How Apprentice's Rebuild Saved the COVID-19 Vaccine—And Countless Lives
What would you do if the world was counting on you to build an entirely new product in just 45 days?
What would you do if you needed to build an entirely new version of your product in 45 days?
And what would you do if the stakes weren’t just the success of your company—but the distribution of a life-saving vaccine across the world?
If you’re like Angelo Stracquatanio—co-founder and CEO of Apprentice—you wouldn’t flinch. You’d be willing to rethink everything about how you find top talent and build your product.
You’d find a way.
In our first episode of Build Different—A.Team's new series about forward-thinking companies finding new and better ways to build—we explore the story of Angelo and Apprentice, a new software company that merged in 2020 to help companies produce critical drugs much faster and more efficiently than ever before.
As the push to distribute COVID-19 vaccines ramped up in early 2021, Apprentice discovered it’d need to launch an entirely new version of its product—which spans many different stacks as well as augmented reality headsets—in just 45 days. It seemed like an impossible task. But when Angelo got introduced to a fellow CEO named Raphael Ouzan, “the whole world opened up in terms of talent.”
This is the inspiring story of how Angelo and the Apprentice team did the impossible, and in the process, reimagined how they build their company and products. Watch it now:
Your agency owns your media data. That's the real AI bottleneck.
CPG media AI doesn't stall on model quality. It stalls because your agency holds your first-party Google and Meta campaign data. Here's how to own the pipe.
The trend dies before your brief is written
Detecting a social trend isn't the hard part. Scoring it for brand fit and turning it into a brief before the window closes is. Here's the discipline, and what an agent changes.
The campaign was failing in week one. The report came in week six.
The signals that a campaign is failing show up while it's still running. Most teams don't see them until the monthly report, after the budget's spent. Here's the in-flight discipline.