Unlocking Strategic Impact from Startup Engagement: Building the Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs’ Insights Engine

Fred Schonenberg
Hello everyone and welcome to the VentureFuel Visionaries podcast, where we introduce you to the innovators and builders creating the future of business. I'm your host Fred Schonenberg, the founder of VentureFuel, where we help the world's best companies commercialize innovation through startup partnerships.

We took this episode from an Innov8rs Learning Lab session. Innov8rs is a community of innovators that get together to discuss best practices. And they had the opportunity to learn from Tito Obaisi. So Tito is the Senior Manager of Pipeline and Insights for the Startup Engagement Team at Comcast NBCUniversal Lift Labs. 

In this, he shares key learnings from their process to explore the dynamics of internal versus external learnings and how these insights inspire his colleagues, educate teams and business units, as well as uncover opportunities that drive startup driven transformation within a large organization. I know you'll get a lot of value from this.

Tito's been a guest on the podcast before, and we asked for special permission to share this with you after we heard him talk to the Innov8rs community. I hope you enjoy.

I'm so excited to be able to kind of share Tito's wisdom with you all today. I'll give you 30 seconds on myself and VentureFuel, and then we'll get out of the way from there. But I'm Fred, I'm the founder of VentureFuel. We launched the company 11 years ago to help large organizations commercialize innovation. 

And the word “commercialize” was really important to us because we wanted to find startups and new technologies that could work with large organizations and drive some sort of commercial tangible outcomes. So not just pilots, not startup petting zoos, but actually things that scale across the organizations and drive transformational value. And we've been fortunate to get to work with Tito and the team at Comcast NBCUniversal's Lift Labs for six years now. 

In our most public-facing work is their AI accelerator, which I'm sure Tito will talk about. But I think what we wanted to focus on today is something that we see them doing that not a lot of other corporations are doing, which is incorporating insights into the work. So when you work at a large company and you work with startups, we all know the energy and the tangible outcomes, but also you're at the cutting edge of what's next. You're seeing both your internal CTOs and your leaders working with these next generation startups, and you get a purview into the future that most people within the core organization are not getting.

So how do you share that strategy back with the group? And so that's really our focus today is to share how Tito's thinking about that, the work that he's doing, and then some tangible outcomes for everybody listening. So with all that said, I'm gonna stop talking for the most part and just help Tito guide this conversation. So Tito, would you like to introduce yourself to everybody?

Tito Obaisi
Thanks, Fred. Yeah, thanks everybody for having me today. And so, yeah, I'm Tito Obaisi. Like I mentioned, I'm with the LIFT Labs team here. My role, as has been mentioned already, is around pipeline and insight. So I kind of help our team with sourcing the startup that we end up working with as a group. And also at the other end of the cycle there is kind of delivering the insights from what we learn from the collaborations with startups.

And so taking that step back, what LIFT Labs does is we kind of operate across NBC, Comcast, and Sky. And we really focus on identifying innovators in the startup ecosystem who can really plug into product roadmaps and deliver business value today, right? Enterprise-ready startups. And we really focus on helping our business units rapidly evaluate the potential impact fit for Comcast and then any learnings we can derive and then kind of move, help our teams really move at that speed of innovation. So yeah, that's a high level of what we do.

Fred Schonenberg
And Tito, maybe just for folks that maybe have not been exposed to the AI accelerator work, can you just give me an idea of the scale of that just as an example of one piece of what LIFT Labs does?

Tito Obaisi
Yeah, yeah. So we do this work year round, but we do have like two temp whole kinds of convenings twice a year through our AI accelerator. And so that's what we kind of identify particularly strategically relevant companies who have the potential to have a really outsized impact. We are stage agnostic. We work with pre-seed to unicorn. So companies like Windsurf and Rider were in our last cohort in addition to pre-seed companies in that same cohort. We do it cohort style. And it's really all about how do we find the companies that have the ability to really push the envelope at this particular moment for related to strategic initiatives that are in flight.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah, and I think it's amazing as a program, you've looked at over 3000 generative AI startups in the past two years. I believe the number is 45 active pilots, POCs happening today within the scope of what NBCUniversal is, right? So there's just so many different programs here, but you mentioned that stage agnosticity, right? It's unbelievable. 

Windsurf for anyone that doesn't know, just got acquired by OpenAI for $3 billion or is about to be. So you have that unicorn level, which some people might not say is a startup down to the idea stage. And the whole idea is how do you inject that within the organization? And it's an amazing program. The piece that obviously we wanted to talk about today is insights within that. Can you talk a little bit about how the insights program came to be and the role of that at LIFT Labs?

Tito Obaisi
We've always been thinking about how we codify and memorialize what we're learning from startups. And our central thesis as a team or one of them is that, or part of it is that, as a large corporation, there's so much you can learn from the most nimble, innovative startups. And so how do we think about how we codify that? How to memorialize that? How do we share that with our colleagues internally? 

So we've kind of taken the position that we realized that we had to come from our particularly unique vantage point, which is the fact that we have the one foot in the startup ecosystem. We're learning from founders, investors, and ecosystem players like VentureFuel, what's new, what's exciting, what's innovative.

And then we have the other foot deep into the tactical side of deploying new technology at an enterprise like the size of Comcast at scale, like the legal hurdles, the data security concerns, the stakeholder management, the change management. And so it's like what's happening at the juxtaposition of these two realities is kind of where we've realized is our unique vantage point as a group and where we wanna share our insights from. And so that's kind of been the basis of our insights program and our insights philosophy and where we try to make sure we operate from.

Fred Schonenberg
I love that. And Melody, now that you put us full screen, I think you were holding that because I was gonna do a poll, which I forgot to do. I think now is actually a great time to do it. What we wanna do just very quickly, we're gonna drop a question on the side here just to see if the people on the call, if you're collecting insights and if you are who the audience is for that. Is that possible to put up for everybody? If y'all can just take a second and just answer. Great.

As that continues to kind of populate, we'll share that with everyone. One of the things I think is interesting, Tito, is that unique vantage point, right? You're sitting at the crux of what's new and next as well as your internal organization. How on earth are you able to digest AI within that, right? This is arguably the fastest moving, most transformational technology in our lifetimes. It seems like a very difficult task to kind of digest all the changes that are happening there as well as then share them with the organization. How do you make sense of something that's moving so quickly?

Tito Obaisi
Yeah, yeah. It's something that teams across the company are focusing on or wondering. I mean, it's a focus of our team, right? It's all AI all the time right now. So, first you just gotta be open to the fire hose. Like it's just coming at you all the time and you gotta just lean into it. And that's kind of been a big focus for our team. And so we're often surprised internally where even people who don't focus on this on our team day to day, you know, even like my job as an insights lead here, they're sometimes surprised by the fact that they're just in it. 

They actually know more than the average person does, right? And so that's a big one, just being, oh, just living in the fire hose and just being okay with this coming at you and not understanding everything. But a big one really is to stay, it approaches just really staying close to the innovators. This is being in their slipstream. We try to teach it, approach it like being in school, more or less.

We have founders in our group who are PhDs, who are people who are building a lot of the core technology that is underpinning this AI revolution. And we just treat it as, you know, my job a lot of times during our programming is just to literally pull people aside to the corner and say, hey, this is something, a really nebulous topic in AI. Just talk me through it from your very unique perspective as a founder of building in this space.

So we try to take it from that approach of like, we're in school as a group. We are not subject matter experts, but we hang out with a lot of subject matter experts as part of our job. So that kind of helps us make sure that we are taking that, bringing that unique insight back into Comcast.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah, and I think one of the things that you and everybody on the LIFT Labs team is amazing at is that intellectual curiosity of just always learning. It's a great environment to do that because, you know, the founders go so deep in whatever their focus area is. And one of the reasons we've kept it as a cohort vibe is it's really dynamic when you get six, eight people with different laser focuses in a room to talk about what's happening.

How are you thinking about ensuring that these insights are distinctive versus maybe some of the other groups within Comcast NBCUniversal? Like, obviously there's lots of teams thinking about AI and the future of work and the future of business. How do you keep your lens sort of focused on what your vantage point is?

Tito Obaisi
Yeah, that's a big thing that we try to prioritize is like, what is us from Lane, right? We sit, our team actually sits within our strategic development org. So we sit alongside our ventures team, our corporate ventures team who’re doing some great work, making some really groundbreaking investments in some key AI companies. We have a transformation team that's really focused on how we are thinking about AI transformation across the entire company. And they're also within our org. 

So people are taking tactics from different angles and we don't wanna be in what they're doing. You know, we're really trying to focus on that, where the rubber meets the road part, right? Having great products is awesome, but like what can be learned from actually deploying AI at scale? You read all the time about companies getting a lot of enterprise, like Johnson & Johnson recently, who are frustrated about not being able to get from experimentation to production or to true business value and scaling back a lot of their AI use cases. 

You know, we try to make sure that as a group from our day-to-day work and from the insights we're generating, how do we take the learnings from what we know works and doesn't work at Comcast and drive that back into our day-to-day work to make sure that when we're bringing a company into one of our internal colleagues, they're gonna be driving business value, right? And so it all, what we try to make sure is like a cycle where everything feeds into each other, where the insights feed into our sourcing, which feeds into our day-to-day like tactical deployment. And so it makes sure that this is a conversation of self-reinforcing cycle about making sure that that tactical part where the rubber meets the road is working.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah. And I think one of the things that is magical about this is it's not academic only, right? Like a lot of times when you read an insights document, it's somebody pontificating on their view of the future. This is very much grounded in reality. Now you're at the cutting edge of that reality, but you're running programs with these startups and your business units. And so the insights are not just academic. There's something that other business units, C-suite leaders within Comcast can take action on, which I think is very unique.

I am curious to see the results of the poll, which are incredibly interesting, on some of the tactics here, like how are you presenting insights to the group? Who's the audience? How frequently are you, basically how would you answer the poll would be the question, but like how, you know, what are, how are you delivering them? I guess that would be the first question.

Tito Obaisi
Yeah. So we were always open to experimenting with format and what that looks like. We've realized that case studies are a big, big one. Our colleagues want to see what is and isn't working and it doesn't have to always be a win. It can always be like, we tried this thing and it didn't work. And there are lessons learned from that. 

Our colleagues really respond internally, respond well to just seeing the practical replay of an implementation and what that looks like day to day. And so we'll bring, we'll have that in multiple formats, we'll have it in written format, we'll have events where we kind of have fireside chats, where we'll bring the startup in, we'll bring the business leader in and we'll have people come into our space in Philadelphia and our headquarters and just sit down and like talk through, take questions from the audience, talk through the deployment, what that looked like.

We have… we're really good at disseminating this information in various mediums. So like social media, we have video formats, we'll have video interviewing the founders and so getting the nuggets and tidbits from what they were learning from them. We try to take a whole, a very wide ranging approach to see whatever resonates with the medium that works for internal colleagues.

But it's really about making sure that we are in the room when these back and forths are going on, right? So we're sitting there in the room as the startups and the founders are tackling challenges and issues and what are the legal hurdles? What is our legal team comfortable with or not comfortable with? 

And how do startups need to adjust their deployment to make sure that we can work for Comcast and what's we're having sitting there in white boarding sessions and people are hacking, they're hacking away and trying to build something, spin something up really quickly. And so we're there in these sessions, making sure we're asking our pointed insights questions and trying to figure out how to deliver that in ways that our colleagues will find digestible. 

Fred Schonenberg
I think I've been in AI too long with you now because I was gonna describe it as multimodal, which is a very AI term. But I think it's really interesting because people consume content very differently. And a big shout out to Aiza who's on the call, who helps with the storytelling of this both internally and externally. But it's really cool. One thing I would share with the audience that to me was very breakthrough and seems simple is we just hosted a number of startups in this beautiful space that Comcast has and brought in executive leaders, but also business unit leaders. And we had the startups set up, right? Like almost like a science fair type thing that is not new, but the business unit, the business leader that had worked with the startup was with them. 

And watching the Comcast NBCUniversal employees talk to their colleagues about how they worked with the startup and what the results of that was so dynamic. And it was just one change, right? Instead of just the founder pitching, you brought in the business unit, but it showed how this comes to life. 

Then to take that and figure out how to story tell it with video clips, with, you know, it can be newsletters, it can be other things that I think everyone thinks of first, but it really creates a lot of momentum for startup engagement and also helps people kind of come into the work that you're doing where they're most comfortable. You know, we've played around with things like Google LLM Notebook, right? Where it's like, basically it's a podcast off of the insights. And so there's a lot of ways to play. And I think it's really cool to see how y'all are experimenting with that and figuring out the right way to share the information. 

One question I had is the other side of this, which is like, how on earth do you stay on top of this? The sources and get tactical here. Like, what do you read? How are you, obviously, there's a tremendous process that goes to finding all the startups, but how are you staying on top of all the changes in AI and are there any hacks or places you would have people go?

Tito Obaisi
Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, I think in general, we all have our favorite publications that we read, you know, like I happen to like the FT, for example. So like finding out who the journalists and people who are doing really interesting work in this area is, it is always good to have your favorite couple. But I try to personally, we have a group of really aligned ecosystem players and investors who are playing and investing and working, operating in the space at a deep technical level. 

And what I tend to do is regularly have check-ins with them and say, hey, what are you hearing? What companies are coming across your desk? What deals are you seeing? What are you seeing out in conferences? Trying to like in aggregate kind of pull in the knowledge and what people are hearing and figure out what's arising from that. A lot comes from the sourcing process itself. It's like when you see a certain type of company coming, popping up over and over and over, that's something that you kind of see is happening there. And that's so we kind of learn a lot through even the sourcing process. And we talk to hundreds, not thousands of companies every year.

And so even those that keep coming to us, we don't end up working with, but those short conversations, you learn a lot. And so like we're always documenting and taking notes from these, even these conversations we're having exploratory with companies.

One thing I do love Notebook LM personally, like it's a great way to get really quickly sharp on really dense topics for me. So I'll just throw in a bunch of articles and YouTube videos on a topic that I want to get smarter about. And it just turns into a 30 minute podcast. It's very compelling in a really airy way. That's like a big fan of that. Yes, Notebook LM is critical. And that's a great example of a bottoms up innovation at a large corporation.

So like large corporations can be innovative within terms of product. That's really encouraging for people like us. So those are a couple of different areas, and it's actually funny, like if these machine learning algorithms on our devices, on our phones and our newsfeeds are so good now that if you train them enough and with what you click on, they get really good at understanding what you want to read. 

And so I get a lot of things just popping up on my phone in that little newsfeed on everyone's device. I'm using like, oh, that's great. I just kind of have things that pop up all the time. So it's like, how do you go to all the different places so that you can find all the different people who are doing cool things? And really the insights come from aggregating and synthesizing all those sources, I would say.

Fred Schonenberg
I love that. Also, we're going to go to questions to the group. To warm you all up for the questions, I would love if you all wanna put into the chat if there's any sources like Notebook LM or places that you go to stay on top of insights. It can be AI or unrelated to AI, but just curious from the audience standpoint, if there's anything that's really interesting. And of course, start putting questions in also.

Tito, what is the value of insights? Like what is it helping Comcast and also specifically like LIFT Labs? How is it helping you all on your mission for working with strategically relevant startups? How is it helping?

Tito Obaisi
So the big thing we're trying to do as a group when it comes to insights is we're trying to help our internal colleagues from senior leadership to line of business, to end users, general population, rank and file, get smarter on technology that maybe they don't have the bandwidth or the access to the same resources and expertise of founders that we do. And just get smarter on that and figure out what the use cases are and what the applicability is for their work. So we try to ground it in figuring out, understanding who our audiences are.

And so I think that a big part of insights is like, who is your audience? Like I mentioned, is it your C-suite board or your board level? Is it your general pop? Is it your subject matter expert? And figuring out how to talk to them in ways that are interesting to them, right? And so if we accomplish that, that is value right there. 

So we try to make sure through all the different methods and mediums that I listed previously that we are helping our colleagues get smarter on this stuff. And so we've in the two and a half years that we've been focusing here on AI. We've seen engagement steadily increase internally with our kind of profile around this space and our perception as a subject matter experts on AI deployment is something that we're really proud of as a group that's been kind of growing into reputationally internally.

And we see that as evidence that we are providing value when it comes to not just helping our employees, our colleagues deploy AI, but also learn from AI. So that session you mentioned the other day, Fred, where we had the startups and the business unit leaders is one of our best attended events we've ever had, right? And so like it was packed in there, fire code was an issue at a certain point, people that are showing up just thinking about, hey, this is the group and this is the team where they're gonna help me get smarter on AI. And that's kind of what we wanna be able to be known as a group.

Fred Schonenberg
I think it's really interesting too. I'd say one of the things I see happening with the organization is as you all have been sharing the insights and the storytelling internally is the relationship with the core has moved from push to pull. Like instead of saying, oh, here, you wanna work with startups? You wanna work with startups? It's more like them saying, hey, I have a business challenge and I've seen how you all have solved it over here.

And I read your thing about this. And I think it's really changed the dynamic internally, which is really, really cool to watch that evolution. Along those lines, one of the things that you all started or announced this year is always on sourcing, that it's not just around those two tentpole events, but that you're always looking. How has that impacted the organization and maybe evolved the insights work?

Tito Obaisi
Yeah, that was a big change for us in 2025. It's really, we do kind of, we're talking to companies all year round, right? But it's all about how do we make sure that we are finding ways to deploy them in the most timely fashion rather than simply those two times a year. So I think what we've found is that with always on, it allows for us to have tighter feedback loops, right? And so at the speed AI is moving, which is light years, right? Something that may have been true in January will not be true in June or December.

And so being able to have this always on sourcing model allows us to understand what's new and happening today, deploy those as quickly as we can internally, take that feedback and then drive that into insights, which drives our sourcing, right? And so as the person who kind of sits in both of those areas, sourcing and insights, it's the same hat for me, right? It's like being able to like what we are learning and generating in terms of insights that can drive a more targeted, more relevant strategically sourcing. So that's kind of the big benefit to being always on for us as a group. I think we're seeing dividends.

Fred Schonenberg
All right, one more question and then we'll go to the audience here. But I'm curious, what advice do you have? Maybe for some of the folks on this call, it looked like about 70 plus percent were doing some sort of insights work. From sort of stewarding this thing, are there any sort of 2.0 learnings that you think you would give people advice on to kind of take their insights to the next level? 

Tito Obaisi
Yeah, I think I've sprinkled some of that throughout. Knowing your audience is very key. You're like knowing who you're talking to and what that category of colleague really cares about. So our CTO has certain concerns that our line of business leaders do not, right? So being able to provide insights that speak to the categories of people you want to move the needle for is very clear.

And that should drive your insights and along to keeping really tightly to your swim lane. Like what is that really unique perspective that you have as an insights professional? I would also say, don't be afraid to be a little provocative. I think that's kind of the general understanding that as a large corporation, there's only so innovative a large company can be relative to a startup. And so by nature, some of what you're learning from the innovators that you're collaborating with will be a bit of a hit to the status quo, you know? So obviously there's within boundaries, but don't be afraid to kind of be a bit provocative. 

Then I would also probably really figure out well into my first point, like what really moves the needle for the people you're talking to? You know, figure out how we want to digest information. It's being as multimodal as possible, right? It is a great approach. Some people want to hear it in person. Some people want to hear case studies. Some people want to hear the report. Some people want to watch short TikTok style clips. People want to listen to a longer interview format, podcast or interview format. 

Figuring out how to, I would say do as much as you're able to do in terms of format. And it's what our comms team is really good at doing is taking the same content and turning it into different formats. And so I think being able to have that storytelling ability to talk to people in the way they want to receive information is really the key to making sure that your insights are being received. Because a lot of people, you know, have been there where you're just writing reports into the void and you just don't want to be there, right? So.

Fred Schonenberg
Yeah, there's nothing worse than sending out that email to the internal organization being like, hello? Like did everyone read that? And like, also we've all been on the other end of that email where we're like, do I need to read this whole thing? Which parts do I need to do? So I love the way that we continue to evolve it, play with it, think about different ways to present it and always start with that. What's the value here? What's the tangible outcome?

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the VentureFuel Visionaries podcast. I hope you enjoyed these insights from Tito. The work that he and the team are doing at Comcast NBCUniversal LIFT Labs is truly at the tip of the spear for how corporations and startups are collaborating. I know this was both inspiring and educational for all of you out there that are trying to figure out how to make corporate and startup partnerships work to drive tangible commercial results. 

For those of you listening, please don't forget to subscribe. Follow us on your socials for more episodes and share with anyone you think might be interested in learning from industry leaders who are shaping the future of innovation. Thanks for listening.