venture profiles — one-pagers on ideas that have passed evaluation and are being pursued
- Investment portfolio — minority stakes, angel investments, and bets on others
- Kill file — ideas and experiments shut down with lessons learned
- Innovation reviews — quarterly audit of what’s in the pipeline
Suggested Folder Structure
84 Ventures/
├── idea-pipeline.md ← All ideas captured with rating and status
├── active-experiments/
│ └── [experiment-name].md ← Hypothesis, timeline, metrics, and current state
├── venture-profiles/
│ └── [venture-name].md ← One-pager: what it is, why, who, what's needed
├── investments.md ← Angel/minority investments with thesis and status
├── kill-file.md ← Shut down ventures with key lessons learned
└── innovation-review.md ← Quarterly pipeline auditZeus’s Note
This is the most chaotic folder in the enterprise codex. It’s supposed to be. Innovation is messy. I capture every business idea here — even dumb ones — because filtering too early kills pattern recognition.
The kill file is the most underrated document in this folder. Every idea I’ve killed taught me something. Some of them I killed too early. Some I should have killed sooner. Those lessons are in the kill file, and I read it before evaluating anything new.
Active experiments have a strict format: hypothesis, timeline, and success criteria defined before the experiment starts. No success criteria = no experiment. That rule cut my “ongoing experiment” list from 12 to 3, and all 3 actually finished.