CMO of a venture builder run on fast validation, not sunk cost
The office was on the top floor of a building on Sunset Blvd — a penthouse that used to be Simon Cowell's, back from the American Idol days. It felt surreal: a small team with serious resources, free to build, invest, or invent. Then the incubator moved to 2nd St, right on the Promenade in Silicon Beach, and the job became trying to start the next big thing every day.
Two jobs at once
Bradley ran marketing for the incubator itself — attracting founders who wanted investment or a seat at the table, reviewing 500+ pitch decks a year — while simultaneously building and managing the teams inside it, training young marketers and first-time entrepreneurs into the CEOs of the startups Curious Minds launched. Equal parts strategy, coaching, and deck-making, on both sides of the table.
The Lean Lab: invalidate fast, fund what survives
Built on Eric Ries' Lean Startup method, the Lean Lab was designed to kill weak ideas faster than to find good ones — running cheap, fast experiments aimed squarely at each business model's riskiest assumptions. It invalidated far more ideas than it validated. That was the point: on sub-$10K bets, validation timelines dropped from years to 90 days, and only the ideas that survived that filter got real investment behind them.
Three ideas invalidation couldn't kill
All three ran through the same Lean Lab process, under Bradley's marketing direction — and all three went on to real, verifiable outcomes.
Hotel guest-messaging software. Reached 100% retention across its first 30+ hotel adopters, then went on to become the industry's top-rated guest engagement platform for five straight years (Hotel Tech Report) before being acquired by Cloudbeds in 2022.
Acquisition coverage ↗An online and mobile platform to identify, report, and track counterfeit products and brand abuse worldwide — folded into YPB Group's anti-counterfeiting suite in a multimillion-dollar acquisition.
Acquisition announcement ↗A "Mayday"-style SDK bringing live video chat, screen sharing, and co-navigation to any mobile app's customer support. Launched out of private beta on the TechCrunch Disrupt NY stage as a Battlefield finalist, later spun out to run independently.
TechCrunch coverage ↗