Danny Nathan: Driving Innovation and Venture Growth with Apollo 21

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Danny Nathan, founder of Apollo 21, an innovation and product design studio based in New York City.

Learn about the transformative role of emerging technologies like AI, quantum computing, and cloud services in reshaping traditional business models. Danny discusses how Apollo 21 integrates these frontier technologies to solve complex business and operational challenges, helping clients across various industries, including healthcare, finance, fitness, and more.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• I focus on layering all the ideals of innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology together with a focus on helping companies understand what it means to build a culture of innovation, what that looks like from an operational standpoint, and how that perspective impacts how companies are structured and how they approach their work. We then leverage those thoughts to help companies create interesting new products 
• We work with companies of all sizes and scales, from napkin-stage founders who have an idea but haven’t figured out how to bring it to light or defined what an MVP product might look like to serve their customer needs, right us to large companies lie Bank of America. Interestingly, the problems they’re trying to solve are not exactly dissimilar, it’s a question of scale and customer expectations are today and where they want to get to tomorrow.
• We’ve found that large companies inherently are not set up well to support the ideals of innovation. As companies grow, they optimise for efficiency and look for ways to wring every dollar out of every penny that goes in. Innovation is inherently an inefficient process that requires some expenditure of experimentation, trial and error and that’s difficult to align to the way that large companies operate in terms of budgeting.
• One of our core values is: Crawl, walk, run. Having run startups ourselves we’re highly aware of the benefit of starting small, understanding what you’re building, determining where the value is being delivered or not, and iterating on that over time, so we can truly build something that accomplishes a need and gives us an opportunity to figure out where we mis-stepped along the way.

BEST MOMENTS

‘Gen AI is the elephant in the room today, you can’t help but be aware of it because of the pace it’s coming into fruition. A lot of companies aren’t ready to incorporate it into their workflows.’

‘Start getting your data in order, understand and learning what type of structure and data you need to align to the goal you have for AI use cases in future.’

‘Figure out ways for your employees to  begin interacting with and utilising AI to accomplish the tasks they’re doing today so they aren’t afraid of it and how to ask the right questions of it to get beneficial responses from it.’

‘One of the things a lot of people overlook is the level of research and understanding of your customer and their need that should go into the process prior to building anything.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Throughout a roller-coaster career spanned acting, advertising, consulting, technology, and entrepreneurship, Danny Nathan has developed a habit of helping companies create new products and services and launch new ventures. 

Known variously as a product person, UX guy, designer, strategist, marketer, creative, and sometimes even "The Cleaner," Danny brings a wealth of experience to every project he undertakes.

Today, Danny is the founder of Apollo 21, an innovation and product design studio based in New