In this edition of our Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Spotlight, we are excited to feature Danny Nathan, the innovative mind behind Apollo 21. Bridging the worlds of management consultancy, product design, and venture studio, Apollo 21 is helping organizations embrace venture-driven growth and technological solutions. Danny’s journey from the creative trenches of the advertising industry to spearheading a company that redefines business operations and innovation is a narrative of relentless determination and a deep commitment to transformative growth.
Hi, Danny! Thanks for joining us today. Tell us about your business. Who do you serve, how do you serve them, and what's the impact that your business and work makes?
I run a company called Apollo 21. We sit roughly at the intersection of a management/business consultancy, a product design studio, and a venture studio. As a business, we help organizations leverage venture-driven growth and remove barriers to scale by building technology that solves complex business and operational challenges.
Apollo 21 excels when collaborating with:
• Established companies ready to utilize technology to solve business problems, streamline operations, automate workflows and processes, and make data actionable via AI.
• Intrapreneurs and corporate innovation teams who want to achieve transformative, venture-driven growth through proven processes.
• Startups who have established product/market fit and are moving beyond “doing things that don’t scale.”
But you could have read all of that on our website.
The inside scoop is that we help companies foster innovation and launch new ventures and new products from within their own ranks. We believe that established companies (large and small) have a distinct advantage over startups in the form of talent, resources, customer understanding, and ideas.
But once companies find product/market fit, they tend to forget about these advantages. Growth breeds a process that has traditionally followed a “command and control” model under which executives make key decisions and the boots-on-the-ground employees are effectively treated as automation machines to execute work. This one-two punch of focus plus process often turns organizations into execution machines. In doing so, they create tunnel vision; they lose the ability to explore new business models because they’re focused on exploit > explore. This entire process effectively stifles innovation within organizations.
Apollo 21 helps to rekindle that innovative spark by applying proven processes to new ventures and innovation efforts. This comes to life in a couple of ways:
• Often, we are helping companies solve particular problems that get in the way of innovation and operational efforts. In these cases, our clients usually come to us with some sort of problem statement. We work with those clients to understand the problem, determine the root cause, and then (usually) build technology solutions to help overcome those problems (or the underlying causes thereof).
• The other manner in which we get involved with customers is by helping to instill venture-driven growth operations within organizations. In doing so, we help these companies recapture the innovation-driven mindset that led to their current market position. We utilize a process that helps companies capitalize on the advantages I mentioned above while executing like a startup. Imagine the power of a well-funded, experienced team given the leeway and directive to think, act, and solve problems at startup speed instead of corporate speed!
The result of these efforts has impacts not only on our clients’ revenue lines, but also on their company culture, employee happiness, and even their brand positioning.
Tell us about the moment you finally felt like you went from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.
I feel like “wantrepreneur” and “entrepreneur” belong on opposite sides of a see-saw.
On good days, I feel like an entrepreneur. Those days unfold when I feel like I know what needs to be done next and I look around and think to myself, “Wow, I finally have a handle on this thing.” Then, of course, the next day comes and something unexpected happens leading to me sitting on the wantrapreneur side of the playground again.
The mental game of entrepreneurship is something that folks are just now starting to talk more about. Everyone knows that entrepreneurship is “hard.” But what’s nearly impossible to convey is just how much of an emotional pendulum it can be. “Imposter syndrome” has been widely discussed over the last decade or so, but if you want to be utterly certain that you understand it, try being an entrepreneur. Never in my life have I experienced so many ups and downs over the course of any given time period.
That, of course, leads me back to the thoughts I shared for Action Saturday recently and the quote from Sam Altman: “The most underrated quality of a founder is being really determined… So much about being a successful entrepreneur is just not giving up.” In one of the most pivotal jobs of my career, the guiding light for our team was a poster-cum-mantra that lived on the wall from day one.
It said, simply, “Don’t give up.”
Determination is highly underrated.
Describe the moment or period in your life/career that motivated you to make the entrepreneurial leap.
I wish I could tell you that I knew from a young age that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Reality couldn’t be further from that truth. I was about five years into my career (post-graduate school) when I finally figured out that this was what I wanted to do.
To make a very long story short…
I started my career on the creative side of the advertising business. And I hated it. This was in 2005-2007 and the world was changing immeasurably quickly thanks to technology and the affordances of the internet. Social media was in its infancy. Flash was the darling of the web. The first iPhone was still in the Skunkworks labs at Apple. And I was stuck making print and television ads at agencies that refused to acknowledge these changes. It was intensely frustrating.
After one particularly infuriating meeting, I decided that I was done. The world of advertising be damned, I was finished. I began applying to jobs anywhere that was not an ad agency. I debated a second Master's degree. I considered chucking it all and moving to South America for a little while.
And then I got a job that changed my perspective on everything.
I spent five years helping to build the team and practice at POKE NY, a technology-grounded innovation consultancy guided by founders who were willing to challenge the status quo created by the agencies I was used to working for. Over those five years, my thinking and my career advanced at a pace that felt both amazingly fulfilling and incredibly difficult to keep up with. Our work spanned everything from Fortune 100 corporations to world-renowned non-profits to pre-seed startups. And I absolutely loved it.
By the time I left, I knew that I wanted to focus my future on entrepreneurship and building new ventures, and I’ve been focused there ever since. I’ve founded multiple startups over the years since and served as Head of Product for a number of others.
All of which led to the creation of Apollo 21.
Describe a tool, service, or software that has been a game-changer for your business. How does it contribute to your success?
That would undoubtedly be our foundational technology platform called Mission Control. I liken Mission Control to a box of Legos that includes reusable components and features we’ve found are in high demand from our clients.
When have a new project where these components fit — usually internal-use platforms focused on operational management, data storage and analytics, and multi-platform integrations — we dump the box of Legos on the floor and pick out the pieces that are best suited to solve the problem at hand. The entire set of components is proprietary and home-grown meaning that our engineers are highly adept at utilizing and adapting them.
The result is an ability to build out platforms roughly twice as quickly as a built-from-scratch solution.
We’ve deployed Mission Control for a variety of purposes, all of which would have required cobbling together multiple third-party services to accomplish otherwise:
• An operations platform to manage video feeds and alerts for a remote guarding company.
• A data management, CRM, and analytics tool for a Western Sports company.
• An event production platform for the same company focused on managing rodeos.
• An operational platform built to handle thousands of daily customer transactions along with the requisite data, communications, and permissioning for a financial services company.
We know that success is very often a non-linear path. Tell us about a failure, pivot point, or lesson that changed your course or direction and helped to get you where you are today.
I hinted at a specific meeting earlier that became a pivotal moment in my career. I suppose this is the perfect place to share in more detail…
About two years into an unhappy advertising career I was working as an Art Director on a creative team at a well-known mid-sized agency in New York. On paper it was a “dream job” — I was making ads for Mercedes-Benz, Arbys, etc. And I was miserably bored.
One day, my copy partner and I were called into a conference room with the Executive Creative Director and the Head of Strategy for our agency. They wanted to brief us on an exciting new project for a newly won account, Mrs. Butterworth’s Syrup. They explained in excruciating detail how our agency’s recent commercials featuring a Mrs. Butterworth’s bottle that animates to life and talks to little Jimmy (while mom is making pancakes in the background) is the embodiment of the brand. Thrilled with these new TV spots, the client wanted to extend the idea into the digital space and had offered up a MILLION-dollar budget to create a kids-focused digital experience.
The best idea on the table was a ”Where’s Waldo” style game where kids would hunt down the Mrs. Butterworth’s bottle. (However, unlike the famous books, the sample screen we were shown had about 3 characters in the scene, one of which was the bottle.) Cue the sad trombone. About 45 minutes into this meeting I don’t think I’ve said a word — I was still dumbfounded that a million dollars was going to be dumped into a terrible Waldo ripoff. My silence was clearly beginning to irk the higher-ups.
After listening to a slew of asinine ideas, none of which trumped the current game, I threw a thought on the table: “If the talking bottle is the essence of the Mrs. Butterworth’s brand, why don’t we spend a million bucks putting talking bottles on shelves in stores. That way, when kids open the bottles, they have the same experience they’ve seen in the commercials?”
After what felt like an eternity of stunned silence, the response from the boss was one I’ll never forget: “That’s package design. That’s outside of our purview.” That was the day I resigned from advertising. (I wish I could say I threw up my hands and stormed out in style, but I was in NYC and a guy had to eat!)
Two months later, I started at POKE NY (described above).
What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly impacted your business?
This one is counterintuitive, but I believe it’s a strategy that sets Apollo 21 apart in the market: We approach every client engagement with the expectation that the client will outgrow us.
We aren’t the “agency of record” for anyone. We don’t try to wring every last penny out of our clients. We know, from day 1, that — if we do our jobs correctly — eventually that client will need to internalize the operations that we’re helping them put into place.
Because we start every engagement with this assumption, we don’t attempt to fight the inevitable when clients mature to the point that it makes more sense to onboard and manage their own team. In fact, we go so far as to work with our clients to plan for that future transition from the outset. Sometimes that means that we onboard and train a team that eventually moves over to our client’s roster. Other times it means that we establish operations and train existing employees to take over.
By acknowledging and planning for this outcome, we build a unique level of trust with our clients. This approach helps us establish early on that we have their best interests at heart, even if it means that we earn a little less revenue from that particular client in the long run. We take pride in seeing the success of our clients.
What’s something you wish you knew sooner that you’d give as advice for aspiring or newer entrepreneurs?
It will take longer than you think it will.
Want to go deeper into Danny's work? You'll find out more about it here:
- Apollo 21's Wesbiste: apollo21.io
- Subscribe to Apollo 21's newsletter: Innovate, Disrupt, or Die
- Follow Apollo 21 on LinkedIn
- Connect with Danny on LinkedIn: Danny Nathan
